The Things We Cannot Change
Merriam-Webster defines acceptance as: the quality or state of being accepted or acceptable. When you look up the word accept the definition reads: to receive (something offered) willingly. It’s important to note that nowhere in either definition is the word like, or agree. If you look at the third definition of the word accept you will find that it reads: to endure without protest or reaction. For many of us we believe that to accept something means that we have to like it or go along with joy or even the tiniest sliver of pleasure. I recently had a conversation with one of daughters about accepting what is present in front of us. We were both in a state of frustration around certain personal circumstances that were affecting us. I was doing my best to tell her that we have to be present and accept the reality that is staring back at us. With her arms crossed and her brow furrowed she grunted back that she would be present with the feelings that are bubbling inside of her but she would not accept what was in front of her. I told her that slowing down and allowing the moment to settle will ultimately give her the peace that she was looking for. I gave her an analogy about her and her dog. I said “If you were to chase him, what would he do?” She said “He would run away.” Then I said '“Ok, and if you stop, sit down, open your palms and breathe, what do you think he would do then?” She said “He would come to me.”
It’s an obvious analogy and one that is easy to receive in logic but when life is presenting moments of challenge mixed with the heartache of things not panning out the way that we would want to, acceptance in this simple example feels impossible. I can remember when I had to open up and accept what was in front of me. I stopped fighting the endless battle and threw my hands up. I didn’t know what else to do. I had tried everything, worked every angle but to no avail I was worse off than I was at the beginning of my calamity. So what does one do when acceptance is beckoning but we actively ignore the call? The practice of acceptance doesn’t happen over night. It can’t. True acceptance means that there is a gradual progression from fight to relax. You must hit your head a couple of times, trip over your own stumbling blocks and scrape your knees a bunch of times before you can get to the moment when you stop and say to yourself this isn’t working so I guess I’m gonna have to just let this unfold naturally. And why does it take us so long to get to that moment? Why do we have to go through all the bumps and brusies before we can be at the threshold of peace?
I believe that we have to go through the muck because it gives us that much more appreciation for the gift that acceptance brings. Forcing yourself to accept something when you are not ready to is liking driving into a brick wall at full speed. Intentionally. Of course we don’t see it as such. We force our square emotions into a round experience and wonder why we can’t move through it with ease. So much of the spiritual/mindful concepts that we coaches and teachers talk about are all joined together, commingling and intertwined like a spiderweb. We want our healing to happen one category at a time. Let me deal with this people pleasing first and then I’ll deal with the perfectionism. I’ll tackle my mentality around lack once I deal with my worthiness. But as we know life, and our emotions don’t work that way. The combination of slowing down and acceptance feels like death. And to some degree it is. We must grieve the fact that what we are trying to force is not going to happen and since we have only imagined this one particular ending, we can’t see the infinite other possibilities that could be just as, if not better, for us than what we are pinning after.
“Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there’s got to be a way through it.”
And to make matters worse we must slow our thinking, our emotions and our actions down while we are accepting what is. We can’t busy ourselves with meaningless tasks just to get our mind off the thing, though we do it time and again and we know that it never makes us feel better. Doing busy work only makes us more tired which in turn makes us more cranky and irritable. When we’re in this state we can’t process our emotions fully. We shut them down and continue to push them further and further back into our minds hoping that if we just ignore it long enough it’ll go away. I can’t tell you how many times I thought that not saying anything long enough would eventually get me closer to what it is that I desired, only to discover that I simply hit the pause button for when I had enough time and space to face the reality that this thing hadn’t changed. All I was doing was ignoring it. And this is where I received the greatest peace after the revelation that acceptance does not mean that we have to be joyful about what we are accepting.
I can’t speak for you but I know that I have been trained to be nice and be kind in a way that is self-sacrificing and a detrimental to myself. I’m gonna take a biblical turn for a moment so for all of you spiritual folks, hold on and stay with me. Christians uphold Jesus as the model man who loved everyone, even right up to his death. But when we look closer at biblical text around Jesus and what he was teaching we see that Jesus was loving, yes, but he also had boundaries. Jesus also did not show us that love and obedient acceptance is what we need to have. There were even examples where Jesus accepted a situation for what it was and kept it moving. He shared some of this with his disciples right before he sent them out two by two to spread the gospel saying: “But whenever you enter a town and they do not receive you, go into its streets and and say ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet we wipe off against you…” (Luke 10:10-11 ESV) We can read the word against and take it as Jesus and disciples “cursing” them. Sort of like saying “Well fine, you don’t want this good word that can help you save your life, then curse”. I’m not gonna get into the ways that the bible takes things and repurposes them to make us more docile and able to control. But What I think that this passage is really saying is that if you go any place where you do not feel welcome and the message is not received…leave.
Acceptance is one of the greatest gifts that you will be able to give yourself along this path of spiritual work. You may grumble and complain at the onset but the more you begin to ease your grip on the control you are trying to have over your life, you will find that acceptance will ultimately bring you exactly what you were hoping for and even more. Because it’s not about the “thing”, it’s about the feeling and feeling is nothing more than energy in the body. (E-motion = energy in motion) What we want is the ability to align our energy with the energy of what we are attracting. Until we can master that skill learning to accept the things we cannot change due to our old patterns and way of thinking allows us to let them go that much quicker. We become free from the lower vibrational energy that was holding us down and ascension can happen. So yes acceptance can be hard but it doesn’t have to be when we understand the wisdom and the freedom that comes when we let go and simply accept.