Acceptance is a hard thing. In the past, when people talked to me about acceptance I would interpret it something like this: “Get over it, pretend it doesn’t upset you so much, ignore how painful it is”, or “pretend it’s not as hard as it really is.”
The thing I’ve found with acceptance is that mostly, when I don’t want something to be the way it is, I also don’t want to feel the pain of it actually being true. I just don’t want it to be as it is. I don’t want to open myself up to that quagmire of stuff. That really hard intense pain business.
One of the things I like to think of, with acceptance, in terms of bracing something from deep within, is that I can also accept myself. I can accept my pain. I can accept how intense things are for me. I can accept that others can’t always get me the way I want them to. I can make some space. I can not only allow reality to be true, but I can somehow get a different angle on reality where I’m not holding on to something being true that isn’t. Like, once I actually get that a person or thing isn’t the way I want, I can step back. I can start to look at solving a problem instead of willing the problem not to exist.
Acceptance is one of those things that can be quite profound, and give us a very different experience of ourselves. However, it’s also one of those things that’s hard to do all the time. Hard to return to a “place” of being able to exist, sort of speak, within the universe in a way that isn’t fighting the universe.