Living the Dream

“For now, this is what this situation, this moment, requires me to do, and so I do it willingly.” Be at peace while you do it…. (p296)

For so long, I seemed to resent surrender and acceptance.  It seemed like failure to me.  Acceptance looks like such a passive thing, as Eckhart states,  But he goes on to say, ”

but in reality it is active and creative because it brings something entirely new into the world.  That peace, that subtle energy vibration, is consciousness, and one of the ways in which it enters this world is through surrendered action, one aspect of which is acceptance.” (P296)  The energy I have spent fighting it could have gone to such greater good.

People who accept, but with a sense of resignation, can often go through chronic sorrow, denial, anger and depression.  There is a sense of bargaining as if by accepting, they are worthy of some sort of trade-off expected.  If that trade-off is not felt, they can become bitter and one hear things like, “  I give in because what is the use…I am tired of fighting…”Rather than acceptance, they feel a sense of futility.  This is not acceptance.  True acceptance brings Peace.

Not imbuing True Acceptance means that you carry old baggage with you that evolves from  that which you should have accepted.  Not accepting an experience in life means that you can not access a true here and now.  You may go through times of false suffering.  You suffer because you can not be truly alive while you are blocked by the feeling of being a victim to life and its experiences.  We pack all our resentments up in a huge box and pack it around, sighing, suffering, feeling put upon.  All we have to do is put down the box.  That experience is over, the lessons waiting to be useful, and the path remains the same but we can walk it unburdened and have wisdom that lightens our step.

Acceptance emits calmness and that calmness ripples before us like rose petals on our path.  It is empowering.  It lightens our steps forward.  The peaceful mind is open and ready to see beauty and necessity in all things.  Acceptance allows us to be who we really are and, because we accept Self and lessons the Self has need of, we can then allow others to be and experience what they must.  Not only can we accept, but we become better for it.

Acceptance eliminates competition, as well.  When we are not competitive, we do not come from a place of feeling like we, or others, are lacking something.  Self acceptance is often much more difficult than it might seem. Criticizing parents, teachers, and other influential people often plant the seeds of limiting beliefs. These may take the form of subconscious beliefs such as, “I’m weak”, “I’m ugly”, “I’m selfish”, “I’m a failure.”

Acceptance is a difficult thing if we have had criticism embedded in our view of ourselves and others, even life, itself.  In fact, sometimes non-acceptance, feels more comfortable to us because it is our way of dealing with an angsty Ego.  In fact, an angsty Ego will feed itself every chance it gets to confirm those victimization-feelings.  We become what we believe and walk around pitiful and angry, like a cat on the prowl, waiting for another war to battle.  We do not pick our battles.  It is not the who or what of the battle, but the battle itself.  It is not Acceptance that is being offered but absolute resistance to almost anything.  These personalities are confrontational and you can not have a logical conversation or experience with some of these people who are so enmeshed with their own angst.

I resisted:  My how I resisted.  I had confrontations that made no sense to anyone but me.  I may not have been resisting the experience, even, it could have been about something totally foreign to that moment.  Resistance seemed to be my greatest sense of value.  Poor people who felt my wrath would be bewildered because there was no logic to my reaction.  There was a sense in me that I deserved something else.  I took a wide stance and prevented, denied and got angry when I sensed a lack of respect, or a sense of challenge, or even a sense of control.  It was wrapped up in lack of respect for authority, as well.  I watched carefully, and if I found, and I usually could, reasons not to respect another person, I resented them.  I would not allow others their human frailties because I would not accept my own.   God, forgive me.  I never saw an event or person in the moment…I was viewing it through sick yellow eyes of a predator.  There were no lessons, there was no honor, there was no self-respect, in reality, for the people and things that came to me with an offering of a new lesson.  The gift of each experience we have is meant to be graciously accepted….even the ones we would rather not have met.  The gift is as wonderful as the way we receive and utilize it.  The struggle against some experiences completely annihilates the gift and makes it more difficult for us to see other things and incidents as gifts.

Acceptance allows us to live a desirable, intentionally peaceful, life.  But one must not become complacent in accepting even Acceptance.  Life will always hand us unexpected and undesirable moments.  Some call it Karma, some call it testing, some call it God’s will, some call it misfortune.  I have a sense it is testing to see if we truly got the lesson.  If I don’t’ ‘get it’, I will get more and more chances to ‘get’ what I did not before.  Only total acceptance, whether we get the lesson at first at not, is the only way to living a peaceful life.

Life takes total acceptance, not begrudging acceptance nor token acceptance.  It needs us to embrace what shows up, honoring it for the lessons it brings and the strength it evokes within us.  The more difficult, the more acceptance and honor it takes.  We can change things but first we must accept them.  When you look for the honor in all things, the lessons, the gifts, it is then that we accept that we can not know and control all things and that there is something greater at work.

We are required, encouraged, sometimes almost ‘demanded” to learn new lessons.  We can use up wasted energy to fight them, but it is so much easier to allow things to be as they are and live a life that learns how to find the gift in difficult things.  There is evidence of “the gifts” every day, even in the small disturbing things.  When you feel the call to battle, consider how you might use that energy to accept what comes.

“To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way good or bad.”

“There are cycles of success, when things come to you and thrive, and cycles of failure when they wither or disintegrate, and you have to let them go in order to make room for new things to arise or for transformation to happen.

If you cling and resist at that point, it means you are refusing to go with the flow of life, and you will suffer. Dissolution is needed for new growth to happen. One cycle cannot exist without the other.”

–Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

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