What does it mean to accept the situation. Acceptance and self-development
How often do we enter into a struggle with people, with an unjust world! We are trying to change ourselves and others, push through the situation, prove our case, achieve desired result. Often for this we make unjustified sacrifices. Condemnation and rejection become our constant companions. Behind them appear irritation, conflicts, troubles. True, our struggle and condemnation often do not bring any result. What's more, things could get worse. The fight becomes endless. Our dissatisfaction prevents us from living.
How to accept everything as it is? How to learn to live in harmony with the outside world? If you are interested in these questions, read our article.
acceptance of the world
Acceptance is an important human quality. It allows us not to experience strong negative emotions, to worry about the fact that the world or people do not meet our expectations.
Much of human suffering and suffering arises from the fact that reality does not meet our expectations. To accept the world as it is, you need to lower your demands on others. Realize that people don't have to be the way you want them to be. We are all different and situations are different. You cannot control everyone and everything. Life cannot go according to your scenario.
Learning to Accept
Accepting what is is not easy. If you have accumulated negative experiences and discontent, then you will have to work on yourself. But ahead of you is harmony with the world and with yourself. This is worth the effort!
- Raise your awareness. Stop reacting in a standard, unaccountable way. Keep track of your emotional state. What exactly irritates you, causes rejection? People, events, things? Everything matters. Once you become aware of your reactions, you can influence them. You will be able to choose how you respond: condemn or try to accept.
- Stop on time. If you feel like you're about to explode, learn to stop and distance yourself from the situation or person. Be prepared that this will not work the first time or the second time. At first, you will still unconsciously begin to get annoyed, swear. You will come to your senses only when you have calmed down. Do not despair! Sooner or later you will definitely succeed.
- Look for the good in everything. Train yourself to constantly analyze the situation. What is happening to you now? What emotions are you experiencing and why? What are the pros and cons in this situation? Focus your attention on positive aspects situations. If they are not, then look carefully! Remember, the brain is not able to calculate what the consequences will be. Accept as a rule - whatever happens, it's for the best. If you sincerely think so, then it will be so for you. The world is a mirror: what message you send there, this will return to you.
- Do good to people. Not for any benefit, but just like that. After all, the one we care about becomes dear to us. Take care of yourself, take care of your world. As you begin to change, the world around you will also change. Change always starts from within.
- There are such difficult situations when it is difficult to find something good and accept the situation as it is, for example, death loved one. This is a situation that you cannot influence, no matter how much you suffer and worry. Will you do better to the deceased if you cry? No. Switch your attention to what is available to your influence. For example, take care of yourself. Don't deprive the world of a happy person.
Remember, acceptance is not a passive flow through life. You can change your life and yourself, but you need to do it consciously, without plunging into negative experiences.
How often do we get angry! With or without reason. Slow movement of the queue to the checkout, traffic jams, bad weather that changes all our plans, disobedience of children and much, much more. When we get irritated, we splash out the negative and, as a result, spend a lot of our energy. But for what? Something we can't change!
How same learn to accept not satisfying us situation if we can't change it?
To accept means to consciously admit that something may not go the way we want, not the way we are used to, or not the way we planned. The opposite of acceptance is resistance or a negative attitude towards what is happening. For the majority, this is the pattern of behavior that is more familiar, and we resist almost everything that goes against what we want.
But why do we resist? To some extent, we are influenced by our past experience. For example, you are used to your parents always talking to you in a calm tone and, of course, you expect that this will continue to be the case in the future. But one day you are faced with the fact that the parents raised their voice significantly in a conversation with you. Of course, this is unpleasant for you and you perceive it negatively. Perhaps you even begin to shout back, thus expressing your resistance to the current situation.
But resistance inevitably causes suffering.
Marathon runners have this slogan: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is a personal choice for everyone.” When a person runs a long distance, sooner or later his leg muscles begin to hurt. And here the runner makes a choice - either suffer, focusing on pain, or switch his attention to something else.
So it is in life: you can find yourself in a situation where you were betrayed, abandoned, taken away from you, your plans and dreams were destroyed, left alone with difficulties. Of course it hurts. But whether to suffer is your personal choice.
Of course, there are simpler situations where there seems to be no pain - traffic jams, a slowly moving queue, a person does not answer our calls and SMS, work colleagues are extremely slow, etc. However, these situations annoy us because we experience discomfort. It is unpleasant for us, we are trying to overcome the circumstances. How? With our negative attitude, resistance - from the fact that we are not comfortable, and we suffer to some extent.
Of course, when we find ourselves in circumstances that are unpleasant for us, or even very difficult ones, of course, we try to act. However, after all, you can act in different ways - with the acceptance of the situation or with resistance to it. Which option makes more sense?
To understand what acceptance is (not to be confused with inaction), imagine scientists who make their calculations without taking into account the fact that gravity acts on Earth. Where there is no gravity, some things are, of course, much easier to do. But there is gravity on Earth - scientists take it as a given that they cannot change and build their calculations taking this phenomenon into account.
So, to all the situations that you do not like, but which you cannot change, treat like ... scientists to the Earth's gravity - just take into account the circumstances and act taking into account the changed situation.
Acceptance, like any other skill, can be trained, which means you can learn to accept the situation. How?
Step 1 - Awareness
You found yourself in a situation where something went against what you want. You are unhappy. Be aware of this dissatisfaction. You can say to yourself, "I'm not happy because this happened, but I wanted it to be like this."
Why do it? The fact is that many people do not even realize what it is that irritates them so much in the circumstances. Awareness is the first step towards understanding and accepting.
Step 2 - OBSERVATION WITHOUT EVALUATION
The essence of this step is to observe your thoughts and emotions without judging whether they are good or bad. You seem to be looking at yourself from the outside, allowing everything that happens to you to BE, without doing anything about it.
Step 3 - PHYSICAL FEELINGS
Pay attention to your physical sensations in this situation - how you breathe, how fast your heart beats, whether you feel a rush of blood to your cheeks, whether your head hurts, whether your hands tremble, whether your cheek twitches. What do you actually feel in your body?
Try to focus solely on your breathing - focus on how the cool air passes through the nasopharynx, descends into the lungs, how your chest expands, how you exhale warm air. About 5 minutes of such concentrated breathing is enough to calm down.
Step 4 - TURN ON THE BRAIN
After you have acknowledged your dissatisfaction, observed your thoughts and emotions, breathed and calmed down a little, it's time to ask yourself the question: “What is my goal for this moment and how can I achieve it under the circumstances?”
Sometimes to achieve the goal you will need to take certain actions, and sometimes you just do nothing, calm down and wait.
An example from my personal life: I am a very punctual person, and if I was traveling in public transport, which dragged like a turtle, and realized that I could be late, then, like all punctual people, I was nervous. Sometimes strong enough. And then in one beautiful moment I realized that I was nervous and realized that I had three options - to continue to be nervous, transfer to another transport or run ahead of transport. Strange as it may seem, the very thing that irritated me so much contributed to the comprehension of this fact - the slow traffic. I just had the opportunity to sit, do nothing and just think. By the way, a lot good ideas it occurred to me in transport. Hence follows
STEP 5 - THANK YOU
Every situation is given to us for something. Even in the most insignificant, in our opinion, unpleasant situation, there is something useful for us. Your task is to realize WHAT EXACTLY and thank the world for the opportunity to learn and work on yourself.
Sometimes life throws us events that we have always tried to avoid. But, unfortunately, it is not always possible to predict everything, and even more so - to change. And you feel with every string of your soul how your whole world is collapsing. Faced with an unpleasant situation, plunging into the abyss of suffering and painful experiences, we react so strongly emotionally that our own fears and experiences inadequately increase its significance and scope. "How to live on?!" - we repeat in a panic, and mental strength is simply melting before our eyes.
Our body has, of course, reserve energy reserves, but if they are ruthlessly spent, then the next step will be the irreversible destruction of the entire organism.
Acceptance of the irreversible is not complete surrender, not inaction, but, on the contrary, an active position. As soon as you can accept the situation, the feeling of a complete impasse will immediately disappear. You gain the patience to accept what you cannot change, you are ready to endure difficulties, philosophically looking at the problem. And life rewards you with a bonus for competent thoughts - peace of mind and self-confidence.
A black stripe of life is followed by a bright one, and you hope that "this too shall pass." In those moments when you learn to live again, thinking about good, positive moments is always difficult. You endlessly go over the countless options for your actions, the possible course of events, but it is these experiences that make you go in circles, eat you whole. This is exactly the case when a part becomes a whole, and the only way to overcome the power of the situation is to emotionally isolate yourself from it.
How to learn to accept unpleasant situations?
Try to look at your life from the outside, imagine it from birth to the very end in the form straight cut. What will become an unpleasant situation on the line of your life? It is only a point, an imperceptible segment and an episode!
Try to find a grain of wisdom in the ongoing negative event. Even in the worst episode, there is still a positive moment - an invaluable life experience. The meaning of human existence is not to end suffering in spite of everything, but to understand them sacred meaning. If you are lucky and can switch from negative experiences to active search true meaning, which is inherent in this situation, then you, having got rid of useless self-pity, will smoothly move on to a positive living of important lessons.
“If this doesn’t kill me, it will certainly make me wiser and stronger!” Nietzsche thought so. Find answers to your questions and think about why fate threw you these tests? Perhaps for growth and overcoming their weaknesses?!
Just trust life and believe that everything is for the better, and what happened to you is a chance to change after all.
“The situation is never the root cause of feeling miserable. The reason for this state is thoughts about the situation. Eckhart Tolle
More recently, I got into a situation that prompted me to unexpectedly discover how powerful our thoughts really are. It's amazing how our perception and interpretation of events affects how we see what happened.
It all started with the fact that I found a parking ticket on the windshield of my car. My first reaction was shock and disappointment. On the way home, I mentally banished the situation in my head, developing this annoying little annoyance into a whole story: this is so unfair, I had no idea that parking parallel to the curb was prohibited, other cars were exactly the same, but only I was fined, why me ?!
I took the situation as a personal challenge and self-flagellated, trying to figure out the reasons why I was fined - maybe I'm not good enough, maybe I'm just a loser? But at some point I caught myself inflating global problem from household rubbish. What really upset me so much? I decided to dig deeper and find out the real reasons, assessing the situation from the outside.
The controller did not know me personally, he was just doing his job, acting absolutely impartially, according to the letter of the law. In what happened, I have no one to blame but myself - I really violated the parking rules, for which I was fairly punished.
As soon as I realized these simple arguments, I immediately changed my attitude to what happened: no matter what story I composed in my thoughts, guided by a feeling of annoyance, the fact remains that I will have to pay the fine in any case, I can only accept this fact and to live on.
There was no good reason for being upset, the only thing that made me feel unhappy was my thoughts. By changing them, I got rid of this feeling.
While studying spiritual practices and methods of self-development for the past few years, I have read hundreds of articles and books, reviewed hundreds of presentations and videos, the main idea of which was the assertion that our thoughts create the surrounding reality. But I had never put into practice what was said in these materials before, until I received the first fine in my life.
On the way home, I hardly followed the road, as I was completely absorbed in thinking about how unfairly I had been treated. Suddenly, something clicked in my head - for the first time I began to consciously control my thoughts, I felt like an outside observer, before whose eyes a new, true story was being born.
I realized that it was the thinking up of the story, the endless mental replaying and dramatization of the situation that caused the insignificant trifle to be inflated by me into a huge problem. I suddenly realized how often I created tragedies from scratch and complicated situations where everything was extremely simple.
We cannot control everything that happens in our life, but we can control our reaction to what is happening - this is the whole secret.
Most of the little annoyances that we often tend to dramatize are not worth spending half a day on worrying and soul-searching. Everything is much simpler - we can accept the situation, even if we do not like it, and move on. We can admit our mistakes and come to terms with backfire instead of looking for someone to blame. We can perceive what is happening from the position of an outside observer, without reacting emotionally and without turning everyday troubles into a tragedy of a universal scale.
The next time something happens that I do not like (and there will undoubtedly be many more such moments in my life), I will make every effort to abstract from the situation and not take everything too personally. I will control the flow of my thoughts and not allow myself to make up useless pseudo-accusatory stories. I will accept the situation as it is and try to remain calm so as not to allow an emotional reaction that would make my feelings of happiness (or unhappiness) dependent on circumstances that I cannot change.
You can learn to control your thoughts and your attitude to any situation in life without waiting for a penalty slip. Do you need a reason to change your life for the better?
