Unconditional Acceptance, Compassion and Love within Us

One of the things I was most angry with myself in life was forgetting and repeating a mistake I knew for a long time. One day when I went crazy with myself again, my healer said to me, “We don't learn in order not to forget the information. Being human means forgetting at the same time. You are burdening yourself for nothing. We forget and we will forget, this is very normal. The important thing is to know that there is that new area, the area that is good for you, in this life. Know that you exist, have tasted so that when you forget, know where to go. Remember which direction to go. So being human is not about learning once and closing the issue. It is the journey of the cycle of forgetting and remembering to be human.”

I was relieved when I heard this, but I still remember eating myself up for a while, wondering how I could forget what I knew and how could I make such mistakes.

I was reading a book recently: Adele Faber-Elaine Mazlish's Speak So Listen Listen Listen Let Speak, which contains wonderful "true" information for communication with children. There are many different stories of parents in the book, of course, through the troubled communication they have with their children. There was a situation that caught my attention while I was reading all of them: when the right communication was established with the children, yes, the children were obedient and did what was right for them. But the interesting part is that it's true, it didn't go away forever. For example, after acting great for 3 weeks, they were able to go back to their behavior in the 4th week when they had communication problems. Even though such a problem is not repeated!

I was surprised when I read this. What surprised me even more was that the author found this situation normal. Yes, the child could revert to the same type of behavior and that was normal and patience and understanding was needed. This accepting, compassionate and embracing attitude of the author also embraced me and comforted me.

I thought the same as ourselves. What difference would it make if I outlived children for 30 earth years? Man was still human. At any age, a person could forget and remember what he knew, and then forget again. This was about many people.

Seeing my anger and shouting at the little girl inside me, I felt a little embarrassed. Sometimes I can really miss its presence in life.

After a few weeks that I was doing very well according to myself, this week when my eating attacks were intense and I was defeated by them, I was angry with myself at first. Then I got stubborn. But now I remember with this article.. Maybe. We can fall and get up again. What matters is how we approach ourselves when we fall.

And I decided again. I promised myself: to be compassionate, understanding, patient and embracing. I will wrap myself to the fullest moments.

Today, I believe that some concepts are confused and used differently than their meanings. For example, compassion seems to be intertwined with pity, gratitude with a comparison of better or worse than us, and unconditional acceptance with a toxic positivity. I know that the state of acceptance, which is at the core of meditation and mindfulness practices, is very valuable, so today I want to talk about how I understand acceptance.

Acceptance basically means unresponsiveness. Neither responding to a behavior that breaks your heart, saying "Well, he didn't do it with bad intentions" or "He's like that, what should we do" is not an example of acceptance. Acceptance is like looking at the weather when you wake up in the morning, planning your clothes and the flow of the day accordingly. Living by accepting what is as it is, without commenting on it, pushing it or chasing after something, makes life easier. Otherwise, it can be tiring to live with a mind that responds to everything good or bad every time you are alerted. I think most of us know the tendency to feel inadequacy as we try to satisfy the mind that approaches everything it sees, remembers, plans from a critical point of view.

So why do we tend to look for something better instead of accepting it? Why do we miss summer if it's rainy that day and want snow if it's a hot day? As Tara Brach mentions in the book (which was one of the key revelations of my journey to awareness), Buddha says, "Life is suffering." “Life by its very nature does not give satisfaction. We are not comfortable because everything in our lives, our mood, our bodies, our job, the people we love, and the world we live in is changeable. We can't hold on to anything because everything is temporary. So we are constantly drawn to getting better, to experience something different from what is happening right now.” Pretty obvious dilemma isn't it? It's an endless loop.

We find it difficult to accept what is because of desires that we constantly want to achieve or avoid. The etymological explanations of words intrigue me very much. In this book, I learned that the root of the word desire (desire) is "far from a star" and it impressed me a lot. Tara Brach interprets this as we yearn to realize our true nature, to belong to a star. But when I read this, I remembered the fact that desires can never be fulfilled and thought it was as impossible as reaching a star; because “As desire grows stronger, awareness flies away.” So what path takes us away from desires and closer to acceptance?

Based on my own experiences and observations from the people I work with, I can say that I practice mindfulness and continue these practices. First of all, it is very important to feel safe. I would like to remind you again that an unconditional acceptance does not mean limitlessness. As reminded in the Heart of the Buddha, “We do not say yes to acting on our harmful impulses or to external circumstances that can harm us: If someone is abusing or abusing us, we must firmly say no and set rational boundaries to protect ourselves in the future. But even in such a situation, we can say yes to feelings of fear, anger, or resentment that rise within us. Yes, it's a practice of inner acceptance where we purposefully allow our thoughts and feelings to come and go naturally.” As Buddha said, everything in this life is temporary, like all our feelings and thoughts. With that being the case, do you think there is another alternative that is good for us instead of accepting it?

Sometimes it's just one space we're looking for, an inclusive void. We need those spaces in order to create something or fully experience anything created. I think we sometimes notice this in our close relationships, too. Sometimes there is no consolation, motivation, or solution we seek, we just want to share that area. We need to be able to live together the pain we feel inside, to establish a bond. Tara Brach explains exactly this in her book Heart of Buddha; “True compassion is being together, feeling together and being able to suffer together,” she says. What does it sound like to observe what's going on inside with someone you love and trust without having to do anything, reading that you can open up space for every emotion it awakens in you?