| |
Life has no other
discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life
un-questioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from,
everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What
seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if
faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the
vision to recognize it as such.
Henry Miller
Acceptance is a psychological state that we can explore from
various perspectives:
The intuitive perspective.
 | A right to exist. |
| A place in the grand scheme. |
| A valid insistence that we come to terms with it. |
| A reason for being in our life. Perhaps we need to learn
something from it. |
| A design. Even if the design is expressed in a repulsive manner,
we recognize that it is a part of life that is exploring itself. |
| The mental perspective. Acceptance is a neutral, intellectual
acknowledgment of reality. If we do not accept, we have two other
options:
 | Denial and repression. We refuse to perceive things and we deny that
they exist. |
| Judgmentalness. We perceive things, but we do not perceive them from
the intuitive perspective, intuiting that they have a right to exist.
Judgmentalness is an intellectual death sentence. We condemn the thing, and
we decide that it should be destroyed, because we don't want to deal with
it. Acceptance means neither criticizing nor exalting and we are at peace
with both the object's imperfections and its merits. |
|
The life energy perspective. Acceptance is a willingness to allow our natural outflow of vitality toward
people, we don't damn the person by attempting to dam this flow of life energy.
Regardless of our material circumstances with this person, he or she is entitled
to that connection. We don't put them out of our heart.
The transcendental perspective. This transcendental quality means that acceptance is a state that can
co-exist with paradoxically contrary states, in both our viewpoint and our
actions:
| Our viewpoint. Acceptance is a psychological function. We can accept something regardless of
our thoughts, images, or feelings pertaining to it, our liking or disliking, our
approval or disapproval. |
| Our actions. We can accept something while simultaneously trying to change it. We can
accept the reality of international aggression while still trying to create the
condition of peace. In fact, we will be more effective in enacting a change,
because our acceptance has allowed us to view the situation clearly instead of
denying and repressing our discernment of it. Acceptance, in contrast to denial,
lets us look directly at the other persons viewpoint while comparing it to our
own. Acceptance is generally considered to be a passive state, but it is
actually an active state:
| We accept our desire to change unpleasant conditions, while we
simultaneously accept the reality that those conditions exist. |
| We do not passively submit to those unpleasant conditions. Instead of
passively stagnating with our denials and hatreds and avoidances, acceptance
lets us see our potentials in whatever is presented to us, and it allows us to
explore those potentials whole heartedly. |
| When we accept all parts of ourselves, we develop understanding and
compassion toward people who are expressing those same traits. We can protect
ourselves more effectively now, because we understand unpleasant traits,
having seen them within ourselves and therefore maintain our composure when we
see them in others. |
|
| Our identity. In self acceptance, we gain an honest, balanced view of ourselves, because we
discern both the potential and the ego, all traits and their opposites. We don't
create a distorted self image. Self acceptance is easier if we differentiate
between ourselves and our actions, thoughts, energy tones, and imagery. We are
not what we do. There is a connection and a responsibility between ourselves and
those elements, a bad action does not make us a bad person. We may dislike
certain things that we do, but we don't dislike and shame ourselves for whatever
we do in any given moment. With this overview, we know that we are capable of a
large range of behaviors. It is our responsibility to control our ego to ensure
that we behave in a socially acceptable fashion. |
| Acceptance is related to self acceptance. When we accept, we are
accepting design conditions that apply to ourselves, other people, and material
conditions. If we accept the fact that we are sometimes late for appointments,
we are obligated to accept the fact that other people are sometimes late for
appointments, and the fact that material circumstances do not always conform to
our schedule. When we accept our lateness, the acceptance is in the form of
thoughts, images, energy tones, and actions. We can think, "I forgot about
the appointment, no one's memory is perfect." This thought is registered in
the design regarding what we can term the being late design situation. In future
occasions when lateness occurs (our lateness, or the lateness of someone or
something else) we tend to default to our previous thoughts, images, energy
tones, and habits regarding that design circumstance, to determine "how do
I respond to lateness?". This is an automatic process that does not
consider whose lateness is occurring. If the design contains elements that
characterize acceptance, those elements are applied to either ourselves, or to
someone else, or to a material condition. However, this natural process can be
influenced by various forces:
| Unique circumstances. Our automatic response is geared for a
stereotyped response to a design situation, but each real life situation is
singular, so our response to lateness can be different if a person is 5
minutes late for dinner with an adequate excuse, or 5 hours late for his or
her own wedding without an adequate excuse. |
| Hypocrisy. |
|
The benefits of acceptance.
| We have more resources, in both acceptance and self acceptance:
| Acceptance. When we accept a facet of life, it is now available for our
use and enjoyment. Perhaps we formerly rejected and hated people who had a
particular skin color. If we accept their presence in the world, we can set
aside the hatred and explore their value to us as friends, business contacts,
or simply as individuals whose differences are not threats but are
interesting. Acceptance affirms the validity of other people, therefore we
also consider the validity of their viewpoints, and gain new information and
perspectives. |
| Self acceptance. Every part of us contributes to our performance. When
we accept, understand, and use all parts of ourselves, those parts cooperate
to create our successful life. Our anger can be helping us to rightly defend
ourselves. We tend to reject a part of ourselves that is ineffective,
frustrating, or embarrassing. That part has those traits only because it is
misunderstood, undeveloped, or ineptly expressed. We can accept it, and try to
understand and enhance its qualities |
|
| We have more freedom. In self acceptance, we allow ourselves to express
our various aspects such as being outgoing or reserved, responsible or happy-go-
lucky, generous or protective. |
| We improve our relationships. When we accept who we are, we can be
ourselves, allowing our natural personality and warmth to emerge. We are
creative and fun loving. We are not judging ourselves and others, therefore they
are comfortable with us and with themselves, so they permit their own
personality and warmth to emerge. |
| We are less sensitive to criticism. When we accept ourselves, we listen
and respond to criticism as mere feedback and we objectively concur with it or
reject it. There is little or no pain, defensiveness, or embarrassment, because
our foundation is in our self acceptance, not in whatever acceptance we receive
from other people. In many cases, their criticism is not so much a statement
regarding us as it is a statement regarding their values for their own life.
Those values are being imposed on us, and we may have no obligation to comply
with them, particularly if the criticism is nothing more than an attempt to
manipulate us via the granting or withholding of their approval. In order to
function in society, we do need to conform to social protocol somewhat, but we
can discriminate between the confirmation that we need from other people and the
confirmation that can come only from ourselves. If we seek all of our validation
from other people, we create the destructive condition of co-dependency. |
| We allow emotional stability and pleasure. Acceptance is associated with
the energy tones of contentment and calm. We still have our feelings of liking
and disliking, however:
| We generally do not experience indignation when the world does not
conform to our preferences. |
| We do not experience gushing support when the world does conform to our
preferences. |
| We no longer feel that we are at war with the world. The world is a
system. If we hate any part of it, we hate it as a whole. Acceptance allows us
to relax into reality, with the faith that it is ultimately good. |
| We accept the emotions themselves. Repression causes emotional
numbness, in contrast, acceptance of emotions allows us to use and enjoy them.
The extent to which we repress one emotion is the extent to which we repress
all emotions. When we refuse to feel fear, we also reduce our capacity to feel
happiness. |
| We have more energy for our use. We stop consuming energy in pointless
battles against the people and circumstances that cannot be changed, and we
don't waste emotional energy via hatred and self hatred. |
| We are likely to experience better physical health. If we are not
accepting, we can encounter:
 | Stress, and stress related illnesses. The excess stress arises because
we are fighting circumstances that we cannot change. The stress is literally
the energy that we cannot discharge because we are pushing against immovable
objects such as circumstances that are to be accepted rather than changed. |
| Stop abusing our body. We accept our body's reality, the reality that a
human body requires adequate nutrition, rest, exercise, and medical care. |
|
|
Techniques for developing acceptance.
| Design-work. We
cultivate energy tones such as relaxation, contentment, and pleasure.
| Affirmations. "I accept the challenges of life." "I accept
myself as I am and I want to be even better.", "I find a satisfying
place for myself in the world as it is.", "I enjoy the variety of
life.". |
| Directed imagination. We can visualize ourselves being calm in a
situation that usually triggers excessive stress or judgmentalness. |
| Modeling. We act as if we are accepting of the unalterable conditions. |
|
| Intuition. Intuition can tell us which situations are to be changed, and
which situations are to be accepted as they are. Our intuition can then tell us
how to change things, or how to accept the things that cannot be changed. |
| We can examine our potential. Our potential is the assortment of traits
that we do not claim in the ego. If we believe that we are an honest person, our
potential contains our capacity for dishonesty. As we discover the traits of our
potential, we discover traits that we have repressed or denied. When we learn to
accept the traits in our potential, we can still leave them there so that we can
continue to think of ourselves as an honest person, but now we are aware of the
traits of dishonesty in our potential. Once we are aware we can consciously
decide not to use or project them. |
| We can accept our past. Some people say, "If I had to live my life
again, I'd do it the same". This is retrospective self acceptance, a
realization that their life unfolded in the way in which it needed to unfold,
despite any complaints that they had along the way. If we adopt this perspective
now, rather than waiting for the wisdom of age, we accept our problems as part
of our education and maturation. Problems come to our attention because they
reveal something within us that needs to be recognized, understood, and then
properly administered. To accept whatever we are at this moment is to trust this
process. |
| We can differentiate self acceptance from self esteem. Self acceptance
and self esteem are two separate functions. We can simultaneously accept
ourselves while still trying to do better to meet our values. |
| Self acceptance has no standards or values, and it needs no justification. We
can have self acceptance no matter what we do. |
| Self esteem is based on standards. We justify our self esteem by
affirming that our behavior corresponds to our values. |
| We can explore our projections and the repressions from which the
projections arise. The traits that we do not accept in other people are the
traits that we do not accept in ourselves. If we feel anger toward our rowdy neighbors, part of that anger can be our envy of their wildness if we have not
accepted the wild streak in ourselves. |
| We can explore the concept of humility. We acknowledge that the world
exists as it is, despite our preferences to the contrary. If we feel that life
has purposes and meanings and values that are greater than those that we can
comprehend and which are all for our ultimate benefit, we trust the process.
If we do this we relinquish the stress causing notion that we are somehow
responsible for the universe. Therefore we do not become opinionated and judgmental. Humility is not a denial of ourselves. It is simply a truthful
evaluation. Half of humility is knowing what we are, the other half is knowing
what we are not. |
The art of acceptance is
the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might
have done you a greater one.
Russell Lynes
Next topic: Conversation Skills |
