Tag: acceptance

Soul Sunday

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

Good morning, soulmates. I may come across as distracted and disoriented throughout the end of the month. We have a bunch of activities and celebrations and experiences, that ideally would occur in more spread out fashion, but this year, they all are packed into these next three weeks. One day at a time.

That being said, I am even surprised about how even keel that I feel. (there’s a rhyming poem, right there) I hope that this feeling sticks. New friends, Sundays are devoted to poetry here at Adulting – Second Half. Typically on Sundays, I share a poem which I have written, or I share a poem that another writer has written, a poem that moves me deeply. Poetry is the song of your soul. It yearns to be heard. Get it out. If you are too shy to share a poem in my Comments section, please write one down in one of your Thought Museums (your journals). Poetry is writing that typically holds the most feeling. It’s nice to see your feelings in words. Notice your bodily sensations when you read a moving poem. Those are your feelings, friends. Enjoy your feelings. Don’t be afraid.

Today, I couldn’t find the right words from my own voice, so I looked up poems to describe “turning a corner”. Despite all of the action, and the emotions tied into that action, which we currently have going on in our family life, I feel strangely calm and peaceful (that’s never been my typical internal state, which sadly, more often than not, feels like a tightly wound, shaming, defensive yo-yo). Lately, I feel like I have turned some internal corner that I’ve been moving towards my entire life. I think that the destination that I am joyfully visiting right now, is called “Acceptance of All that Is.” I pray that I can sit in this locale for a while, because it feels really, really good – not ecstatic, just utterly serene. I think this poem describes it best:

Final Curve Poem by Langston Hughes

“We don’t talk enough about the chapters where you feel comfortable with the healing you’ve done, you’re no longer repeating the same lessons, you’re at peace and that’s why you’re so quiet. There’s nothing to say, there’s just a lot of calmness.” – Valencia (Twitter)

Are you passing on love, or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

The Year of Acceptance

Happy October! I was not particularly fond of September 2020. Bye-bye September, don’t let the door hitcha on the way out! My theme for today is “acceptance.” (You: Oh great. Not this again. She needs to learn to accept “acceptance” and to move on.) I read a quote that made a lot of sense to me a little while ago, and I wrote it in one of my journals. I’m sorry, but I don’t know who to attribute it to:

“Knowing and understanding are not the same as accepting. Give yourself space to process.”

If ever there was a year that we have been forced to wrap our heads around things, 2020 would be it. Major changes and societal issues and health issues and economic issues, all on top of any of the usual personal life issues which any of us have to deal with in any particular random year, have made dealing with “acceptance”, practically an every day occurrence.

Like the above quote states, we can know things intellectually, without fully accepting these same things. We can understand, for instance, how wearing masks can help save lives. But have we fully accepted that wearing masks may become the norm for the unforeseeable future? Acceptance takes time. Acceptance is always the final stage in any grieving process. Acceptance is not equivalent to approval, but it is the knowing and the ability to sit with, “it is what it is.”

My daughter and I watched Good Will Hunting, the other night. We have seen the film several times, but it is one of those rare movies that is worth watching, again and again. The following scene is one of the most traumatic, poignant scenes in the film, that perfectly illustrates why knowing and understanding are not the same things as acceptance. Friends, the overwhelming events and negative circumstances of 2020 are not our fault. The strangeness and onslaught of changes that have come to our daily lives is not anyone’s fault. Hopefully, we will all be able to come to an acceptance of that fact, and just rise up and do our best, every single day, keeping our faces turned to the sun. Keep the faith!

The Answer

The spiritual path calls on us to heal old wounds, to feel our feelings instead of ignore them, to use meditation as a tool to investigate our inner world's. Download a powerful meditation for deep heart healing at SuzanneHeyn.com

I am, once again, back to focusing on “acceptance” in my life. This lesson in acceptance comes up a lot, for us self-admitted “control freaks”. We tend to have to repeat the Acceptance class again and again and again. Acceptance has a hard time sinking in for us. Right now, with everything going on in the world, the universe is really testing a lot of us, on so many different levels, on how well we are faring in the “Acceptance” department.

I planned on writing/blogging on “Acceptance” today and I thought to myself, “Haven’t I already touched on this subject?” So, I went to the search function on my blog and I searched “acceptance” and three pages of many, many of my blog posts showed up. So, the answer to my question is, “Yes, lady, you have more than touched on the theme of Acceptance. You might even start boring yourself, with this one.”

I’m sorry to be so repetitive. I have a little pamphlet that I picked up in a spiritual store over a decade ago, at a time when we were rebuilding our lives in a new state, after the total fiasco of the Great Recession. I have referenced this pamphlet so many times, that it is wrinkled and torn and the pages are thinning. But its strength is in its words, which resonate with me, every single time that I read it. The pamphlet is entitled Acceptance: The Way to Serenity and Peace of Mind, by Vincent P. Collins.

Here’s my favorite passage from my beloved pamphlet:

“God is infinitely wise: God knows what is best for us. God loves us with an infinite love; God wants what is best for us. God is infinitely powerful; God can achieve it for us. We, on the other hand, are ignorant, weak and wayward. Yet in weakness lies our strength. Are we licked, beat, flattened, hopeless? Fine! It is only when we admit our utter helplessness that we can be sure of God’s help.

No one but a monster could pass by a starving, naked infant freezing in a snow bank without picking it up, sheltering, feeding, and clothing it. So it is with us. As long as we insist, “I can handle it!” – God says, “Go ahead!” But when we appeal to God as a helpless infant, God picks us up in God’s gentle hands, cradles us in God’s powerful arms and our worries are over.”

31 Acceptance Quotes That Will Show You How to Accept Life As it Comes

Is This Normal?

“Part of our difficulty in dealing with traffic jams et al is that we have come to view them as unusual. Somewhere along the line we failed to notice that life is.

In our illusionary approach to our lives we have been able to fool ourselves into thinking that things should go right and . . . we have a very specific idea of what “right” is. We have come to believe that the easy, the problemless, the fun are “normal” and everything else is abnormal or bad. We have predetermined what life is or should be and we expect it to run smoothly along those lines.” – Anne Wilson Schaef

The above selection is from a morning meditation book that I read every day. I really had to think about this one. I agree that we shouldn’t let the small gripes and aggravations (traffic jams, spills, headaches, etc.) get us down or view these happenings, as really out of the ordinary. At the same time, the big highs and the big lows are rarities. The big highs and the big lows stand out to us, because they don’t happen all of the time. If we let it be, life is usually relatively calm, mild and uneventful.

What I have been reading and meditating on lately, all comes down to acceptance. I think acceptance means to let life play itself out without resistance, particularly a resistance to circumstances that we don’t have any power to change. Acceptance means letting go. Acceptance means to stop adding to our own suffering by commiserating constantly over unchangeable happenings that make us angry, sad, miserable, etc.

The serenity prayer, in my mind, is one of the most helpful, wise tomes of wisdom, ever written and one of the most useful tools ever made, if we make it a practice.

The Serenity Prayer

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

I Accept

God grant me the

SERENITY to accept the things I cannot change;

COURAGE to change the things I can; and

WISDOM to know the difference.

I think that the Serenity Prayer is one of the most important prayers ever written. It is so simple and spot on. Simple does not mean easy, but if we can master and live the serenity prayer, then it naturally follows that we have peace.

Acceptance is one of life’s most difficult lessons – especially as Americans. We are taught to be doers, achievers, hopers and believers. Acceptance has a ring of “giving up” to it, and that just goes against our DNA. But acceptance is not really giving up. It is surrendering the people and the circumstances over which we have no control, and offering them up to Bigger Hands. It’s dropping the “heavy as a boulder” bag at Bigger Feet and trusting that Bigger knows what is best. It’s asking Bigger/God/the All Knowing Universe/the All Loving/ the All Wise to give us peace among the people and the circumstances that frustrate us the most, yet we cannot change. Instead of asking for others to change, we ask for acceptance and peace, and a different perspective, amid all that we cannot change. We ask for focus on what we do have the ability to change – ourselves and the way we look at our lives.

I have so many examples in my own life when I tried to force my will, my wants, my ideas of what was best, on to people and situations that weren’t going to budge. I exhausted myself trying. Finally, in my most tired, spent moments of frustration, I knew that I had no other choice but to surrender my issues to my Higher Power. I was depleted. More often than not, when I stopped trying to fix my broken toys and I handed them to the Expert, that is when things really started turning around in my situation and I could breathe again. Often, situations got “fixed” in ways I could never have imagined, but looking back, the solutions were often miraculous and awe-striking, and nothing my limited mind would have conjured up. If I believe God to be an All Loving presence, the Creator of all that is, why wouldn’t I trust the judgment of God? God/Creation gave us free will, and in many ways, we have run a muck with our free will and really created some horrific disasters. But if we finally give those disasters over, God will turn them to Good. It’s what God does. Pain, in that sense, is a gift to us. When we finally reach our limits to Pain, is when we finally come to our senses, to hand that Pain over to be worked on by Bigger Hands. The Bigger Hands will lead us to what we need to do, to assist with our problems. Sometimes that can be as simple as looking at the problem through Bigger Eyes and seeing it in a different light.

“When you find no solution to a problem, it is probably not a problem to be solved, but rather a truth to be accepted.” – curiano.com

“Sometimes you don’t get what you want because you deserve better.” – u.fo Twitter