In my travels it’s become very clear to me that to talk about acceptance is to talk about love, and to talk about love is to talk about acceptance. They are one and the same. They are the key to peace and freedom. They are the key to the recognition of your own nature. They are the key to everything. And they are happening right now, right under your nose – whether you recognize it or not.
When you fall in love with another person you accept that person, you accept their differences, you accept who they are. Similarly when you love an aspect of yourself, you accept that aspect of yourself. Equally, when you hate an aspect of yourself you are attempting the futile rejection of that part of yourself. In this way love and acceptance are seen as synonymous.
We have very limited ideas on what it means to love. But to me what it means to love is to fully accept without reserve, without condition. The beauty of it is that if something is happening (or has happened) it has on some level been accepted already. In this way we can see that it’s already been embraced in love and welcomed into your Being.
You are love, you are acceptance. Anything that appears to you is accepted by you. This is a very hard thing for the mind to grasp. The tendency of the mind will be to reject this notion. But take a look, how can it be another way? If you are experiencing something, there is some part of you that has already included it. Even if in that acceptance resistance and avoidance appear, even they have been accepted into the experience too. And if what you experience has been accepted, it has also been accepted in love.
We have to learn to recognize that on some level even those things that we reject about ourselves, actually – especially those things, are already on some level accepted. We have to learn to integrate these apparent dichotomies. We have to learn to integrate these multitudes of feelings that we experience day-to-day, week-to-week, moment-to-moment, without being terrified that they will rip us apart. Because fear not, and I will steal the wise words of Walt Whitman here, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
So own your contradictions, do not be afraid of them. Life contains a multitude of seeming paradoxes quite happily, quite naturally. What makes you think you are an exception to that? What makes you think you get to be free of that?
Stop pathologizing your paradoxes and multitudes.
Accept all of it, love all of it, for what other option do you have? Is it even possible to truly reject anything? If it’s happening and you bear witness to it, it has already happened, you have no control. And the future, well the future hasn’t happened yet, so you have no control there either! Let go into this moment, see that all that arises has already been accepted.
True acceptance equals true Love, they are the fulfilment of one another.