“All happiness comes from awareness. The more we are conscious, the deeper the joy. Acceptance of pain, non-resistance, courage and endurance – these open deep and perennial sources of real happiness, true bliss.”
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
A common obstacle to changing is a lack of acceptance.
What’s that?! Isn’t acceptance of something the opposite of change? Isn’t it just giving up?
No.
Well, it depends on what you mean by acceptance.
There are at least 2 ways that people think of this word, acceptance. One leads to likely change, the other leads to likely stagnation:
- Acceptance of what is happening right now, with agnosticism about what will happen in the future.
- A prediction that the future will be the same as today.
When I suggest acceptance as a strategy to dealing with difficulties that don’t have an obvious solution, clients often hear the 2nd definition above. They think, at first, that I’m suggesting they should let go of hope for things to be different.
But I then clarify that we can have hope and still not make future predictions, and simply accept what is happening right now. The two are compatible.
Doing so creates space and helps us relax, which frees energy and stimulates ease and eventual creativity. It also often leads to insight, because we are not pushing away our life, but instead looking at it without fear. As we look at something, we come to understand it, and gain mastery over it with time. The creativity that typically follows helps us make new and effective decisions.
None of that is as possible with the 2nd acceptance definition above. In that case everything is in reverse. Rather than being open about the future, we decide it’s gray and static. And no matter how much we tell ourselves that “this is just how it’s going to be,” the alive part inside of us that is constantly moving towards growth is going to fight that type of surrender, which is actually more like a commitment to defeat. The part of us that wants to grow just isn’t going to be roll over and be okay with “acceptance” that means that things won’t change later.
Giving up creates a tension inside of us between two parts. One part is fearful and defensive, often analytical. It says that we “should” give up hope for change because not knowing and not having the change we want now is painful. Another part of us is fearless and wants to grow, and will never be okay with giving up something that we aren’t sure we can accomplish or not. That tension depletes our energy, lowers our creativity, and skews and diminishes our perception, reducing the chances of the effective behavior that leads to change.
It’s one thing to not know what we want, or to know that we can’t do or have something with conviction. That happens. But when we genuinely want something and we don’t know one way or the other if we can do or have it, the place I try to inhabit is acceptance of what is now, and agnostic hope for the future.
The “key” to acceptance
Here’s an example of how the struggle feels when we have the wrong notion of acceptance, and how to shift it to the right one:
The other day I was trying to replace a laptop key, and was starting to get frustrated. I just wanted to type, not spend my time dealing with this annoyance. The plastic underneath laptop keys is surprisingly delicate. They look to me that they could easily snap off a tiny piece and become useless. After 20 minutes of trying to put two pieces of the key together with no luck and worry that I was about to break my ‘n’ key for the next week, I realized that I was not accepting the situation (disassembled, non-functional key). I was envisioning the plastic breaking, leaning towards acceptance that this key would remain broken. Another part of me was too attached to the outcome of getting this key back together in the next 5 minutes so I could resume my work. There was a tension between two stressed out parts of me, dealing with it in opposite ways (under-committing and over-committing to the problem at the same time).
I realized that I wasn’t going to solve the problem being rushed and impatient, and let go of the attachment to the outcome. I started to look closely at the key. I realized I was unsure of which configuration was correct and which sides were up. I looked at a couple more videos. I finally figured out that one piece actually needed to be stretched to fit the other piece in it. I slowed down the whole process. I really saw the key pieces, and the clips they fit into on the board. I saw them in the present because I wasn’t looking at them in the future (they will for sure get fixed or they will for sure not get fixed). Not focusing on the future outcome freed up my awareness to hone in and perceive the solution. It wasn’t actually that complicated, and I managed to get it all together and the key works perfectly after clearing a small piece of debris from under it. I was just having a hard time focusing of the parts of the plastic, the direction of the board’s metal clips, etc, because I was too busy deciding if the near future would entail a fixed or a broken n key.
It is similar with our emotions and thoughts. We often feel something unpleasant, and like the laptop key, we just want the damn thing to stop being an issue and improve… now. We don’t want to really stop, slow down, and take a close look at what’s doing on underneath the feeling. The pain of the emotion (what caused it, how long it will last) is uncertain, and it distracts us temporarily from other business, and feels like a stalling of progress.
But just like having a working keyboard is necessary for efficient writing, having a working mental/emotional process is necessary for all of the productivity and well-being we hope and plan for in the day. It’s easier in the short term to avoid the problem or rush to premature defeat by it. But in the long run this makes life more difficult because, like a broken laptop key will undermine our laptop use, unfelt and ignored feelings will negatively impact the use of our mind and body.
So when we notice issues in our thinking and feeling system, it’s important to stop and accept that something is amiss, and needs attention. If we don’t accept it now we’ll either keep trying to perform with less success, or we’ll stop trying altogether. If we do accept it, we’ll put aside the future for a temporary while so we can focus on understanding the problem and learning what, if anything, we should do.