“Welcome it. Open to it. Embrace it. Love it. Honour it. Accept it as it is.” These are the words of guidance we’re often used to hearing when we find ourself immersed in difficult, upsetting or emotionally painful moments in life. But when we try to follow that guidance, and the pain doesn’t go away, we can become increasingly frustrated.
It’s that frustration which reveals our hidden agenda—we are actually only ‘honouring’ and ‘welcoming’ the pain in order to get rid of it. Beneath our spiritual disguise it’s the same old separate ‘me’ hard at work, still resisting, still trying to manipulate life, still wanting things to be different.
What if the pain were welcome to stay forever?
Then our clever thought strategy is totally obliterated. Maybe then we can hear those words of acceptance afresh, as an invitation to see life from a radically new perspective. Since our essential nature is being all that is, if something exists at all then it is already welcome, already embraced, already loved, honoured and accepted; and that includes those moments when we’re caught up in the game of ‘me-ing’, when the pain is so great that we simply can’t accept it, when we fundamentally resist, when we judge ourself for having resisted.
True acceptance is not a strategy; it has no time limit or conditions attached; it is the very essence of our being.
This is not about chastising ourself for getting it ‘wrong’. That’s only more of the same old game. Rather it’s seeing deeply into the mechanism of how we operate, of how we’re easily caught up in that old familiar model of belief, of how, when life is allowed to be truly ‘as it is’, then in that natural resting our suffering does indeed begin to unravel, and the innate joy of being shines through.
