Summary of today’s Live session (Nov 28, 2021): Good to be with you today for the Sunday Live meeting. For those who missed today’s Live, or parts of it, here is a brief summary along with poems and quotes. Please let me know if you have any questions or if I’ve missed anything of importance.
The theme of today’s Live session was ‘Saying yes to what is’. I shared that whatever is present at any given time is ‘unavoidable’. We can assess or speculate on why this moment is ‘like this’, but if tiredness or restlessness or boredom is present right now, tiredness…. Is present. What we have much greater impact on—and what makes all the difference in the world in terms of our happiness or suffering—is how we meet this moment, how we respond to what is here now.
If we meet this moment with resistance or aversion or denial, it is a recipe for suffering. As the psychologist Carl Jung said, ‘What you resist persists.’ Resistance doesn’t truly get rid of anything—a painful emotion that we repress, will return in another, often more painful, form. However, if we meet our experience with acceptance and kindness, and without judgment, resistance, or denial, this is a doorway to deep peace and freedom. What we accept completely, we go beyond, as Eckhart Tolle said.
The wisdom of meeting our experience wholeheartedly and with acceptance is at the heart of many spiritual traditions and paths:
• The poet and mystic Jellaludin Rumi, from the Islamic Sufi tradition, spoke of ‘ this being human’ as a ‘guest house’ and that our invitation is to welcome all the guests—all our experiences: ‘The dark thought, the shame, the malice meet them at the door laughing…’
• The spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle speaks of ‘saying yes to what is’ as a key path to freedom… and ‘whatever you accept completely you go beyond…’ and ‘If you fight it, you’re stuck with it.’
• Buddhist meditation teacher Tara Brach instructs us to meet our experience and all parts of ourselves with ‘radical acceptance’. This deep-rooted acceptance is a doorway to the deepest freedom.
• Anthony de Mello, Jesuit writer and spiritual teacher, spoke of enlightenment as ‘absolute cooperation with the inevitable…’ Inevitable here meaning ‘unavoidable’.
• American poet and essayist Robert Bly said that every part of ourselves that ‘we don’t learn to love and accept will become hostile to us…’
• The psychologist Carl Rogers said: ‘ 'The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.'
If we don’t cling to, resist, or try to escape from what we are experiencing, the feelings, sensations, thoughts and other experiences can pass like a weather system… and in the words from Tibetan Buddhism, they ‘self-liberate.’ Without our struggle with them, where do they go? It is our resistance/judgment/aversion that gives them their painful and afflictive quality. Without that, they are just energy coming and going—impermanent, impersonal, and not inherently problematical.
Since ‘acceptance’ is sometimes misunderstood to mean passivity or inaction, it’s important to say that saying ‘yes’ to what is is not about passivity or absolving people who carry out harmful acts. Rather, the more we bring radical acceptance to what we are experiencing, the more we are able to act from a place of non-reactivity—of wisdom and compassion. This is how Eckhart Tolle puts it:
‘To be in alignment with what is means to be in a relationship of inner non-resistance with what happens. It means not to label it mentally as good or bad but to let it be… Does this mean that you can no longer take action to bring about change in your life? On the contrary, when the basis of your action is inner alignment with the present moment your actions become empowered by the intelligence of life itself.’
Poems I shared today included Martha Postlethwaite’s ‘Clearing’; and ‘Lost’ by David Wagoner (from a Native American elder story), as well as lines from Rumi’s ‘The Guest House’ and Dorothy Hunt’s ‘Peace is this Moment Without Judgment’.
Have a lovely week and see you next Sunday! 🙏🏼
