As we begin to work with unconditional acceptance the question often arises, in one form or another, “So I should just be OK with myself if I lay on the couch and do nothing for years on end, or if I am drug-addicted and don’t take care of my children? Ted Bundy should be OK with murdering all those women?” This is a wonderful question to ask. How serious are we about suggesting that acceptance be unconditional? Just how far can this go?
The answer is that we are indeed talking about a radical acceptance, one that has no exceptions. However, to understand the seeming flaw in this approach we have to consider in more depth what it means to accept something. Acceptance is a process that involves the body and its senses, is without reservation, and that is marked by nowness. It is the experience that something is so.
Acceptance is therefore more than mere cognitive accounting, a sterile acknowledgment that something is a certain way. In true acceptance there is a congruence between the words and the physical manifestation. Perhaps one way to illustrate this is by considering what it is like to be offered an apology that comes without attendant remorse, a sort of perfunctory incantation unaccompanied by an embodiment of the sentiment being vocalized. It is like a defendant saying to the judge “I’m sorry I broke the law”, while expressing with every aspect of demeanor “And I’m really sorry I got caught”.
When we accept things we give up saying “no” to experience. Careful attendance to ourselves generally shows that in virtually every moment we are assessing our experience, making a judgment about it, and trying to shift it in some way. To accept, unconditionally, is to stop guarding against experience. We can trust enough to let ourselves feel what is occurring, without being concerned that we will be swept away by it.
To come back to the question above, acceptance is not an end point, in which we passively resign ourselves to our bad behavior, putting a good face on it and saying “I like yelling at other people and making them feel bad”. Acceptance is the starting point of a new way of relating to ourselves, one that is not a reactive and reflex warding off of intolerable truths about ourselves. Acceptance cuts through denial. It is the state of feeling completely, without insulation, so we know who and what we are. From that state, we can make intelligently directed change that sees the bigger picture. When we react from a place of “I can’t stand it/me” we are likely to make things worse as we flail about in search of solutions.
As an illustration, we could consider the development of compassion. To be sure, there is a tradition of rousing compassion by finding places in us where it already exists, and fanning those embers. However, if this approach is taken as a way to ignore the aggression that is in us, it is in a part a defensive strategy and ultimately a statement that we don’t want to see that part of us. We have in effect rejected ourselves.
From the Somatic Inquiry point of view, when we find, for example, that a sentiment arises in us that we want to hurt someone, it is neither necessary nor recommended to reach quickly for a remedy such as thinking of how the person that harmed us is suffering too. Considering others’ experience is an excellent practice when done from a foundation of acceptance of our aggression, a felt sense and full embodiment of the truth that we do have retaliatory impulses within us. However, it is dangerous to suppress those impulses, papering them over with remedies, antidotes, and “spiritual practice” so we can pretend they don’t exist just so we can maintain the image we want of ourselves as peaceful and loving. Without the foundation of acceptance, of fully feeling the negativity within us, these wonderful practices become tainted by being used in the service of denial.
We are talking about developing an “approach” state of mind towards difficult material. By turning to confront the stressor, looking directly at the very things we wish would go away, we already achieve a certain degree of freedom and strength. There is no real possibility of growth if we do not expose ourselves completely and thoroughly, with kindness and curiosity, to those parts of ourselves we wish were different.
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