A concept named by someone I teach, and I haven’t stopped using it since
There’s a step in mindfulness practice most teachers, myself included until recently, call Allow. It’s the second step in RAIN, a practice popularised by the meditation teacher Tara Brach and used widely in mindfulness teaching:
- Recognise what’s here
- Allow it to be here
- Investigate it with curiosity
- Nurture yourself in response
Allow is good instruction. Let the feeling be there. Don’t fight it, don’t fix it. Simple to say, harder to live. Then, in a session with someone I teach, they renamed it without quite meaning to, and the word they used has changed how I teach the whole practice.
We were working through a difficult feeling, and I asked what it might be like to allow it, just to let it be there rather than push it away. They paused, then said something like, “so, honouring it, really.” I hadn’t used that word. They had. But the moment it landed, allow suddenly sounded thin next to it.
Why Honouring Lands Differently
Allow can sometimes sound like gritted teeth: permission granted through clenched patience, tolerating something rather than making proper room for it. Honouring carries more weight. It suggests that whatever is here, a difficult emotion, a tired body, an inconvenient truth, deserves to be treated as real and worthy of attention, not argued with or waited out. Honouring how we feel turns out to be a way of honouring ourselves.
That idea has stayed with people longer than I expected, and what’s happened since is one of the things I love most about this work. More than one person I’ve shared the concept with has told me they’ve started carrying it around, turning it over in the ordinary moments of their week, asking themselves: how can I best honour myself right now? For someone whose instinct has long been to put everyone else first, that question does real work, and I’ve watched it settle into people in a way allow never quite did. It isn’t self-indulgence. It’s closer to self-respect, showing up, perhaps for the first time. Watching that shift happen, sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once, is one of the quiet privileges of this work, and it moves me every time.
Sometimes it shows up in small, almost ordinary ways too. One person told me, only half joking, that they’d eaten far more than they needed and spent a good while afterwards uncomfortable, and realised it was really just their body telling them they hadn’t honoured themselves a little earlier. That’s the thing about the concept. It isn’t reserved for the big, meaningful moments of self-care. It’s just as available at the level of what you eat, when you rest, what you agree to.
It would be easy to hear honouring and assume it’s only about being kind to yourself when things feel good. It isn’t. The feelings that most need honouring are often the ones we’d rather not have: frustration we’ve learned isn’t attractive, tiredness we’ve learned to push through, sadness that doesn’t fit the day’s schedule. Honouring those is harder, and more necessary. It’s the difference between feeling something and then also judging yourself for feeling it, a verdict layered on top of what was already there. I wrote about that layering in a previous post, the second arrow we fire at ourselves once the first one has already landed. Honouring what’s here doesn’t stop the first arrow landing. But it takes away much of the reason to reach for the second.
A Question to Sit With
If you’d like to try this, you don’t need a formal sitting practice, though it helps. Next time you notice a feeling arriving, pleasant or otherwise, try asking: how can I best honour myself in this moment? Not fix it, not push it away, not pretend everything is fine. Just honour it. Sometimes the answer is simple: rest, a breath, a boundary, a biscuit eaten slowly instead of a whole packet eaten fast without noticing. Sometimes there’s no clear answer at all, and the honouring is simply in asking the question honestly and staying with whatever comes back.
It isn’t a word from any textbook. It came from someone doing the quiet, meaningful work of learning to value themselves, and it’s stayed with me since. I’ve been teaching mindfulness for a long time, and I don’t think a concept has landed quite like this one in a while.
If you’d like to explore practices like this in a welcoming space, my Thursday evening drop-in is open to everyone, online or in person in Barnet, 6.15pm, no experience needed. You can find out more and book via North London Yoga.
Ruth McDonald is a BAMBA-registered mindfulness teacher. She teaches weekly drop-in sessions and works with individuals and groups in London and online.