Traditionally, mindfulness was taught as the essential foundation for meditation practice. However, it was also understood that mindfulness was half of this foundation. The other essential half was compassion. For thousands of years, mindfulness and compassion have been understood to be the two wings of spiritual enlightenment and psychological freedom.

Compassion is not pity. It’s not feeling sorry for someone or feeling sorry for yourself. Compassion is the act of feeling and expressing a love that’s totally welcoming and accepting. Compassionate love is the kind of caring that we may observe when a loving mother soothes her mischievous toddler, or when a dog owner tries to firmly but kindly teach her rambunctious puppy not to chew up her shoes. In these kinds of situations, the initial thought may be one of irritation, stress, or reluctance to confront the situation. However, although the thought happens, it falls away and is replaced by benevolent acceptance of the situation, and behaviors that arise from a loving acceptance. The young child is held, sung to, and soothed. The puppy is admonished but with a smile and a hug. Where seemingly negative thoughts and feelings would have dictated indifferent or even angry reactions, unconditional acceptance allows for a loving response.

This level of acceptance might be easy to muster when you’re faced with infants, cute animals, or people going through obvious tragedy and suffering. The challenge of compassion is to experience it in the situations where we’re conditioned to feel negative feelings like anger, anxiety, or resentment. To work on these external situations, you must first gain experience in having a compassionate attitude toward yourself when your mind goes to places that trigger negative emotions.

Often, we experience negative emotions twice. At first, there’s the initial feeling, and then, almost automatically, this initial feeling is surrounded by an additional feeling about the first feeling. For example, we may feel depressed and then get depressed about feeling depressed. A panic attack is characterized by anxiety about anxiety.

When feelings about feelings, called secondary emotions, take over, their impact is exponentially greater than that of the primary emotions that they’re reacting to. Mindfulness can help clear out these secondary emotions by allowing feelings to arise, linger for a moment, and fall away, all the while witnessing and accepting their existence without adding another layer of distress over them. This is part of what’s meant by linking mindfulness and compassion together—compassion comes from an accepting mind, not a mind that’s dueling with itself. To help you cultivate compassion toward your own mind, it may even help you to think of your mind as a cranky infant that has thrown baby food everywhere, or a mischievous puppy that has just chewed up your favorite shoes.

Radical acceptance is the type of unconditional love that mindfulness can nurture. In mindfulness the concept of radical acceptance refers to this kind of all-embracing welcoming. What’s so radical about it is that it’s often not the automatic or easiest response. Nothing that arises in your mind is turned away. Even your darkest, most distressing thoughts, feelings, and fantasies are welcomed into the mindfulness session with the quiet reassurance of your steady breathing. There’s no tension, resistance, or judgment, only the rhythm of your belly breath rising and falling.

With your mental awareness tied to the pillar of your belly breath, all sorts of distractions—be they criticisms, anxieties, fears, or worries; disturbing sounds, sights, and smells; or any manner of disruption—appear and fade away. In the story of the Buddha’s enlightenment, he was confronted by distractions from each of his senses and impulses, which were represented by dancing maidens that morphed into terrible armies of demons before falling away into emptiness. All he did was return his awareness to his breath while keeping his mind not too tight and not too loose, just accepting.

As with the Buddha, your mindfulness is an open, welcoming basket that can witness and absorb all distractions equally. If these distractions are from your environment, you witness them as you return to counting your exhalations. If they’re internal distractions arising from your ruminative mind, you also witness them as your awareness returns to counting your exhalations. There’s no judging, criticizing, or scolding yourself for the sounds in the room or thoughts you have. This is the twice-daily practice of mindful, radical acceptance that can transform your experience of living.

By accepting the distractions of mindfulness practice sessions, your mind learns to tolerate itself without perpetuating its ceaseless commentary on whatever it’s thinking about. By engaging in mindfulness practice, your mind has a chance to watch itself, as if on a videotape replay. Over time, the mind becomes better at catching itself in the act of contributing to your stress instead of your happiness. Gradually, at first with isolated incidents but more often as time goes on, your mind catches itself choosing happiness. Your mind doesn’t learn this practice by harsh discipline and punishment but, rather, with the warm embrace of radical acceptance.

It may seem that spending some time just breathing with acceptance may be relaxing, but often it can be quite challenging. When you initially start with sitting meditation, you may experience a host of different feelings, ranging from relaxation to near panic. This is part of the reason why a daily practice is strongly recommended. By practicing daily, you get a better and more accurate sense of your mind. Your mind isn’t always pleasant, so your mindfulness practice may not always be pleasant.

If you feel that you’re getting immediate, positive results, you’re fortunate. Many people report a sort of “honeymoon” period, when they feel that they’ve had a rapid mental, emotional, and spiritual transformation. Many people also report tremendous difficulty and hardship in starting the mindfulness practice. Rest assured, however, that there will most definitely come a time when the feel of your mindfulness practice changes. Honeymoons can fade into monotony. A frustrating rut in your sessions, lasting for weeks, can spontaneously break through into joyful ease. Keep practicing, no matter what the immediate sense of reward or frustration might be. This sense will change, and as it does, your practice of mindfulness will mature. This is all part of the basket of mindfulness into which all of your experiences, pleasant and unpleasant, are welcome. Your task is to look at the entire basket, not just the good parts.

Your mind’s acceptance is considered to have profound implications in the Buddhist tradition. The mind oriented toward compassion is called bodhichitta, or “awakening mind.” According to the sixth-century Indian master Shantideva (1992), the awakening mind is like a supreme medicine or a giant tree that provides shelter to everyone equally.

The metaphors that Shantideva uses are powerful, and you can use them to motivate your practice. Imagine the gentle awareness of your mindfulness practice as a cooling shade tree in the brutal heat of your mental and spiritual suffering; or your mindfulness practice as a bridge away from your familiar habitat of distress to the natural homeland of inner peace.

Holding you back is your familiar, automatic reaction to stress, programmed into the human body since prehistoric times. This is the universal, biological reaction to physically flee from danger or else to fight it off, no matter what your mind wants to do. This fight-or-flight response, as it’s called, was very helpful in the days when wild animals chased us as easy meals. Our breathing became rapid and shallow, our fingers numb, as blood flowed to keep our visceral organs functioning should our limbs be bitten or torn. Few of us face this kind of threat today.

In the modern world, the wild creatures that torment us are mostly mental. The fight-or-flight reaction may have been helpful in the distant past and, once in a while, may help us get out of physical danger, but it’s not so helpful when our threats are psychological. Regular meditation practice can diminish your body’s tendency to engage in the fight-or-flight response, instead teaching your body a more wholesome way to respond to stress while helping to guide you toward your goals. Of course, if you do happen to be chased by a tiger, your body will immediately know what to do! But for the most part, the radical acceptance of an awakening mind is much more helpful in guiding you out of the trap of rumination and worry.

Excerpt from The Mindful Path Through Worry and Rumination by Sameet M. Kumar.