Acceptance

I was thinking about Step 1 of the 12 Steps and the idea of acceptance.  To admit we are powerless over our own or others’ compulsions is to accept the reality of them.  Okay, but then what do we do?  Stop the reality?  Give in to it?  Turn it over to a Higher Power and go hang out somewhere else?

Acceptance is not a simple term, and real acceptance is a mighty process involving one moment of surrender after another.   To accept reality is to allow it fully without either judgment or preference.  When I surrender or allow, I neither reject nor approve of reality as it is, I don’t defend myself against it or give up in the face of it, I don’t turn my back on it, and neither do I invite it; rather, I let go and let it be.

What does it mean to let a compulsion “be”?  Or to let my helplessness “be”?  They are part of me, aren’t they?  I’m responsible for them, right?  I like the answer from A. H. Almaas:  “First, you realize that you are rejecting and pushing.”

We tend to defend our compulsions or try to push them away and reject them.  But when we can look at them objectively as traps or trances or jesters that take us away from the truth of who we are inside, then we can cease to identify with them and begin to understand them lovingly.  We come to understand that we are human beings with frailties, that we easily become trapped or entranced or duped by our frailties, that when we are at their mercy we have forgotten how to love ourselves.  We begin to accept this, and we stop defending and rejecting ourselves and serenely surrender to the truth of the moment, that all we can do is “the next right thing.”  And then we feel something like a blessing, a benediction, a protection, an inner knowing…  a real acceptance.

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