Acceptance means to be in the embrace of what is without resistance. True acceptance is one of the most powerful and life-changing practices you can choose for your life journey. Join author Kirra Sherman as she shares “4 Steps to Accept the Unacceptable: Why Finding True Acceptance is your Key to Freedom.“
Written by Kirra Sherman
Do you want to create the life you love? True acceptance is one of the most powerful and life-changing practices you can choose for your life journey to manifest a life of your dreams. Finding acceptance is the key to happiness, ease and living without suffering. Finding acceptance is also what creates space for you to be able to connect with what you’d love. True acceptance transforms suffering into ease, pain to love, and dissatisfaction to fulfillment.
But how do you accept? It’s more than just words, isn’t it?
True acceptance is not just saying, “I accept” that when emotionally there is disappointment, resistance, or emotion going on underneath the surface of trying to be in acceptance. That’s denial of how you’re really feeling, a denial of what is. True acceptance requires being real with how you’re feeling.
Acceptance means to be in the embrace of what is without resistance. True acceptance is not necessarily about accepting an event outside of you, true acceptance is found in feeling how an event makes you feel.
If you’re experiencing an emotional charge — like anger, or frustration, sadness, or any other emotion based on an experience in the world, you’re in a judgment of something. An emotional reaction to something outside of you is a reflection of a deep emotion, or judgment, living within you.
Acceptance is realizing the judgments within you and bringing presence to neutralize them.
All events outside of you that make you feel charged are connected with your personal judgments. It’s why some people can be more or less affected by the same behavior.
It could be personal or impersonal to your direct experience, but the reason something is difficult to accept is because it touches you somewhere within emotionally. There is a tenderness, fear, or an anger that ignites in the wake of an experience outside of you.
The greatest difficulty with acceptance is realizing that you are not accepting an event itself, but a part of yourself, a judgment within you. It may be a part of the world or yourself that you don’t want to believe is true or even exists within the human race.
Why is it important to find acceptance?
When you find acceptance, you are free to be yourself and live through your heart. To see the world beyond judgment is to see it through the eyes of love. When you feel and experience the world through the eyes of love, do you not feel more alive?
There may be situations that contains too big of an emotional charge, or too much of a heavy story for you to accept right now. But even in the awareness of that, you are closer to acceptance than resisting considering it as a possibility at all. The closer you grow to acceptance, the closer you grow to being love itself.
Just know that holding onto judgments can cause you to recoil from intimacy, openness, vulnerability, and experiencing more love in your life.
Have you come across a situation in your own life, or one you’ve witnessed in the world that you find unacceptable? It could be as small as the way your mother speaks to you, the way someone eats with their mouth open, or something as significant as a relationships ending or world catastrophe.
A broken heart may make you not want to experience love again. Being rejected may not make you want to put yourself out there again. Being annoyed with the way your mother speaks to you will not allow you to feel as much love for her.
If you’re in judgment of something, you’re not experiencing being in love with it. Love has no judgment. And ultimately, true acceptance IS a form love.
Recently in a conversation, a friend shared with me how he didn’t want to leave his relationship because he cared for his girlfriend, but felt that the relationship wasn’t right for him anymore. “I love her,” he said after he told me the story of his experience.
I shared with him: “Do you feel sorry for her?” He paused, and said, “yeah I feel sorry for her.” I responded, “If you feel sorry for her, you’re in judgment of her… and that’s not love.” You may care for her, but if you’re in judgment of her, you’re not loving her.
The first key to acceptance is to see the truth behind a judgment: if a world tragedy like Sept 11 makes you feel sad, look at that sadness. Why does the event make you feel how you feel? Peel back layers deeper into that emotion as it relates to your life.
It’s not am event itself that is difficult to accept, it’s the feelings underneath an event that are difficult to feel.
For example, when I was a little girl my father left our family and I felt abandoned. Small events in my life since then have had the power to trigger that event in my life, something as simple as someone not picking me up from the airport on time, or not calling me back.
Any event that causes a discomfort (or a positive high) is a judgment, but it’s not the event itself that is charged, it’s your reaction to it that is. In truth, all events in life are neutral, but if you have judgment it will be positively or negatively charged. It is your experiences, emotions, judgments and perception that create whether you experience an event as positive, negative or neutral.
When I realized that all the events in my life that triggered emotions were there for me to free myself from this old pain within, I began to open my heart to pain. My heart led me to feeling that bitter disappointment that I felt as a little girl, and it also led me to express that pain to my father. I had to feel that resentment. I became aware of all the other feelings that circumstance created to bring awareness to my current limitations and discomforts.
What I discovered is that it wasn’t about the little events that triggered that same feeling that I experienced when I was little, it was how I was unconsciously reacting to events that made me feel that same pain. By expressing and feeling those emotions, I began to free myself from it through releasing them.
I became willing to look at how everything made me feel. Anything that made me feel sensitive, or closed off became a tool for how I could free myself from a deeper emotion in my life. If talking about rape caused me to feel unsafe, I’d feel the unsafeness of it and ask myself, what’s this really about?
True acceptance is about opening up to your emotions and diving into them rather than protecting yourself from them.
Acceptance requires a trust that life loves you more than sometimes you’re able to experience, even when you’re not at first in love with what it’s giving to you.
The ultimate truth is that you’re not your judgments, and you’re not the part of you that judges the judgment.
Who you truly are is a feeling. It’s the feeling of love. It’s the part of you that came into this world to express joy through infinite means and ways. It’s that feeling of peace that finds you when you’re connected with your heart. Everything else is a lie–emotions, drama, thoughts, limitations, doubt, uncertainty, indecision, fear–they may be a part of your journey, but you can be free of them by embracing them and living beyond the need of your circumstances to give you the happiness that is already within you.
Freedom is found in being vulnerable. When you don’t fear experiencing anything, you can experience freedom from your circumstances. There is nothing that anyone can take away from you when you’re willing to experience anything that life is throwing at you, even if it means going into pain. Being willing to find acceptance is the road to freedom.
How to find True Acceptance:
#1 Decide & be Open.
The way to know how to do anything is simply to take the first step: Decide that you want to. When your heart meets with a feeling of desire, and you say yes to that feeling, that’s called an intention. Set an intention to accept something you have judgment for by deciding.
#2 Feel.
Go beyond the surface of event, circumstance, or behavior into how it makes you feel? The emotional reaction is the judgment, and in truth, it’s not connected with the experience itself. Allow new experiences in your life to trigger old emotions.
#3 Embrace without Resistance
Experience the emotions — discomfort — pain — dis-ease by allowing yourself to open up to it fully
#4 Tell the truth
You are not your emotions, you are not your judgments. Who you truly are is already in acceptance.
Next time you have a situation you feel is unacceptable, or you’re emotionally reactive, bring this process and use it.
Please comment below on situations you feel you can’t accept no matter what — situations you have accepted that you thought you might never be able to accept. And if you felt the wisdom and truth of this posting, share it with your friends on facebook, twitter, or by email. With more acceptance in the world, there will be more love.
Identity Magazine is all about empowering women to get all A’s in the game of life — Accept. Appreciate. Achieve.TM Every contributor and expert answer the Identity 5 questions in keeping with our theme. As a team, we hope to inspire and motivate ourselves and inspire you to get all A’s.
What have you accepted in your life that took time, physically or mentally?
Myself. Little by little I’ve learned to see my self through the eyes of love and find the perfection of life by embracing my humanity. I’ve accepting that everything I’ve experienced in my life has supported me to expand into my truth.
What do you appreciate about yourself and within your life?
I appreciate that no matter what challenges I’ve faced, I’ve decided to take the road less traveled and appreciate everything that has ever happened in my life because every event has brought me to exploring the aliveness of life itself.
What is one of your most rewarding achievements in life? What goals do you still have?
When I first left my corporate job, it was my most rewarding achievement because I was so afraid of leaving the security I believed it gave me (at the time) and so taking that leap led me to a path of becoming an entrepreneur and following my heart wherever it may lead.
My biggest goal right now is finish a book I’ve been writing.
What is your not-so-perfect way? What imperfections and quirks create your Identity?
I don’t believe in a “not-so-perfect-way” because everything can be turned into a life lesson. However, I sometimes do the opposite of what may be perceived to be “the right thing to do” that I have a judgment for. i.e. If I have judgment for licking my fingers as the dinner table, or something that isn’t the “spiritual” thing to do, I transform my own judgment by going into the behavior that’s “wrong” consciously to overcome it. Rather than resisting the behavior, I own it.
Quirky — my whole personality feels really quirky. I actually like cleaning, and I have been known to sometimes watch certain movies over 15 times (possibly upwards of 30).
How would you complete the phrase “I Love My…?”
Humor. There are few things I love more than to laugh, and I’m pretty funny. A friend and I joked how it could sound arrogant, but we love our humor so much that if you don’t think we’re funny, you need to work on your humor! Just kidding, kind of… =)
