Monday, January 3, 2011

Acceptance

Today’s blog was not easy for me. It took me all day to transform these thoughts into some semblance of sense. If it hadn’t been such a personally prevalent subject I probably would have just chalked it up to time well wasted. However, I kept coming back time and again today with the intent to make sense of this thought pattern. So here it is…

I’ve been thinking a lot about acceptance…
Accepting things for what and how they are. Knowing on some level that every experience I have (we all have) is precisely the experience I’m meant to be having. All things do happen for a reason. Finding acceptance and ultimately appreciation, is irrefutably essential to spiritual development.

Accepting what life presents to me in this moment; whether it is in the form of comfort or discord; whether I find myself feeling great joy, frustration, or sorrow. Knowing that every experience is a direct reflection of my spirit’s needs is something I aspire to daily. This would be my ideal. However I get caught up in the drama of my own emotions, and I (like most people) can’t help but wonder; why? Why does my spirit need to feel discontent, irritation, upset, or sadness? Perhaps it is meant to be a reminder. Perhaps I am being given opportunities to remember to “go with the flow”. That struggling against the current will never lead me where I want to be. And that I must practice allowing situations to unfold naturally. After all, what we resist persists. Letting go and trusting doesn’t always appear to be easier than struggling, but it is always smarter.

Wishing for an experience that differs from my current reality merely increases my unhappiness, and creates an entirely new set of uncomfortable circumstances. If I expend my energy resisting unpleasant feelings, emotions and situations, I will not prove successful in avoiding them, but rather, stand to strengthen the hold they have upon me. I will not heal the hurt or disappointments, but instead, increase the attention being given to them, and in turn increase the power they wield over me.

All mental and emotional discomfort is an exercise in acceptance. If I am feeling emotional upset, I can be certain that my spirit is trying to tell me that it is time to change how I am interacting with the universe. It is time to open my heart and feel my feelings, to stop trying to force them into abatement.  Nothing can be changed until it is accepted, brought out of the shadow of shame and denial and put into the spotlight of awareness; where it may then be transformed into a restorative, strengthening, purposeful understanding through the superb facility of acceptance.

Phew! Okay. Enough said.

-Love.

1 comment:

  1. Reading this I can relate to what you're writing about.I absolutely despise feeling the uncomfortable emotions and have forever run from them, pushed them aside, ignored them, WHY? Because I was not allowed to feel nor was I shown what to do with my emotions. I had done what I was taught and that was to not feel them. Because of where I'm at in my life right now, I am learning how to feel those and all emotions, negative and positive emotions. How to process them, how to explain them to myself and my loved ones. It's not easy when you haven't been "feeling" for so long. Accepting your emotions is a part of what makes us human, I think. We have a large, vast, controlling mind that we have the power to. We have the power to recognize the emotions, look at them, ask ourselves why we feel the way we do, why that emotion comes out in a certain situation and the answer to that why normally soothes our mind or gives us an "ah ha" moment where we accept or make a change. Accepting a situation is a different story in my own opinion. I feel if you do not like your situation and are getting negative feelings from it, you are so very right, make a change or accept it. Good write Sara, raw, harsh, real, humane. <3

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