Acceptance
Acceptance can be a difficult concept because there's often a feeling of implied acquiescence or 'giving in' that just doesn't sit well. But the true meaning of acceptance is the ability to simply acknowledge what is, without any judgement or need to change it.
When something unwanted happens, our first instinct is often to resist it. It's not the situation itself that brings unhappiness but rather our resistance and conditioned reactions to it. As long as we are in conflict with something, thinking that it should be different from the way it is and blaming circumstances or other people for our unhappiness, we will never have the clarity of mind to see what is really troubling us. But when we make decisions from a place of wisdom and clarity we are responding with power and intention and not simply reacting in the same old conditioned ways.
So when painful feelings arise, rather than avoiding or numbing them, we can simply acknowledge them - accept them as the current reality, experience them and investigate their nature and where they come from. When we do this, we will discover that painful feelings do not come to us from outside, but arise from within our own mind. Circumstances or people have no power to make us feel bad - the most they can do is trigger the potential for painful feelings that already exist within our own mind. We have the ability to choose how we respond in every situation.
Most of us live our lives as slaves to our feelings or emotions that become ingrained in us by repeated thought patterns and behaviours. We've trained our brains to think a certain way and to respond in conditioned patterns so that there is no longer a gap that allows for the possibility of choice. We simply react on autopilot without engaging our conscious decision making brain - the subconscious rules the conscious.
But we do have a choice! Just as negative thought patterns are programmed into our neural pathways, so too are the positive ones. We can change those patterns whenever and however we want to. It simply takes conscious intention to make a positive choice by focusing on what we want instead of what we don't want.
