Personal Reflections and Insights on Acceptance

Following on with the theme of radical acceptance Dew on The Grass blog is currently posting on the theme of Acceptance.
What can I say? Take some time to read these articles, benefit from the insights and truths so clearly and tenderly expressed. I have.

I step into the water. The riverbed slopes gently and I walk forward, slowly and deliberately, into the deeper water. At waist level, I pause, giving my body time to adjust. I have to remember to put my hands into the water. My instinct is to hold them high. I bend my knees and the water rises inch by inch up to my shoulders. The trick is to do everything gradually.
Winter Wild Swimming by Chris Yoemans

Acceptance’, it turns out, is a trigger word for me, bringing with it some strong emotions, which have made writing this blog difficult, despite several attempts to do so.

Mostly, it has brought into sharp focus, remnants of non-acceptance and feelings of grief, through remembrances of the breakup of my parent’s marriage, some sixty years ago, and also the feelings of loss that I feel for my own marriage, not through abandonment, but through the illness and decline of a spouse.
Coming to Rest by Karen Richards

Looking up the etymology of the word “acceptance”, amongst the definitions I found, what stuck out for me was: to get without effort, to assent to the reality of a situation.
Some years ago I wrote an article called “Dealings with Pain” on dealing with excessive physical pain. The article is in fact about the process of how to assent to the reality of a situation. The keyword here is, I think, “reality”.
When we find ourselves in a situation that feels unbearable, unacceptable, we feel that we, that is “I”, the self, is in that situation and limited by it. That is a very narrow perspective of reality, of the self, a belief that warrants closer examination.
On Acceptance by Anna Aysea

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3 thoughts on “Personal Reflections and Insights on Acceptance”

  1. The difficulty comes in my experience when what ‘reality’ is asking requires a level of expansion beyond what the ‘I’ can provide. Whilst reality isn’t limited, human experience is causal and so people do suffer.

    1. Hi David, Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I would suggest that the question of what “I” is, is prior to every other question. The believe that “I” is the limited self, the ego, when examined closely, is not in keeping with direct experience. The body-mind is limited, the question is, is “I” limited to this body-mind. Being open to the possibility that “I” may not be limited to the body-mind is what is being suggested by my article.

      Anna

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