If resistance fuels suffering, then turning toward experience can loosen it. Approaches like mindfulness-based therapies and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy often work by reducing experiential avoidance—learning to notice sensations, thoughts, and emotions without immediately acting to eliminate them. The goal is not to “like” pain, but to stop treating it as an emergency that must be escaped.
As people practice staying with discomfort in manageable doses, the body can discover that feelings rise, peak, and fall. That discovery is transformative: pain may still be present, but the extra suffering created by frantic struggle begins to drop away. [...]
