Steven C. Hayes

‘If I do not care, I will not be hurt’ is how human minds keep values at arm’s length. Unfortunately, this move hurts even more than caring; it’s not the biting, alive, occasional hurt of caring and sometimes losing, but the dull, deadening, constant hurt of not living your life in a way that is true to yourself.

Life is a choice. The choice here is not about whether or not to have pain. It is whether or not to live a valued, meaningful life. You’ve had enough suffering. Get out of your mind and into your life.

If your value is the compass point by which you can make your life’s journey, your goals are the road map that can lead you there. ... Goals give you a practical means to make your values manifest. They also offer you a metric against which you can measure your progress on your valued path. You may know what you want to be about, but without goals, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to live these values in the real world.

None of the techniques will work simply by reading about them, any more than reading about physical exercise will build your muscles. The techniques will be of value to you only if you do them, and do them repeatedly. If you have been reading this for understanding, fine. You understand. Now practice.

Mindfulness is the defused, nonattached, accepting, nonjudgmental, deliberate awareness of experiential events as they happen in the moment.

You won’t be able to make these techniques a part of your behavioral response patterns without practicing them. You can’t just read them passively and hope to ‘get it.’ Take these skills with you in your life and apply them. Let your experience be your guide. Practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes permanent.

Defining what matters to you and actively choosing to pursue that direction is what this book is ultimately all about. Although the defusion, mindfulness, and acceptance exercises you’ve explored are useful in themselves, this information is an empty shell if it isn’t used in the service of living a meaningful life.

Accept response-ability. There is a slight but important difference between accepting ‘responsibility’ and accepting ‘response-ability.’ Accepting ‘responsibility’ often carries the implication of blame. Blame is what we do when we try to motivate people to change a behavior or do the right thing. But does accepting the thought ‘I’m at fault’ really motivate anyone to change?

It is amazing how when we begin to say yes, life seems to present us with just the right challenges: always slightly more or slightly earlier than we might have wished and yet doable—if we are willing.

We don’t assume that left to their own devices, normal human beings are happy and that only an odd history or a broken biology disturbs peace. We assume instead that suffering is normal and it is the unusual person who learns how to create peace of mind. Why this is so is a puzzle; this book is about that puzzle.

This is not a traditional self-help book. We aren’t going to help you win the war with your own pain by using new theories. We are going to help you leave the battle that is raging inside your own mind, and to begin to live the kind of life you truly want. Now.