If you can’t accept it, stop doing it.
Sep 29, 08- (by JunkysWife)
- 9 responses
- Family and Friends, Mind, Body, Spirit, Sober Salon
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I just finished Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth
Something I read last night was really helpful, and it helped me mull over some of my most recent decisions to ask my husband to leave and then in deciding the conditions to allow him to come back home. Tolle sets up three ways to be in the world: Acceptance, Enjoyment, or Enthusiasm. It’s kind of a progression from acceptance to enjoyment to enthusiasm…each one grows off of the other.
In the section on Acceptance, he explains:
If you can neither enjoy or bring acceptance to what you do–stop. Otherwise, you are not taking responsibility for the only thing you can really take responsibility for, which also happens to be one thing that really matters: your state of consciousness. And if you are not taking responsibility for your state of consciousness, you are not taking responsibility for life.
I thought this perspective was interesting: If you can’t accept it or enjoy it–stop. I like the dichotomy there…and I like the freedom of choice. I have found a place in my recovery that is similar…when things get too hot around my house and I cannot enjoy my husband’s presence or accept his behavior, then I can ask him to leave.
I thought this tool might be useful for everyone in all kinds of recovery, so I figured I’d pass it along. I’ll let you read for yourself about moving from enjoyment to enthusiasm…
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I like that we can add choices. Generally we get stuck thinking we haven’t got them, and it takes some searching to dig them up.
I like how Tolle expresses this. I often think many people mistake acceptance as just giving in to being a doormat to bad behavior or just deciding to ignore their own needs and feelings because they cannot change someone else. I’m always for the alternative where we have a choice in our hapiness by how we experience the people and things in our world.
Thanks for writing about this. It brings a helpful perspective to things that are going on for me right now.
“If you can’t accept it or enjoy it–stop. I like the dichotomy there…and I like the freedom of choice. I have found a place in my recovery that is similar..”
This made me smile a broad smile as I often find the honor and truth you have within for personal feelings that are a dichotomy refreshing. Thanks for sharing. I too as Woman.Anon found this helpful.
I love the perspective as well. It’s one of those which sounds so simple after become aware of it, but that isn’t built into the expectations of life that we were conditioned for (whether by parents/family, or our own dysfunctions/experiences).
I like the simplicity of the perspective … it gives us a nice, succinctly expressed little gem that we can keep in mind because it is so simple.
This is beautiful! And, strangely enough, I was just thinking of something similar this morning, i.e. people taking responsibility for their CHOICES. I think it is convenient to forget that just about everything we do is the result of a choice.
My thoughts this morning came about after reading comments on my friend’s CaringBridge site. (I am going to use the following as examples only–NO judgment attached! Just a common example.) Many of those who signed my friend’s virtual guest book were from places far away. Some of them wrote they “wished” they could be here. The reality for most of them is that they could be here if they chose to be here. It’s easier to say we “wish we could,” versus we “chose not to,” because “choosing to” might involve taking time off work or spending extra money, etc…
This concept of which you wrote is similar, I think. We may continue doing something which we find distasteful, all the while feeling trapped, while the option to STOP doing it never crosses our minds! Choosing to stop may cause complications or also feel distasteful, but that does not mean we don’t have the choice. I love it.
Personal responsibility is a beautiful thing. It gives us the freedom we often feel we don’t have.
Thanks for the post!
That information is incredibly helpful to me, thanks
[...] Lisa Incognito: That information is incredibly helpful to me, thanks… [...]
I love Eckhart… and you.