Acceptance...

I want it to be this way…

I thought it would be like that…

The gripping, the tightness, the fight…

Looking at acceptance I found the teachings in Buddhism.

The Second Noble Truth of Buddhism is that “desire is the root of all suffering."

We spend our lives wanting reality to be anything but what it really is.

We desire, we want, we chase…

But what do we get? More of the same.

Things are never enough, even when we receive the desired outcome.

We have the thing we craved and now it’s time for the next.

I see it everywhere and I include myself.

The past years have seen lots of change for me and it’s felt like a rollercoaster on occasion. There has been nothing to hold on to, no grip. It’s been scary.

But when I have allowed myself time, space and to be seen and heard. A sense of being at peace with where I am, at what I have already achieved in life and a knowing of where I am going, seems to ease my Soul.

When we accept where we are, the resistance to anything other than what is stops all the pain and suffering.

We can’t change the past..

We can’t take back the decisions that got us here…

But by accepting where we are right now. By forgiving the person inside. By simply accepting, we stop all the worry and the rumination and the wondering and we take steady steps forward.

It isn’t always easy, I know, but it can be oh so simple.

“Acceptance doesn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, mean passive resignation. Quite the opposite. It takes a huge amount of fortitude and motivation to accept what is — especially when you don’t like it — and then work wisely and effectively as best you possibly can with the circumstances you find yourself in and with the resources at your disposal, both inner and outer, to mitigate, heal, redirect, and change what can be changed.” - Jon Kabat-Zinn

Desiring the world to be something it is not, wondering about how things “should be” all gets put aside. Then, we can change what can be changed.

The internal reflects the external.

Where are you pushing?

Do all of your desires need to be satisfied?

Can you accept where you are right now?

“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.” ― John Lennon