In any situation, we only have two choices – to either accept it or to change it, and if we can’t change it, we must accept it.
We can use everything within our power to try and change something but if we can’t, we must accept it.
All the other mental dialog that comes up, the inner argument with reality and going back and forth, the resistance, the complaining is just suffering.
How unfair this is, why’s it always me, I knew this was going to happen, this just isn’t right, whatever roleplay we engage in – whether it’s outrage, anger or victimhood, it’s all just suffering and it changes nothing. Still, we can either accept what is happening in reality or we can change it.
But how do you accept the unacceptable?
About a year and a half after my mum passed away, Luisa who’s one of my very wise friends here in Peru told me that I needed to accept it and let her go.
I immediately felt a strong anger and resistance to what she’d said and I just said “No, I won’t“.
Everything surrounding my mum’s passing was, to me, completely unacceptable. How it happened, how fast it happened towards the end, how much she suffered.
How could I possibly accept it? None of it was acceptable or OK.
And it took me a couple of years to realise that I didn’t know what the word accept actually meant.
It didn’t mean to give it my stamp of approval, or to say that I’m happy about it, or that I agree with it, or that I like it or that I want more of it – that isn’t acceptance.
Acceptance is simply to stop mentally resisting it, and to stop fighting reality and arguing with reality. All of this is just the mind doing what it does, trying to claim control, trying to give a false illusion of control over the things we have no control over.
In the moment it feels comforting to let the mind do what it does, but it doesn’t change a thing and it just keeps us suffering.
