The password to Acceptance: ‘Well, this IS it!’

The best way to accept reality is to sit quietly and reflect on it!

Everyone understands that there is great value – and inner peace – in accepting what IS. Yet, almost everyone struggles with acceptance. The human mind plays dirty almost all the time – dragging your thoughts to what once was, what could have been and what may be. Resultantly you grieve, you pine and you worry incessantly. As long as you are doing all this, chances are that you will never get down to accepting your Life for what it IS.

A good way to learn to accept reality is to sit down and think about whatever has happened quietly. Do not try to quieten the environment if you can’t find a quiet nook to pause and reflect. Sit down wherever you are comfortable. But you must remain silent for an hour, to begin with. As you “soak into” your own silence, you may even be angry or guilty over the past. Allow that anger and guilt to surface. Cry if it makes you better. Write down your innermost feelings if that makes you better. After your anger subsides and your guilt becomes lighter, you will find that you will be seeing reality – as it IS. That is the time you must accept the reality. Just tell yourself, “Well, this IS it!” Then think of ways to live with the reality. Your mind will fight you – every step of the way. It will try to tell you that you can’t live with the reality. It will give you 100 justifications. It will throw up worry after worry after – scaring you, making you anxious about the uncertain future. All the worries and justifications to float around a bit. Don’t suppress them. For each justification and worry, simply repeat your “acceptance speech” – “Well, this IS it!”. Slowly, the mind will give up justifying. It will stop worrying too! It too will learn to accept the fact that you have accepted your reality. You may not be able to reach this level of acceptance in one session of solitude. It may take you several sittings, often spread over days and weeks. But there’s no better way to accept what IS than to reason it threadbare within yourself.

There’s an Irish proverb, "Nil aon tin tan mar do thin tan fein". It means that “there’s no fireside like your own”. Only through accepting your Life, in the warm glow of your inner fire, with all your love, can you open the doors to inner peace and bliss. Acceptance, while being simple to understand conceptually, doesn’t come easy. But when it does arrive, it makes Life simple – and easy!