Acceptance is the key
Acceptance is like sitting in a field, looking up at the sky, and watching the clouds go by. There is no resistance to the moment-to-moment experience, there is only observation and acceptance. It would be silly to watch the clouds and be upset that they are not forming into the specific shapes we want. And yet, that’s exactly what we do in life.
I think there’s a common misconception around the idea of “Acceptance” and it has to do with the semantics of the word acceptance. It’s common to associate the word acceptance with the word resignation.
Acceptance is being open to the actual feelings we’re having at the moment to moment experience of life and being willing to just feel that. Whatever it is: anger, happiness, fear, jealousy, anxiety, joy. We can learn to simply be with our experience or we can try to control the experience. But when we try to control it, that’s the opposite of acceptance. Anytime we’re trying to manipulate our inner experience, we’re doing the opposite of accepting it. Reactivity prevents us from being able to respond. Acceptance is a form of responding instead of reacting. Resignation would be an example of reacting while acceptance would be an example of how we choose to respond.
I feel and firmly believe that acceptance is the most crucial part of our lives. We are not taught how to accept and what is the importance of acceptance is, when we are young, people around us talk about it but no one emphasizes it.
We learn about acceptance the hard way and some of us don’t even try or think about learning.
Some of us learn about acceptance from heartbreak.
Some of us learn about acceptance from failure in any endeavor.
Some of us learn about acceptance from death.
In the book of life, there are many lessons to learn, but the hardest lesson is about acceptance. Accepting is a hard lesson to learn but it is the most effective and important lesson to learn. Acceptance teaches us to see what is in front of us. When we accept the situation that is in front of us then we will be able to constructively get through it.
Life is always changing, it is never still. Life presents many obstacles, when we were in school it was in the form of waking up in the morning then attending classes, preparing for assignments/projects, and whatnot, at that age those were the obstacles that we faced, and as life is never still and continuously changes, it quickly turned into what kind of qualities we look for in our partners, or who is our friend and who is not, our obstacles turned into what career path we should choose and which jobs are well suited to us. The obstacles are always there in our lives no matter at what age we are, no matter what the situation we are in. When we were child our problems were child-size but it was still there. And now that we are grown up are problems not child-size anymore. It is like life to present us with obstacles.
The key solution in solving these obstacles is to accept the fact that life is always going to present a different kind of obstacles in front of us, just as we grow up our obstacles also grow up with us. Accepting is not going to make the problems go away, it’ll make it easier for us to deal with them as we no longer think of them as burdens, injustice, and bad luck.
We can learn to accept whatever life throws at us. That’s the key to freedom. Acceptance is the key to freedom. It’s so simple and yet so profound and yet so difficult.
Acceptance is what we become present to in that moment-to-moment experience of observation. It’s what happens before you choose to act. Acceptance is what allows you to react wisely vs just reacting. See we tend to associate the word “Acceptance” with action, or with behavior, but acceptance doesn’t have anything to do with behavior. Acceptance is not resignation or denial or defeat or ignoring. It’s what has to happen before there can be any action before there can be any behavior. Acceptance is what frees us to choose. It’s the key to being able to respond to any given situation and no longer be trapped by reactivity.
I want to make one thing clear that acceptance does not encourage or condone in any way resignation or disengagement.
For instance, if you want unconditional love then it requires unconditional acceptance. I believe even with our relationships our understanding of what acceptance is somewhat distorted because we think we’re accepting others when in reality what we’re dealing with is simply accepting what comes up in ourselves about that other person and we don’t know how to accept what comes up in ourselves because we have never practiced acceptance on ourselves.
So now how can we be more accepting in our lives:
Focus on what you have- The truth is we all have much more than we realize. If we look around and notice the small and the big things, the ones we take for granted every single day, we’ll feel inexhaustible.
The reason for our unhappiness is that we are not accepting what we already have in our life. We are not grateful for the things that are already present. We look for the things which are not there in our life, thinking that somehow it is going to fill the void of happiness in our life.
Accepting what is already there in our life is the key to fill the void of happiness. Oprah Winfrey said, “If you look at what you have in life, you’ll always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you’ll never have enough.” that sums it up. Be grateful and accepting for what you have in life.
Don’t avoid reality- We avoid reality because of expectations. Our expectations are the real root of the problem we face when it comes to accepting reality. We create expectations in our minds and when those expectations do not land the way we have thought then we get disappointed. We are often the reason behind our disappointments. We create such humongous expectations which in reality is not possible.
Expectations are not the reality.
Accept the reality no matter how ugly it is, and by doing so remember you have the power to change the reality only when you accept it.
Acceptance will provide us better tools to deal with our issues with facing reality. If we don’t accept that we have a problem then we will never be able to work on that problem.
Stop Expecting- We expect people to be more understanding and open but when they act the opposite way we blame others and sometimes even worst we blame ourselves for over-investing in other people. But the truth is we create expectations on things that we have no control over for example other people’s behavior, words, actions, and decisions, and all the external things that revolve around us.
When things do not go as we expected them we try to escape the situation. When we are heartbroken we tend to numb the pain with external things, some might use drugs, alcohol, and some might use the blame game to numb the pain as blaming others is much easier than looking at our flaws. All these tactics we use are nothing but a way of escaping the truth and when it comes to life then reality is the truth of life. So hiding away from the issues, escaping from the problem is not going to help us, yes it might make us feel good for the moment and numb the pain but it won’t solve the issue.
Stop fixing internal problems with external solutions- Acceptance assists us in facing the reality because accepting something is an internal work. To solve the issues that reality presents us we have to work internally and not externally. Acceptance is the answer to all our disputes with reality. If we do not accept the reality then our shortcomings will get bigger and if we choose to ignore it then it’ll become more and more difficult to resolve.
The sooner we start accepting that we lack in certain areas of our life, the better for our present and future.
How we can expect a better future for ourselves if we are not even accepting the present.
We cannot fix internal problems with external solutions.
Acceptance is not going to solve all of your problems magically- You cannot expect that acceptance is going to solve all of your problems magically. It does not work like that. It’ll make your problems easier but it’ll not make it easy for you.
We are not taught how to accept in our life. Our parents did not teach us how to accept, they might have discussed it but it was never emphasized enough, and in our schools also, we were never taught about it.
We came across acceptance through situations that we faced later in our lives. We learned about it from the difficulties that life presented us. So if we are not taught how to accept in the first place then how can we expect ourselves to be a master in it. Learning anything is a process and it’ll take some time to grasp why and how acceptance will help us. It is the initial process towards solving our problems. It is better for us that we started learning and practicing acceptance, then sooner or later we will be able to see our problems clearly and distinctly.
Acceptance is the key- If we’d like to go where we claim we want to go, to accomplish what we claim are our goals, there is only one way. And that’s to meet our problems with acceptance. Acceptance in any field of life is not going to make the situation easy but it’ll make it easier. We are going to face a lot of problems, obstacles in doing the work we love, there are going to be people who will make acceptance difficult for us, and of course, most of the problem that we are facing and will be facing is not always imposed by others but only by ourselves. Acceptance is the initial step forward.
