Psychological Mindedness Part 2 - Developing a Psychologically Leaning Mind
Posted on April 20, 2017 by Josephine Heiss, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
What is acceptance and why is acceptance the key to free will? Acceptance is not evaluation. It is not agreement nor is it resignation towards others.
Develop your muscle for genuine acceptance
What is acceptance? How is it not resignation? And why is acceptance the key to free will? Acceptance is not evaluation. It is not agreement nor is it resignation towards a perceived “other” side. Instead acceptance is a state of mind from which to view events that arise in your life. One that is free from your ego’s endless labeling of these events to be either “good” or “bad.” It is seeing the reality of a situation almost from a meta view. Even though it may be uncomfortable or down right negative, and not resisting it. We resist reality constantly by being addicted to our own thoughts. We instantly judge what’s happening moment by moment and then avoid or numb out from any experience we don’t agree with. It just part of being human to want to avoid pain and move toward pleasure. But as we evolve we find better ways of dealing ourselves and how we show up for life.
You don’t have to decide if you find a moment good or bad to accept it as it is every time. Let me restate that because it is a very subtle, yet incredibly powerful distinction to understand. We are not our egos, or our thoughts, or our ideas and beliefs. Even though we agree with a great many of our beliefs; we don’t betray them by accepting the legitimacy of another view. However we often get lost in our own evaluations and judgements of what is. Just spend a hour paying attention to your own inner thoughts. Write them down without editing yourself. Do this for a month and you’ll soon see what we’re all up against. We are bombarded with our thoughts about everything all day; most of them not even originally our own. We are seduced by our mental stories.
American psychologist, Carl Rogers, who was one of the founders of the Humanistic Psychology movement, had this to say about acceptance, “The curious paradox, is that when I accept myself just as I am, I can change.” The truth of the paradox seems to be that it is not simply when, but only when I can accept things as they are that anything can begin to change.
The trick is to remember that we all see reality though our own unique set of emotional filters, so that we can try to relax our judgements, and set intentions to accept what is. Then we can be free in each moment. Being able to step into the space of receiving the moment is being able to ask the question, “what is going on inside me right now?” And again, the idea here is that the answer should not be an intellectual concept or “Well, I am feeling this way because she/he did X, Y, Z to me.” Mental models won’t work because that is just more ego. And our ego can’t change or accept anything that is not its job. The ego’s job is to maintain balance between the impulses of the id and the morality of the super ego. What accepts is awareness. The answer to the question “what is going on inside me?” is therefore better answered as somatic experience, “what is going on inside me right now? In my stomach, in my head, my throat, my heart.” This somatic experience takes us out of our mental story telling and into our bodies.
Acceptance is in this moment how you are relating to the reality that is right here? Can you fully accept who is showing up in your life? Meditation is a excellent tool for gaining insight into the art of acceptance. A daily meditation practice teaches us how to witness ourselves and our worldview objectively. It can show us our true self and our relationship to reality. At first we just learn to sit with our racing thoughts, count our breath and most importantly be gentle with ourselves. If you want to develop a long term practice it is important to also develop the qualities of gentleness and self-respect when learning to meditate. We spend a great deal of time unconsciously beating ourselves up. When we decide to sit down to clear a space in our heads. We have to learn to shut off the old mental tapes of our internal critic. It is in these quiet moments of self-reflection that we can learn that true acceptance is a gift that we can gift both ourselves and the world.
In part three we’ll look at the barriers to acceptance.
