Acceptance

When I was little I learned to swim because I almost drowned. I wanted to give my mom a surprise for mother’s day and serve her breakfast in bed. We had a garden with two decks, and her room had access to one of them, so I decided to surprise her by going to her room from the outside, so she wouldn’t even notice me until I was right there. Once I got the food prepared I placed it in a tray and walked across the garden towards her room. Instead of reaching her room I walked straight to our swimming pool filled with water, and suddenly sunk to the bottom of it, with all the breakfast floating at the top of the pool. Time stopped for a while, and even though my life was at stake, I didn’t panic and was able to found my way out of the pool by opening my eyes, finding the pool stair and climbing through it out of the pool. That was the day when I learned to swim, it was also the day that I unconsciously learned that there is a loving force way bigger than the little girl I thought I was, that guide me to stay calm under water, find the way out of trouble and survive drowning. That force has always been there, on my side, as an invitation to a deeper sense of who I am.

Accidents sometimes can be blessings, they can shake our usual ways, our patterns of behavior and our attachments to the way things appear or are supposed to be, and to the attachments we hold about who we think we are.

Nothing seems to destroy the life force, it’s always with us, with the invitation to rest on it and to meet our deepest nature. But we can resist it, we can deny it, we can terrorize it, we can anesthetize ourselves to the point where it appears like a tiny whisper. No matter what, in my experience with taking care of dying people, the force of life is always present, specially when we are getting ready to depart and our images of ourselves, our masks and egos start to fall apart and crumble. It’s like a sweet, caring and unconditionally accepting mother that is always patiently waiting for us to come back to her. It also feels like a womb, ready and always open to receive us, to love and take care of us.

We are very conditioned to believe that we were abandoned by this force, this feminine principle, that we left the womb and we will never be able to return to it. There are numerous legends, folk literature, songs and myths about this subject, so it seems like a big deal to the whole of humanity, past, present and future.

How can we return to a deep knowing that we are always taken care off by this feminine energy, that we were never abandoned by her, that we never left the womb of our deepest and most loving mother? One of the pointers towards the experience of the “Loving Mother Essence” is acceptance of life. In this society where hard work, effort and competition seem like the focus, acceptance can feel like a challenge. Acceptance of the way things are; of diseases and pain, of death and suffering, of poverty, injustice, crimes and violations of human rights, of addictions, of bad relations, of mean people, mad corporations, of my own darkness, etc? You got to be kidding me, seems like a natural response. Acceptance doesn’t mean I want to increase or perpetuate the madness of the world, the injustices, pains and sufferings that I have experienced. Acceptance comes from a realization that resistance separates me from the rest of all, that every time I resist I become a fragment of the wholeness, a fragment of myself, like a piece of a puzzle that doesn’t have perspective of the whole puzzle, that doesn’t feel connected to the rest. As a fragment I feel isolated from the rest of all, where I stand as good and something else stands as bad, I am right and somebody else is wrong, or the opposite, as a fragment I encounter so many opposites.

Acceptance means I am one with everything else, not the mental idea of oneness, but the sentient realization of this deep union we really have capacity for. With this deep acceptance, whatever life has brought to my table, seems to be there as an invitation to meet another aspect of myself that in the past has been denied. Acceptance of life doesn’t mean I stop working, stop desiring a better outcome, etc, but it means I am willing to listen to the signs of life, to pay attention and to feel what’s on my plate, served by life, with a child’s curiosity and deep trust, trust that the universe operates correctly at all times, no matter how bad or unloved or scared I have felt before. Acceptance invites life in, in the present moment, with the ups and the downs, with all the mess, the shame, the anger, the grief, the terror, the loneliness, whatever is in my plate. Acceptance of all there is invites love in, invites the mother essence to hug and take care of us again, to take care of all those fragments of us that appear so messy and so ugly that no one ever wanted to pay attention to them, that were abandoned but now are ready to return to love and wholeness.

It takes courage though, to have the willingness to meet all of life, everything that life offers us, because so many times it seems like it’s not what we are expecting or longing for. But what are we really and deeply longing for? No matter what we choose, we are life, and life is us.