More Acceptance, More Peace

Wikipedia defines acceptance as "a person's agreement to experience a situation, to follow a process or condition (often a negative or uncomfortable situation) without attempting to change it, protest, or exit".






In life we have so many opportunities to experience acceptance and also to experience protest. Why would I choose to protest? Seems so much better to accept and experience peace. Yet, there have been so many times in my life when I know I've done just the opposite.



I have had expectations for all sorts of things in my life. Here are just a few (maybe you can relate to one or two). what success looks like, how i am supposed to look, when i was to get married and have kids, what my house should look like, how my friends should act......WOW, that's a lot of expectations! (and that's not all of them ;-). These come from a long line of experiences, past history and watching what went on around me as the unwritten rules for life. However, these rules, these expectations eventually caused me pain when i realized that I am not in control of what other people do or how they act or how things are "supposed to be". All in all, it really all comes back to being in the present. If I begin to have an expectation for a certain outcome to occur or a certain person to act in a specific way, I have entered down a path that can now lead to major disappointment and also miss out on many gifts that come in different packages.





Deepak Chopra says in the Seven Spiritual Laws of Success that " Least effort is expended when your actions are motivated by love, because nature is held together by the energy of love. When you seek power and control over other people or situations, you waste energy. When you seek money or power for the sake of the ego, you spend energy chasing the illusion of happiness instead of enjoying happiness in the moment." All things we perceive as problems have in them gifts; an opportunity to grow into something else completely.





For example, you walk into the yoga room and half way through class you realize that you have a lower amount of energy than normal. You are feeling that your whole practice up to this point is just a struggle and you begin to feel frustrated. Frustrated to the point, that you begin to give up in the mind and begin sending negative messages to your brain about how your body isn't performing the way you want it to. If we use this definition of acceptance now and break this down, we could instead, see that our energy is low and accept this. We may decide in standing head to knee that it may be beneficial to stay in the first part instead of going to the deepest part of the posture and instead focus more on our pranayama breathing. We can bring more focus into the breath. We can focus more on finding the stillness in the posture and also in between the postures. Wow...what a gift. This could actually become a huge learning curve in your practice. In these moments of stillness that you begin to create now in your practice, you feel good. You send feel good messages to the brain because you are in acceptance and treating your body with respect. So the message is "It may be uncomfortable, but don't leave...don't exit the situation".





I recently had a situation in my life that I wished I handled differently because I came from a place of non acceptance. Of course, because of that, It caused me pain and as I looked at it closely, I had to peel the layers away, and it was really uncomfortable. But, I want to learn and go through this journey. I want to self realize and learn from the things that don't work so i don't have to repeat them. Life is full of mistakes so that we can learn from them.





Pattabi Jois, who was an icon in the yoga community and creator of Ashtanga Yoga, said "Perfect asana means you can sit for three hours with steadiness and happiness, with no trouble." I love that. It's not about being perfect, it's about coming back again and again to stillness, to being. To being a person who is a work in progress.



Om Shanti