ACCEPTANCE MONTH: DAY 10: “Don’t look for peace. Don’t look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender” ― Eckhart Tolle
While I don’t like the use of the term “surrender” here, I know he equates it with Acceptance. For me, there is a difference between the two. I am quite comfortable with that understanding of the two words.
So, this is a great quote, because it addresses our ability to fight the Universe with whatever happens in our story. And the fight is the thing that brings about unease and pain and suffering. If I can just unconditionally accept what life offers, I will be much better off than those who don’t. Some folks need to keep the fight going for years!
And the pain they create in themselves, the sickness, the dis-ease, the horrible way of life they have from that point on, is entirely a process of learning to accept what life offers. We don’t have to like it, we just have to stop fighting it.
It does not matter if it is death, divorce, moving, losing a home, losing a child, a career, whatever the story we keep perpetuating is, the greater the pain we will cause ourselves by fighting the shift in what we are experiencing.
I have buried a daughter, a husband and way too many important friends in my life; actually in recovery. I have lost a home and had my financial wherewithal wiped away from me. I went through significant abuse for 30 years before I got to stop drinking and drugging at “them.” Recovery has given me such abundant and beautiful tools for learning to navigate these situations, as well as the loss of a career after I had spent six years going to school to credential it the way I always dreamed. None of this has any part in my story.
I see all of this, and then some, as the way the Universe unfolded my path to allow me the gifts of my life. I work with the most damaged and broken people on the planet and can relate to them totally. Not in how I sit in my shit with this stuff, but how it gave me incredible strength and love and hope and became the beauty I see in the world each and every day.
And I seldom get to that place where I have to feel the pain of fighting what is happening “to” me, because I see all of this as having happened “for” me and through me. I am richly blessed by everything. I get to recover today, because I am no longer looking at the world through self-pity and the story that I had something better coming to me. Thank you Universal Power for that!
Dolphin Hug 