Acceptance you can learn
Acceptance is one of the greatest steps you can take to a confident life, with less fear of what the future holds. But what is acceptance and how do you get there? Allow yourself a tea and read along.
If there's anything I find difficult then it's Acceptance. How many times I want everything to be different than it is can't be counted on two hands. My love's choice to stay away longer, that car in front of me that is not going fast enough and then especially the weather! Being with the fact that it is raining all day today and I am cooped up in my little caravan, makes the weather a wise teacher of acceptance.
But, not being able to accept what is or what happens is actually rejecting choices I have made in the past. After all, I decided to live with my love because I love him the way he is, I wanted to go to Granada with my car right at the busiest moment and I think it's tremendously cool to live in a tiny house in the middle of nature.
Not accepting is also rejecting reality and especially not letting myself live in the present moment, but in the past (when I lived in that big house, life was much easier) or in the future (now if I have that yurt then a rainy day won't be so bad).
Not accepting takes a lot of energy and is actually a coercive, controlling and even destructive habit. Because I don't let the things be as they are, and I even want to change them into what they are not: imperfectly perfect. So not accepting brings me a lot of anxiety and yet I keep doing it. Why?
In our world, it is important to be ambitious, to long for more and, above all, to be better and more effective. Our world is a world of faster and of never enough. And that creates a world of dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction with where we are in life, with what we have and with what we cannot have.
Dissatisfaction is in itself a form of not accepting. But who really likes to be dissatisfied? Nobody, I think. This is why accepting reality is so important in gaining confidence in life.
I find that the real masters in accepting are the trees. They cannot do otherwise. For one thing, they cannot move: they have to accept where they have put down their roots. They cannot run away when I want to cut off their branches, so they have to accept what I do to them. They drop their leaves without grieving, brave winter without grumbling and bow with all the winds. I have never met a disgruntled tree that said: "This year I decide not to grow apples, but pears." A tree remains who it is. A tree.
"Grant me the peace to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change what I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." - Reinhold Niebuhr
Acceptance is knowing what I can and cannot change and therefore acceptance gives peace of mind.
And acceptance is an inside job.
Six and a half years ago, I was standing on the edge of the ocean and decided to put my whole life upside down to for once follow my heart, which meant not to do as expected. To do so, I had to learn to radically accept myself. Because the decisions I made and the feelings I felt at that moment, all went against what I had always held high, what I had long repressed or what I did not want to see.
Just months before I discovered I was not accepting the way my mind worked and therefore was constantly criticising the thoughts and actions that stem from it.
I also discovered I did not accept my body and struggled with the appearance my genes define for me and the feelings I feel inside.
To radically accept myself was to have to see who I really am: my body and my mind.
And to understand that there is no right or wrong. Even though we learn something completely different in our society, acceptance is knowing that the imperfection we think we see is actually perfect. Knowing that our body and our mind is neither good nor bad, but just is.
This idea gave me a lot of space. Space for myself, to be who I am, my imperfect perfect self.
But it also gave room for my fears. So back to my previous post. When I drank tea with my fears, I was able to accept them because I understood that they are neither good nor bad. But that they are simply there.
This allowed me to step through that 'door'.
Acceptance is no longer having a judgment. So I could look my fears in the eye without judgement. I could see who they really were and where they came from. And from there, healing was possible.
Of course this is not new:
Especially in Eastern practices like Buddhism, Zen and Tao, acceptance is the gateway to enlightenment. It probably won't surprise you to find beautiful rituals that allow you to practice acceptance.
Meditation and yoga are good exercises that are all about acceptance and learning that there is no right or wrong. Meditation helps you more with acceptance of your mind and yoga with that of your body.
Mindfulness is an exercise in attention that you can apply even to small household tasks. By keeping your whole attention on vacuuming, you learn to be in the now and practise accepting a situation.
I encourage you to create a moment with a good tea, where you look at what you cannot accept and ask yourself why that is. Give the feeling of not accepting and the underlying reasons space to answer you honestly, remembering that there is no right or wrong answer. From the answer you get, you can take your next step.
But! There are a few pitfalls with acceptance that I have regularly stepped into.
Accepting is not the same as throwing in the towel. A situation is what it is, but that does not deprive you of your right to make new choices and your duty to take your responsibilities.
You are allowed to find transgressive behaviour unacceptable. If your boundaries are crossed, physically, mentally or emotionally, you have the right to use the word NO, whatever the other person thinks. No is a full sentence, for which you owe no explanation.
Therefore, never be a victim. If you feel that accepting a situation makes you a victim, then something is wrong. Find out what needs to change, because your acceptance is probably is based on fear.
After all, the basis of acceptance is always... Love.
The next post of this series, I will explore this love further and delve into the topic of gratitude. If you want to make sure you don't miss that post, you can subscribe via the button below and receive it right into your mailbox when it comes out.
If you feel like chatting further with me about acceptance, you can do so via the comments. I'm curious about where you stand with this big theme.
Lots of LOVE
Daphne