Weekly Training: Learning Acceptance

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them. That only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally, forward in whatever way they like. Lao Tzu.

So today in this mini episode, we are going to talk briefly about the concept and idea of acceptance. And this is something that I really have had an interesting journey with. There's many things in my life personally that I have been faced to accept. Addiction in my family, addiction within myself, a lot of.

Shame and challenges within my own life, infidelities that I've accrued and lies that I've told. And all these, all these types of pieces are very challenging to accept. Our past can sometimes be very challenging to accept. And when I see and work with people on a daily basis who are struggling to engage in a depth of intimacy that they desire or build a meaningful, purposeful business, what I often see are people who are rejecting the acceptance of something, the allowing of something in their life. And this is a byproduct of the culture that we live in. In many ways, North American culture does not respect acceptance. We just want to say that again. North American culture does not respect acceptance. We live in a type of heroic masculine that believes in victory over acceptance, dominance over allowing, and we get stuck in our lives. Because allowing and acceptance are often a non rational process, right? Our ego, our rational component of our brain and our identity wants to find out how to solve every single problem, how to manipulate external realities to move in our direction. And when things that we don't like happen, our minds can often get fixated and obsessed on trying to figure out how to control the uncontrollable. So I want to say two things about acceptance. I'm going to leave this episode to be relatively brief, but I want you to try and put some of these pieces into motion. So here we go.

Number one, the biggest misconception about acceptance is that it's a passive process, something that happens to us. This is not the case at all. Acceptance is not a passive process. It is not something that happens to us in our life. Acceptance is a courageous act of bravery. It is an active process, a verb, an action. It is something that we must implement. It is something that we must practice. It is something that we must deploy when we are met with an external factor that we dislike, when we are met with something within ourselves that we wish we could annex and get rid of. Acceptance is an immutable force that we have to choose. That we have to choose in moments where we know that acceptance is required for us to move Forward. Many of the obstacles that we face in our life are a byproduct of not accepting, of refusing to allow. Whether that's not accepting that we have a deep grief within our heart that needs to be felt, or accepting that someone no longer wants to be with us, or accepting that the business that we wanted to create is not going to unfold in the way that we wanted. So rather than focusing and fixating on how we can solve those problems, we need to be in the action, in the action of acceptance, daily. This is a practice, accepting and allowing our a practice, an active, avid practice. And it's something that I have had to curate for many years, many, many years, because there are parts of me that want to battle, that want to fight, that want to go to war with the uncontrollable aspects of nature and life and existence and the universe and relationships and business and finance. There are parts of me that are stubborn and that creates suffering simply because I don't want to let go, simply because I refuse to accept what is. And the refusal of that acceptance, the not allowing of myself to accept things as they are, is the action, is the chosen action that moves me further into suffering.

And so our choice is, when we are met with these experiences in life, to choose to accept actively, daily, repeatedly. Sometimes this means that when a relationship dies or fades away, a divorce happens, we have to choose that acceptance, sometimes for weeks and months on end and. And sometimes that acceptance for us to fully embrace, it requires us to go through hell. It requires us to face our own grief, our own sorrow, our own pain, our own actions. It requires us to forgive ourselves for maybe the pain that we caused, or the infidelities or the lies, or abandoning ourselves for the relationship and calling that a smart decision, but then realizing that later on that that was the demise of the relationship. So to accept these things is not a one off experience. It is not something that we simply wake up one morning and say, you know what? I think I'm going to accept my divorce. I think I'm going to accept the fact that my father passed away too soon. I think I'm going to accept the fact that what's happening with my children right now is really causing me a lot of pain and suffering. Those things are not a one off experience.

We. So this is the second part. We underestimate the potency and power of acceptance. We have diminished its power. We have diminished what it requires from us. Acceptance demands. Acceptance demands that we face the. The hard, dark, murky waters of existence. It demands that of us. And for many of us, this fear of that part of life is the reason why we can't accept. It's the reason why we can't allow. Because we are afraid to move into the space of not knowing, of having to ask for acceptance sometimes daily, which can feel.

Sometimes helpless, sometimes powerless. That we just want to accept, that we just want to allow. And to move in that space to allow and accept the things that we cannot control sometimes requires us to meet the hard parts of ourself and of existence and of life. So I hope that this episode landed for you and what I would encourage you to do is to look at your life and ask yourself, what am I not accepting right now? What am I refusing to allow? And what would it look like for me to choose to allow that daily? What would it look like for me to choose to accept that daily? And lastly, what would that acceptance require of me? So thank you so much. Please man it forward. Share this episode with somebody that you know would benefit from it and needs to hear this message right now. Until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.