Acceptance: accepting what is. It’s a tenet of many spiritual teachings and like so much wisdom, we can get to see this deeper and deeper. As an understanding of how our experience gets created and an awareness of what is creating our experience comes more and more into view, all the myriad ways we take ourselves out of alignment with reality get more and more visible.
This can be by turns shocking, comic and very ordinary. We begin to notice all the places we argue with what is, particularly in the realm of our feelings. For many, policing how we feel has been a lifelong past time. It is common for people new to the Three Principles understanding to go off on a tangent of subtly trying to control their reactions, believing erroneously, if they understood the Principles deeply enough then they’d never feel irritable, frustrated, bored, angry, critical etc. Ironically, the one they miss, is the self-judgement!
They are all made of thought and therefore at their essence, they are all neutral. Just vibrations passing through the system. There is nothing to be done with them, just let them roll through.
Accepting how we feel, means acknowledging that a sensation or thought form is present, however it shows up. There’s no need to label it. Better yet refrain from spending much mental energy concocting a story about why you are experiencing what you are experiencing.
A simple example showed up for me recently. I feel cold every now and then and I suddenly became aware that for me feeling cold is subtly wrong. As a result, I reach for what is wrong such as, I feel the cold more when I am tired; or I should move more; or my heating isn’t very effective. In this way I add meaning to feeling cold. The main meaning being, ‘I shouldn’t be cold’.
And so I innocently suffer not so much from being cold, but from the idea that I shouldn’t be cold. When I saw this at play, it was funny and then quite simple to just acknowledge ‘feeling cold’ FULL STOP, without the additional commentary. What was interesting was, ten minutes later, my awareness of being cold had disappeared. The arguing with reality, ironically was holding the feeling (of wrongness) in place.
To come fully into acceptance of your experience in any moment does not mean to be stuck with it. On the contrary, fully embracing what is occurring (on the inner or outer level), allows for flow, for fresh thinking to come in, for helpful ideas to occur, new perspectives. Paradoxically, acceptance is a powerful agent of change.
What have you seen around this?
© words and photograph Juliet Fay 2022
#Three Principles
