Accepting?
We want to change the world, we want it to be better but did the world ask us to change it? If you want to see the world as a broken place, wrecked by human interference, sucked dry of its resources, and an endless list of problems, each one of which is in itself impossible to fix, that will be the world that you experience. Instead we can accept the world as it is, full of endless challenges, brimming with life both organic and informational, infinite possibility and adventure, by seeing life as the greatest story ever told, we get to live the drama of whether we have a happy ending and that is how you can choose to experience your life.
To do so we first have to give yourself space and time to accept things as they are, by refusing to force change upon others and instead getting our own houses in order first. It is our nature and so tempting to want to help and change others. However there is no point in trying to teach someone who does not want to learn, instead we have to mind our own business and get on with living a good life, though in the long term we can incidentally become powerful examples of how to live a life, but not if our starting intention is to be that golden shining example of sainthood. That contains the seeds of ego, an attachment to achievement and dissatisfaction with your present moment, a non-acceptance of who you are now, perfectly imperfect. Stop trying to distract yourself with other people's problem and tackle your own first, by accepting others as they are, you can start accepting yourself.
The first thing to accept is that just because you are imperfect, it does not mean you are worth any less love. The person you are now is without exception or condition a person who is worth loving as much and equally as every other single person in the world. There are absolutely no qualifications or disclaimers to that statement, it is not to say that there is not poor actions. I do not know a single person who has not acted badly at some point in their lives, but there is no action that exclude you from being worthy of love. You are born worthy of unconditional love, you die worthy of the same love and there is not a single second in-between where you are worth more or less, there is no action that can change it, and it is there constantly for you, you just have to accept it.
If you find that hard to believe, there is plenty for us to practice the act of acceptance on before accepting your own self worth. We all have a host of imperfection, a herd of faults and mistaken beliefs, and we all misunderstand the world, our own nature and reactions. The only way to free ourselves from these limitations is by accepting them as they are. Just about any action seen from a certain point of view can be seen as wrong or at least poor in its quality, however that does mean that the opposite is also true. Every wrong decision contains the seeds of higher quality action, and we can only learn from the experience of making lower quality actions, it is a necessary part of the process of becoming a better person, so the more mistakes and failures the better. By accepting our own actions as imperfect but the best that we can do given our current life situation is liberating it frees from our own ghosts, our inner voices that criticise and undermine us, our expectations that we cannot live up to and our automatic reactions that can be invisible to us.
It is in accepting that we have the chance to step back from the story that we are living and are so completely absorbed in that we start to believe that our ego is real and is in fact who we are. We become identified with ego so completely and in such a believable manner that we do not even question it. We start to believe that the narrative in our minds is describing who we are and what we are doing, we can only step back and observe it, by accepting what is happening as it is happening, the act of acceptance means no longer having an opinion about everything. We let the mind do its thing and mind our own business, which is the act of living every moment as fully and with as much depth as possible by giving it our full undistracted awareness.
When the mind is racing and you are reacting both to what is occurring and to the expectations of what you thought was going to occur, it is no wonder that such situations can suck you in, and you become part of the drama. There is a lot going on, there is not just the external stimulus but the internal chatter of the mind increases to match the external drama, and there is no denying there is an excitement in being caught up in the moment, it can be when people feel most alive, but the downside is that it is also the moment when you feel most out-of-control and least able to effect what is happening.
It is these moments that are hardest to accept as they are happening without reaction, but they are also the moments that have the most to teach us, they contain the hard lesson and the clearest examples that we are not just the sum of our thoughts. Thoughts are merely the stars in the sky of our consciousness, they are so bright to us because we fail to see the darkness in-between them. We have to practice to become the observers of the stars, the watcher who accepts. To be clear non-acceptance only occurs in your thoughts, non-acceptance is the product of the ego, it is just another thought or more commonly a pattern of repeating thoughts, it just happens to be thoughts about a thought, in the same way that a feeling can produce thoughts and thoughts can produce feeling, both of which leads to cascades and a spinning roundabout of thoughts then feelings.
The only way to stop the roundabout is to accept that there is a roundabout, and that every thought just gives it more energy and spins it faster. That is what the ego is, spinning energy, that is there to serve, protect and entertain us, and where it is successful, we pay attention, we treated it as a real thing and we give it more energy, we even become identified with it when we stop using it as a tool and start believing that we are the tool. The only way to stop the spinning thought roundabout, is to treat it with indifference, we have to stop giving importance to whatever it was protecting us from or how it was serving us and it is by accepting the source of its creation that we most effectively stop it spinning.
Of course, if it is protecting you for good valid reason, that is the time to let the ego do its thing, acceptance does not mean accepting bad action that causes you harm, it is in no way a reason to allow yourself to be victimised in any way or to passively accept things that you do not like. Acceptance does not mean you do not act, it simply allows you to act from a place of knowing, it stops you reacting from habit, it allows you to see things clearly and to enable you to make effective decisions. It allows you to step out from the movie of your life and to see yourself like a character in the film with you able to advise yourself about what to do, without being caught up in the drama, you can tell yourself not to go into the basement, or to go off on your own. That is what films are, a series of bad decisions, mistaken beliefs and conflicts between people, why would we choose to live our lives like that, the point of stories is to teach us how to make better decision, not to inspire us to recreate the same dramas in our own lives.
Life is dramatic enough without creating more internal drama, if you know what you want and once you realise that acceptance is an option. That it bring peace to your mind and inner self, that it gives you alignment with your inner-self, whether you think that is your soul, connection to source or inner wisdom, it does not matter, at our cores we yearn to experience love, grace, ease and joy in its pure form, and if our reaction drag us away from that experience, if our expectations prevent us from having experience and thought distract us from being in the moment. Then there is another choice, you get to chose to accept every moment as it happens.
