Imagine walking on ice; before taking the first step safely, you must first find a good foothold. If you try to move forward without having done this, you might fall face-first and hurt yourself.
Accepting the situation is like finding this foothold; it is a realistic assessment of where your feet are and what the ground conditions are. It doesn’t mean you like being in that spot or that you intend to stay there.
Once you have a good foothold, you can take the next step more effectively, making a change to your position. Therefore, the more fully you accept the reality of the situation, in the here and now, the more effectively you will be able to do something to change it.
Accepting does not mean agreeing or resigning yourself to anything, nor giving up. It means opening yourself to the present reality: recognizing how it is, making space for sensations, impulses, emotions, and painful feelings, exactly in the here and now, without opposition, passivity, shame, or undue guilt.
Why is it useful to accept reality?
Since in life there are inevitable circumstances that cause suffering and cannot be changed, opposing them (by denying them, or constantly thinking that it’s not fair, or that it shouldn’t have happened) is a struggle that has too high a cost from an energetic and emotional standpoint.
Often, in fact, the constant attempt to reject reality and painful emotions causes suffering to increase and persist over time, without any result (an example: “when the new boss arrived I didn’t like him and I did everything to oppose the new situation, I thought: ‘I don’t like him, I want my old boss back… We worked better before, I won’t give him that information so I’ll sabotage him.’ Behaving this way made me increasingly angry and I lost the desire to go to the office in the morning. I created a tense situation with colleagues and superiors, which earned me a reprimand. What can I do?”).
In these moments the only possibility is to accept reality and one’s emotions however difficult, unpleasant, and painful they may be, so as to be able to redirect one’s energies toward what is within our POWER, trying to respond effectively and appropriately to different situations, and opening oneself to possible change.
(I still don’t like my boss, but I understood that this is the situation and it won’t change, so I sought dialogue with him, proposing some work methods that I thought were more effective while seeking support from colleagues and he listened to me. Now I go to work more peacefully).
Accepting reality as it is is certainly not easy, and often requires an act of CHOICE. One must make a COMMITMENT within oneself to accept reality and repeatedly renew this commitment.
