Accept the Now

ACCEPT THE NOW

You may want a life that is predictable, a life in which you have control over everything that happens in your life. But the reality is that your life is unpredictable. We are in a world of forms and no form is permanent. So things come and go and even form changes form. You are not able to choose what happens in your life but you can choose how you respond to what happens. Respond not react. When people react, they are not in alignment with reality. When you accept what is, you align with the Now and your power is ready to manifest as a response. What you do when you are in alignment with the Now will have the power to move you forward which is a step in changing the situation you consider undesirable.

Accepting the Now is the beginning of the end of suffering. It is a liberating experience. By accepting what is, a new door will be opened for you to go through. But when you do not accept what is, you struggle. What is already is and you are fighting it. That is insanity. It is a fight you can never win. To accept what is is to accept the truth and this will set you free.
Acceptance does not mean that you do not desire in any way to change your present situation. No. Acceptance does not imply helplessness. On the contrary, it is when you have accepted what is that you can really move past it. You go deeper in yourself and you find a new resource, a new way, or a new opportunity. You act with what you have found to create a different life situation for yourself. This is how you change your situation. Accept, then act. See what happens afterwards.

You do not need to create an identity out of what you have accepted. Say for instance you told a lie and you have fully accepted that you lied, if you create an identity for yourself by saying, “I accept myself the way I am. I am a liar,” then you are keeping yourself stuck. In such a situation, there is hardly any chance for change. Acceptance is realizing the situation as it is. It is unnecessary and not helpful to identify with it. No singular act, whether you describe it as good or bad, can define who you are.

In his book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, Eckhart Tolle narrates the session he had with a woman in her thirties. When she started telling Eckhart her story, she began to sob uncontrollably. She felt lonely and unfulfilled with much anger and sadness. She had been abused as a child by a physically violent father. Eckhart quickly saw that her pain was not caused by her present life circumstances but by an extraordinarily heavy pain-body (which I simply refer to as the pain entity in her). Eckhart saw that the pain in her had become the filter through which she viewed her life situation. She was unable then to see the link between the emotional pain and her thoughts and she was completely identified with both. So with her thoughts she fed the pain in her and this resulted to a deeply unhappy self.

Eckhart directed the focus of her attention to what she was feeling inside her body and asked her to sense the emotion directly, instead of through the filter of her unhappy thoughts. Thinking that this was a way into her unhappiness instead of a way out of it, she reluctantly did what she was asked to do. Tears rolled down her face while her body was shaking. “At this moment, this is what you feel,” Eckhart said. “There is nothing you can do about the fact that at this moment this is what you feel. Now instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now?”

She was quiet for a moment. Suddenly she looked impatient, as if she was about to get up, and she said angrily, “No, I don’t want to accept this.” “Who is speaking?” I (Eckhart) asked her. “You or the unhappiness in you? Can you see that your unhappiness about being unhappy is just another layer of unhappiness?” She became quiet again. “I am not asking you to do anything. All I’m asking is that you find out whether it is possible for you to allow those feelings to be there. In other words, and this may sound strange, if you don’t mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? Don’t you want to find out?”

She looked puzzled briefly, and after a minute or so of sitting silently, I suddenly noticed a significant shift in her energy field. She said, “This is weird. I’m still unhappy, but now there is space around it. It seems to matter less…” That space, of course, comes when there is inner acceptance of whatever you are experiencing in the present moment.

I didn’t say much else, allowing her to be with the experience. Later she came to understand that the moment she stopped identifying with the feeling, the old painful emotion that lived in her, the moment she put her attention on it directly without trying to resist it, it could no longer control her thinking and so become mixed up with a mentally constructed story called “The Unhappy Me.” Another dimension had come into her life that transcended her personal past – the dimension of presence… Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness.

Reference:
Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, 2005, Penguin Group, New York, USA, pp. 165-166