“Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.” We count on reality, change with all its good and bad manners.
Of all the spiritual qualities, I have found acceptance of myself the most difficult. As a child I had a sense of joy, and my creative activities made me feel happy, but I was expected to conform. I wasn’t to have many needs. My parents valued creativity but they wanted me to fit in. These conflicting values made it hard for me to accept the exploring self that was me. I couldn’t accept the self who just wanted to experiment and wander, but I also couldn’t give up my curiosity. I learned how to sneak in what I wanted to do, and then felt bad about myself. I would curl up with my lined tablets and write out my wishes and then write how to be good.
“Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can’t bring down.”
—Olive Schreiner
I hid out in my bedroom with my diary or wrote letters to a pen pal to explore my conflicts. I wrote letters to the school guidance counselor, Mrs. Ellis, but never sent them—she was for troubled kids. Already, though, writing was a tool I used to explore how to accept myself. As we view ourselves through the lens of acceptance, we begin to drift to the center of softness. We begin to forgive what went wrong with ourselves and forgive how hurt has made us act. Our writing today will be about what we need to learn in the accepting of ourselves.
“Keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you.”
—Mae West
Acceptance of ourselves asks us to deal with the loss of our real selves, and to say there is enough that is good. We may have lost some of joy and innocence we had as children, but we have enough to live on. Our real selves have everything: every feeling, every reaction, all of human life. We remember how relaxed and balanced our bodies once felt before hurt, and we work to gradually regain that. We are asked to recognize what is true for us, feel it, and move on, with hope and trust that all will be well. We are asked to live life as it is and value differences in others.
When we shift into self-acceptance, we live in a wise speaking way.
Day 1: Loss
So many times we try to avoid dealing with what is troubling us by escaping into television or addiction or just being too busy. We head home after work to eat and watch television or spend the evening with a good bottle of wine to soften the edges of our stress. We make plans for every night of the week so as not to have the time to be alone with ourselves and do the reflective work the spirit needs. We lose our wise person’s counsel.
Loss is one of those things we so often try to avoid. Loss of a job, a loved one, a part of ourselves. We don’t have channels for dealing with loss. But being asked to accept ourselves without dealing with our losses is like asking us to leave behind one hand, one foot, our eyes, or our shoes on the side of the road. Give up our love of writing. No more listening to stories. Sit still and learn to like it. No more laughing. There now. Just act happy and well and in spirit and everything will be fine.
“Although the world is very full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
—Helen Keller
But it is our human right to feel the pain of loss. It will not consume us if we acknowledge it and work toward acceptance. In An Interrupted Life- The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, Hillesum writes, “[S]uffering has always been with us, does it really matter what form it comes? All that matters is how we bear it and how we fit it into our lives.” The way to acceptance is to understand what happened to your spirit and to be sympathetic to the pressures you were subjected to and how you gave up. With caring and coaxing through writing, you nurture and reassure the young self you once were and ask yourself to live as you once wanted, with rainbows twined in your hair. You give your wise speaking a voice. You give yourself a spirit who accepts all that you are.
“Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.”
—Rita Mae Brown
Begin with acceptance of your writing. You don’t need to be an expert. You don’t need to be sure of your grammar. Accept how you write and think of it as a tool to find your wise voice. All that matters here is finding the wisdom you have within you.
It takes a certain fierce determination to live your life in a way that includes despairing feelings. Today we’ll use our writing to begin to accept how we feel, to accept those things that are beyond our power to change, and ask the higher power for serenity in spite of all the difficulties. In The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller wrote about the fact that we are now the person who must notice and remember the child we once were. We must accept ourselves and yet press on for all that we can be. Writing can help us do this. You won’t get stuck if you enter the well of hurt. Just remember the ladder that goes down the well also goes up.
“Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.”
—Charles Simic
Writing brings us closer to the waters churning within us. These waters can be stilled with the help of the soothing balm of the spirit.
Part of experiencing pain is accepting the loss that comes with being alive. With loss, we may feel a sense of protest that includes feelings of disbelief, denial, shock, anger, and self-criticism. We may experience changes in our sleep, appetite, and digestion. We may cry and experience forgetfulness. Then we may feel despair and agitation and want to withdraw socially. Next we may detach from our feelings and feel apathy. We may find ourselves acting in a “zombielike” way and feel that nothing has much meaning. We may feel all of this at the same time.
Writing helps us become new in the awareness of ourselves. There is a wise force within you waiting to speak. Let it.
Exercises
1. Use streaming to explore what your well of loss might hold. How deep is it? How wide? What would happen to exploring past feelings of loss if you lowered a ladder into the well so that you could go down into the well and climb out whenever you wanted? What experiences of loss do you need to explore?
2. Use gazing into the waters and then the technique of dialoguing with a teacher about loss in your life. Acceptance is saying yes to what the day brings. Write down what loss needs more work so that you could live this way.
3. Although you would never choose pain, write about the gifts of those hard times. Write what you know about going into your feelings and then becoming more than the feelings. Find out where the hurt settled in your body by just sitting quietly for a while and noticing where the hurt and anger seem to be residing. Does it need understanding, soothing, a promise from you? Speak to and for that part. Look for any lessons that may be hidden in the pain. Use these random phrases to do streaming on the losses in your life. Then write down random phrases from a book you have and do more streaming on losses. Examples of the phrases are: rebirth of tall trees, anything can be moved, horses move through me, mirrors and dreams and moving things.
4. Write about the dark. Write about the light. Write about the changing of the night to dawn and what you see.
Day 2: Anger
Often, one of the hardest things to accept in ourselves is anger. It’s not considered a “nice” feeling, and we often want to pretend it’s not there. After all, we don’t want to be seen as an “angry person,” do we? A little mad, perhaps, but not angry. Instead, we justify our behavior (“I had a good reason
