Acceptance is one of those words that can have positive and negative connotations based on its context. When I think about acceptance, I come up against questions that I’ve wrestled with myself and witnessed my clients wrangle in therapy sessions. Is acceptance the same thing as forgiveness? If I accept something that happened to me, am I condoning it? Why does acceptance sometimes feel liberating and healing and other times feel self-defeating? To answer some of these questions, I turn to the Buddhist tradition and the practice of radical acceptance. Radical acceptance is a dynamic practice that shifts and changes to meet the needs of the moment and the situation. Radical acceptance is not equivalent to and does not require forgiveness. In fact, the radical acceptance concept posits that our practice, our work, is to maintain a neutrality around the reality of things. Tara Brach, author of the book Radical Acceptance says “Radical acceptance is the willingness to experience ourselves and our lives as they are.” Shame, stigma, anxiety, fear, are some of the many reasons that we might want to avoid experiencing things as they are. But we are much more capable of addressing our challenges once we sit with what they are.
To illustrate the value of acceptance in her book The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World, Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron tells a story about a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs, but the tigers are still behind her. Eventually, the woman comes to a cliff. The tigers are still coming so she climbs down onto some vines she sees hanging on the side of the cliff. She looks up and there are tigers above her, she looks down and there are tigers below her as well. It’s at this moment, Chodron says, that the woman notices a bright, juicy, red strawberry growing on the vine. She could despair. She could give up hope. She could make the decision to focus only on the tigers of past regret and future anxiety. But she doesn’t. She chooses to focus in on the strawberry, to eat and enjoy it, to relish the moment. This is the situation we are always in, Chodron suggests, tigers above and tigers below. Acceptance helps us to stay in the present moment, and not abandon ourselves. Acceptance helps us to attend to the pain so that we might grow through it, rather than lose ourselves in the suffering of avoidance and numbing.
Words are powerful tools. When I find myself in the throes of my own suffering, wrapped up in the “what ifs,” I read this poem to reground myself in “what is.”