20250114 - Body Scan With Acceptance

In the gap between experience and response lies your freedom. Let me explain. Your reflexes makes you withdraw your hand instantly when you touch something hot. It’s not a conscious choice that you make, your body does it for you. This is a useful and healthy reaction that work to your benefit because it protects you from getting burned. Great! In the same way you have all kinds of similar reactions to other situations. - A friend invites you to something you would rather skip but you automatically say ‘Yes’ - Your partner gives you some constructive feedback and you immediately start defending yourself - A colleague has a different opinion than you and you start arguing about it All of those reactions are ways for you to “pull your hand away” to avoid some difficult emotion. The problem is that these reactions are not necessary in the first place, they cause more problems than they fix and they are not who you are. So what happens here then? They are mechanisms that you built as a child in a time where you didn’t have all the wisdom and resources you have now. You are reacting as if you were six years old again and your mother is criticising you for not making your bed. And these reactions create your life! How many conflicts have you been in with your partner because of these kinds of reactions? Ten? Hundred? Thousand? What if you could go back to all of those moments and change your response to how would have liked to respond? How different would your life be now? Of course, you cannot go back and change, but you CAN build the awareness to catch yourself in all of the future triggers that WILL come. Build the gap between experience and response so that you can consciously decide how you want to live your life. This is the mindfulness-gap that we are building here!