Acceptance is transcendental

What does it mean to accept? To allow what is to be? Contentment in all circumstances? It can mean both. To allow what is happening to be as it is in your life and contentment in all circumstances. Acceptance does not mean stagnancy or simply doing nothing to resolve conflict or burdens in your life. It is more of a mindset of how to approach all circumstances in your life. It’s a surrendering to what is occurring in your life because it is unchangeable, and while it’s unchangeable it remains constantly changing. Often, we do not have control of what happens with other people and situations. The infinite number of variables that exist for how someone acts and reacts to us is too many for us to form an accurate portrayal of. We don’t know why bad things happen to good people and why certain people treat us in a way that is hurtful. The only solace we can bring into the situation is acceptance.

Acceptance creates a space for objectivity in any given situation and helps us remove emotional attachment to it. Objectivity allows us to view situations less as personal attacks that we begin to identify with and more as experiences that hold aspects for our personal development. Every experience is a teacher and objectivity lets us be the best student. Why remove emotional attachment? To allow the natural flow of emotions through us instead of the snagging that happens when we construe a narrative around an emotion. Acceptance is how we arrive at both of those spaces. It helps us meet reality and acknowledge what that reality is. 

Objectivity cannot be reached when there is a personal slight attached to a situation. If a situation is approached through the lens of what they did was wrong or I’m right in this situation, then there is no room to look at the big picture that considers both sides and all the variables involved. It’s a subjective view of the experience that limits what can be learned from it. Emotions are also heightened when we view things subjectively because it is “I” centric and focused on how the self is feeling in the situation vs. what the situation is. This leads to misconstrued versions of reality tainted in our own bias from personal experiences of the past. Acceptance dissolves this bias by allowing what is to be as it is in the moment without judgement of what it should be based on how we feel. 

I once had a friend explain to me that emotions travel through us like water in a river; they are intended to flow forward and take us to new destinations. However, at times there are blockages in the flow caused by our own attachment to how we feel in a moment, we don’t allow the emotions to move through us but instead stop them to pick them apart and analyze why they are happening. Analysis can be helpful at times to understand our experience and how we relate between our external and internal worlds, a form of introspection, but it is better saved for a separate time. Thinking through our emotions as we feel them causes us to place debris in the river’s way. We now are preventing the forward motion so that we may inspect and dissect the feeling instead of letting it carry us somewhere new. We might get stuck mulling over making sense of something that may not make sense or trying to place our emotions to a specific experience or grasping at why the depth of it is disproportioned to the logical experience. All of this can lead to an attachment of the emotion to our personal experience.

The integration of logic to an emotion leads to a narrative that the mind creates as an explanation of said emotion. When this happens, the mind now has an outline for any situation that resembles this narrative, and that may invoke a similar emotion, even when unwarranted. This is the emotional attachment. Keeping separate the emotions as they’re felt and the processing through logic as to why it was experienced helps prevent the forming of narratives around an emotional experience. Acceptance is key in this separation.

If you view emotions as something you receive from a given situation, then you can begin to see emotions as conduits for how we relate between our internal and external worlds. They can show beauty and admiration, but also where we have boundaries crossed and experiences that bring us harm. Our feelings bring us a deep understanding of how we relate. This only happens if they’re felt though, and you can’t feel your feelings if you think about them. Thinking brings you into the mind and feeling brings you into the body. It can be scary to feel. Our minds don’t have a conclusion of what that feeling may bring. Acceptance dissolves the need for an explanation or conclusion.

If you accept you are in emotional pain, you can allow that pain to pass through you and not hold on to why the pain is happening or if the pain will happen again because you are present with the pain in an objective way. The objectivity comes from no narrative being placed on the emotion. You begin to feel pain as you think about how your friend betrayed you, as soon as you begin to feel the pain, sit with it instead of continuing to think about your friend betraying you and trying to figure out why. Name the emotion, acknowledge you are in pain and let the emotion move through you. Allow the emotion to flow through you like you would feel water dripping down your body from a shower. It comes and goes in its time and does not need to be solved. There’s no need to get caught up in why you are in pain. Thinking about your friend betraying you won’t change the fact your friend betrayed you, but letting go of the pain by feeling it will move you forward beyond the experience.

When we hold on to emotions from experiences, emotional attachment, we bring forward a past experience into our present and future. Acceptance aids us in letting go and moving forward. To accept that your friend betrayed you is hurtful, but once you feel that hurt you don’t need to let it harbor inside you and lead to a narrative that makes friends untrustworthy. 

When we accept we are acknowledging what happened and allowing the experience to flow through us. It is an act that is transformative and renews your sense of well-being in the world. The transformation begins with the objective view that grants you a means of leaning into a new perspective. When you are not clouded by the emotional and subjective bias of a situation, lessons become apparent and it’s easier to learn from these moments that show us where we are uncomfortable. This produces growth. The renewal of our well-being happens when we release emotions instead of letting them dictate our view of self, others, and our situation. To accept moves us beyond what is happening personally and into what is happening all around us; it’s a way to balance our perspective and ground ourselves in reality. Acceptance transcends us from personal slight to an open-minded perspective of what our situations have to offer.

Thanks for reading, and as always, much love.

- Jenn