Living in the NOW: 7. Keyword for the access into the NOW: ACCEPTANCE
When we succeed in taking our ego and our thoughts less seriously, accepting our present situation and not take any situation as a starting point from where we can try to find a way to make a problem out of it, we can make progress in our attempts to spend more time in the NOW. In the NOW your problems do not exist because you accept them fully and are thus capable of letting go of them. Perhaps you realise you have a problem, but instead of being a player you have become a spectator and you just observe your thoughts without connecting these thoughts with a judgement. We observe and determine ourselves what we do with the information we receive and in this way we take away the root of the problem. The problem does not bother you any more and has stopped being a real problem.
Acceptance is not just the key to the NOW, it is also the solution to many personal problems. When you observe the problem in the NOW and you accept it, our perspective is enlarged , it changes and it becomes easier to see things in their proper perspective. We may start taking our problems less seriously and accept them as part of our day to day life. In this way the problem becomes less of a burden. When we see things in their proper perspective we also start to analyse them better because we look at problems in a clear way without judging them. We become witness and only then does insight get a real chance. Then you will come to realise that suffering, pain and problems are really just a means or a signal that leads us to truths that lie beneath them. In this process it is we ourselves that use our mind instead of our mind using us. That is true power! We make use of the space between stimulus and response that according to Covey is the key to happiness and growth.
"Between stimulus and response there is a space; The secret of happiness and growth is to be found in the way in which you use this space."
In addition: all this means that when we are more capable of feeling at ease with our own thoughts, emotions and problems we get less entangled in those of other people.
Besides: we not only fit in better with our surroundings, but we are also capable of staying longer and more easily in the NOW. Being able to let go of prejudices, preferences, memories, stories, conditioning, and routines gets us into a situation where the ego has less opportunity to disturb our inner equilibrium and where we can be in the NOW more frequently and for longer periods of time. In fact we are looking for the cause-result relationship of problems and situations to learn from them without condemning the guilty one. We are all the result of our past and in the present we cannot do anything about this. Things are as they are and we had better use our energy for more worthy causes than fighting battles that we cannot win. The process we are talking about is an extremely effective way to explore not only the deeper dimensions of our self and our existence but also ways and means to deal with our everyday problems. You will get less victimised by old and by new problems, you will become a more well balanced person and a person that knows how to make the most of things.
Does not all this sound great? Without acceptance of your present situation you will never have access to the NOW and to your true potential. Where can you learn to accept any situation? Indeed! As we can read in our Meditation instruction pages we see that when Meditating we teach ourselves to accept any thought, mood or sensation that we experience during the Meditation session. Meditating is accepting and consequently an excellent tool for anybody that wants to enrich his life by trying to live more in the NOW.
Read the sequel about Living in the Now in the eighth article: Does Meditation or living in the NOW make psychiatry superfluous?
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