Acceptance

If there is one thing that keeps people from moving forward it is the concept of acceptance. When we feel pain or hurt or things don’t go the way we’d like them to go, we tend to fight. We want them to be different. Learning acceptance allows us to find peace in every moment. If we are okay with how things are, it doesn’t mean that we have to sit still and not try for them to be different. But it does mean we can work with what we’ve been given.

Its like being stuck in traffic, the feeling of utter frustration when you can’t move or get where you want to go is something everyone has experienced. But there is nothing you can do about it. When you learn to accept things as they are, you gain a certain peacefulness that allows so much more freedom to do other things.

When our bodies have a problem, we naturally want them to heal quickly. We do everything in our power to change the condition from “sick” to “well”. It seems counterintuitive to accept that we have an illness. There are many examples of how acceptance can actually lead to greater health. Janet had diabetes but decided that she would not take medication and just try to pretend it didn’t exist. She ended up in a diabetic coma in the intensive care unit. It took her about 2 years to recover from the severe fatigue after that incident. David was diabetic from young adulthood. He read a book about monitoring his blood sugar regularly and decided to follow those guidelines. He accepted his condition and incorporated it into his daily lifestyle allowing him to live a normal life. I met him while he was hiking the Waimea Canyon in Kauai.

Carla had a condition that was more difficult to diagnose. She had severe fatigue and body aches for a year. After many visits to doctors she still had no diagnosis that led to healing her problem. Even after seeing alternative doctors she wasn’t getting better. Of course it caused a great deal of distress. In times like that, acceptance becomes even more important. When a problem is difficult to understand or solve it is especially likely that there is a large emotional or spiritual component. It might be that the main element to healing becomes acceptance. Our bodies are vessels for our spirits. When they act up, our spirits are talking to us in some way. By accepting that there is a problem that only allows certain activiity, and finding our way with patience and love, new answers might come.