Thick soup and bitter medicine

Some interesting analogies to understand acceptance

¡Hola!

I’m still traveling around Spain 🇪🇸, but I wanted to check in with you and share something (hopefully) helpful.

Today, I’d like to share an analogy that might make it easier to understand the concept of accepting our emotions.

“How do I accept my anxiety in the moment?” is a common question, and it’s one of the trickiest to answer. It’s like trying to explain which exact muscles you need to contract to lift a fork off the floor. I don’t know the mechanics of acceptance to that level of precision, but when acceptance happens, we often recognize it subconsciously.

Sometimes, metaphors and analogies can help us unlock that sense of acceptance without needing to know all the details of how to do it.

So, when we hear the advice “let go of resisting your emotions,” it’s natural to ask, “What does that even look like?” When I first tried to “sit with my anxiety,” I often found myself getting more caught up in it. It felt like I was swimming in a huge pot of thick soup, with anxiety surrounding me from all directions. It was overwhelming and endless. I’d practice this for hours, only to end up frustrated.

ChatGPT helped me illustrate the point :) Cool, isn’t it?

If accepting anxiety feels like swimming in a thick soup, there’s another metaphor that might help.

Imagine you need to take a bitter medicine to get better – the kind that makes you wince 😣 and leaves an aftertaste for a while. Think of letting anxiety be, or letting it go, as similar to taking that bitter medicine. You allow it to run through your body without resistance, knowing the bitterness will eventually pass.

You let the bitterness flow through you and let the aftertaste linger for as long as it needs to. Don’t resist it – after all, you can’t just turn off your taste buds. Instead, make it okay for the medicine to be bitter, knowing the taste will fade with time.

The key difference between the “bitter medicine” and “swimming in the soup” metaphors is how we relate to our anxiety. When we feel like we’re swimming in soup, it seems like anxiety has taken over our entire existence, and no matter where we look, we see nothing but anxiety. But in the medicine analogy, we aren’t drowning in it – we simply let the bitter taste run through us, knowing it’s just one of many experiences happening in the moment. Anxiety becomes just one part of the bigger picture, not the whole picture.

Let me know what you think about this idea! And if you want to read more about other ways to make acceptance a bit easier, you might want to check out this letter: Two "tricks" to unlock acceptance.

Hope you found this letter helpful 🙏 As always, sending you virtual hugs and a postcard – this time from sunny Granada!

See you next time!

Alina

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