Thursday, October 6, 2011

Acceptance is Key

Acceptance is key. Acceptance doesn’t mean that we like everything. It means that we accept the challenges, accept the realities that surround us and accept our own responsibility for ourselves and our actions.

Acceptance is the opposite of denial, avoidance and resistance. You can feel the difference in the energies of these. Acceptance feels open. Denial feels fearful and closed. Acceptance allows the world that surrounds us to be what it is, to show us its truth. This truth is infinitely precious. We didn’t incarnate on this planet to deal in easy falsehoods and surround ourselves with people who tell us what we want to hear and nothing else. We came here to be in the thick of it all.

To me, acceptance is our willingness to love life, to love the world, to love God. Acceptance is our courageous stance as we proclaim, “Yes.”

We don’t whine about how it isn’t what we’d like it to be, at least, not often. We accept it as it is and this is HUGE. This acceptance is vast and deep and grand when you really think about it.

On the one hand, resisting reality and saying, “No.” On the other hand, accepting reality and saying, “Yes.” It feels completely different to be in acceptance rather than in resistance, avoidance or denial. It feels like unconditional love.

It feels like courage to me, to be in total acceptance. So that when we say, “I love,” we don’t just mean, “I love when it suits me. I love when I see what I expected to see. I love when I see what mirrors me and makes me look good. I love when I see what is pleasant and comfortable. I love when I experience an easy love, an easy moment.”

It feels like the utmost courage to say, “Whatever it is; I accept it. It is what it is. I see it. I feel it. I work to understand it, not so much with my mind, but in my heart. I do not wish it away.” This is compassion. This is the way that God sees the world.

It feels like grace to me, this acceptance. When we place ourselves in complete acceptance, we place ourselves in grace. We place ourselves in heaven on Earth.

It isn’t always easy. It isn’t always comfortable. Therefore, like so much else, it is a practice. We choose it. We choose acceptance. Yet we slide back into resistance and avoidance here and there. When we do, we notice it and bring ourselves back into acceptance. After some practice in this way, we come to feel uncomfortable when we are NOT accepting. It feels off-balance and unnecessarily difficult to resist and deny the perfect moment that we are always in. And so we learn and grow and become more and more aligned with the frequency of joy, which knows no resistance to what is in the moment.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Trust


Trust is absolutely essential to this practice of tuning our frequency to joy. This practice is in fact a consistent call to trust. Trust yourself. Trust the world around you. Trust God. Yes. Trust God.

When we are out of trust, we drop our frequency into worry, anxiousness and even fear. We fret about what just happened and what may happen. We fall out of the Now.

Our worries are always based on the past; we fear that our experiences will repeat themselves in ways that we find unpleasant and destructive of our peace and security. We fear losing our security. We worry about augmenting it. We do not trust that we are well, that we are exactly as we should be for our own highest good. We do not trust that we are exactly where we should be right now. We work and plan and work some more to control our situation and then we worry about losing control of it.

All of our need for security, for control and for reassurance comes from our fears based on what we have experienced in the past. We don’t know and we can’t know, what will happen, but we worry based on what has happened before. So, when we worry about what will be, we are actually basing that worry on what has been. We are living in the energies of the past.

Trust eliminates all of that worry and fretting. Stepping into trust eliminates the power of fear to push us off-balance. It is not rational to trust. It is a choice that we can make, based on our own sense of what we choose to be in the Now. Do we choose to be in a feeling of trusting or in a feeling of worrying. It is a choice made with free will. And let us be clear that worrying is no more rational than trust is.

Just because something happened in the past that felt unpleasant or painful, that doesn’t mean that the same thing will happen in the future. Worrying about what has not yet happened and may never happen is not rational. It is something that we do though. We tend to allow the worry to build up in us unconsciously. We ‘slip’ into worrying and out of trusting.

I don’t know anyone who likes to be worried or fearful. Yet many people are. For some, it fills their lives. In a sense, it is what they become. I feel for these people because I have experienced fear and anxiety and I know how awful these feelings are, how they can overwhelm us, colour everything so that we become defined by them. Yet there is an alternative.

When we trust, we tend to do so consciously. We choose to trust. Don’t look for reasons to trust. We do not know what will come to us. We do not know what we will experience. We do not know what we will become. We can either trust that all will be well, that all that we experience serves us in some way, or we can worry about it.

We have a third option as well, which I’ll explore a bit more later on. That third option is to simply accept that we don’t know what will happen, what it will feel like or what it will mean for us. We accept life and life’s experiences.

Trust is a frequency of optimism, of hope, of faith. Worry is a frequency of fear and the insecurity that accompanies fear. Acceptance is a frequency of non-resistance. It is essentially neutral.

Trust is a choice that we make from our hearts. We trust because we choose to experience being in trust.

Have you ever fallen in love with someone whom you barely knew? Trust feels like that. It feels like The Fool in the tarot deck - stepping off of his cliff edge and into the unknown with never a care for what will become of him.

I choose to tune my frequency to trust whenever I feel myself slipping back into worry because I prefer to experience trust than to experience worry. I take a deep breath and choose trust. I invoke trust by saying its name.

I inhale. I fill my lungs with air and my bloodstream with oxygen. I say to myself, “Trust.” The worries fade away.

If real fear comes up in me, rather than just the habitual worries of the mundane world, I take the time to delve into its source. Why am I afraid? What am I afraid of? I answer those questions and the fear melts away like late snow in April. For more on this, I refer you back to what I said earlier about facing our fears.

Trust feels like love. For when we love someone, we entrust our love to them.

Trust feels like peace. For when we trust, we let go of our struggles to control what is outside of us for the sake of increasing our security. When we trust, we no longer need to control and so that struggle is released. When we are no longer struggling, we are at peace.

Trust feels like unity consciousness. For when we trust, we remove the barriers of separation that we have built up to protect ourselves. When we trust, we let go of our defenses and allow our essential unity with ALL to come quietly in to our consciousness and transform us.

Trust feels like ease. For when we trust and therefore release our defenses, our barriers of separation and our need to control, what we are left with is a sudden sense of ease. Our bodies become more relaxed. Our minds become quiet. Our hearts rejoice in our newly discovered openness to the world.

What I have found in my choice of trusting is that trust feels like heaven on Earth. It is, like so much else, a practice. It is a conscious choice that we make in the moment, and then again in the next moment and then again a little bit later on. And we do this over and over again until we come to a time when we are almost always trusting, almost always at ease, in peace and feeling loved and loving. Then, when we slip into worry, it feels jarring and unpleasant and we simply and easily choose again. We choose trust.