A lecture on radical emotional acceptance: feeling sadness, fear, grief, shame, and anger with tender awareness reveals what you actually need. Holding emotions with kind attention transforms fear into courage and weakness into strength.
As we become more adept at that level, we move to another one, which is the awareness of more vulnerable emotions like sadness or fear or grief or feelings of failure, shame, embarrassment. And again, congratulations. We need to embrace it. If we're against ourselves, we have no chance of coming to peace, no chance of stopping ourselves from hurting the other and ourselves. There's no chance. So it's so important. The key thing is that we congratulate ourselves, that we appreciate ourselves, that we are tender with ourselves. And that's the healing agent. The healing agent is the tenderness, is the acceptance, is the yes, it's perfectly okay that you're angry. It's perfectly okay that you're sad or frightened. And I'm going to hang in there with you. And we learn how to coexist with the emotional states we're in and recognize at deeper and deeper levels as we grow older that it's so paradoxical. If we can really embrace fear, we're going to develop courage. If we can really embrace weakness, we're going to develop strength. If we reject weakness, we're going to stay weak. If we reject anger, we're going to stay angry. If we hold it with a truly emotional, intelligent witness, then magic can happen with any emotional state. It's like bathing the two together. My heart wants to say hello to you no matter which state you're in. Then there's another level where when you're in touch with the vulnerability, it becomes a little easier to see what it is that you need or what quality is really being called for in your being. So, for example, if you are anxious, relaxation is being called for. If you're angry, peace is called for. And if you're distrusting, trust is being called for. And so we start to realize the next level. Underneath the vulnerability and sometimes underneath the resistant emotions, is the underlying needs that exist. To be supported, to be connected to, to have attunement, to communicate, to be kind to ourselves. And when we start to realize that all emotions underneath represent the possibility of discovering the needs that we have, then everything's golden. There's no point in rejecting anything because we recognize that we're going to get to the needs, we're going to get to the qualities. If we're agitated, we're going to learn how to be more peaceful. Now, it doesn't happen just immediately, but just gaining the insight that this accepting awareness, this kind, gentle accepting awareness is what we want to coexist as much as possible with every emotional state we're in, without exception. And when it's absent. We're just spinning like a top nowhere. And when it's present, it truly doesn't matter what state we're in because we're looking for the possibility of how do we transform? How do we find love? How do we find peace? How do we find trust? How do we find compassion? So it's magical.
