Acceptance
A large part of forgiveness is acceptance. Acceptance can be used with different meanings. It can be used to refer to when we are defeated by a situation and we accept our defeat. Cheri Huber offers a powerful meaning of acceptance in her book When You’re Falling, Dive 2003); “Acceptance is nothing less than the complete transformation of what one has believed to be one’s self and one’s reality.” Cheri Huber states that in each moment we have the choice to resist life or to accept it. Resistance leads to suffering. We can make no changes by resisting what exists in the moment.
Why do we continue to resist life, even in the subtlest of ways? Huber says that resistance maintains our ego identities. By resisting, we are saying, “No, I am not that. I am this.” We say no to everything that isn’t in alignment with our own sense of self, and with this, the underlying belief is that life is threatening. People often find themselves thinking about what is wrong in their lives or in the world. Huber suggests asking ourselves what we mean by “wrong.” When something is unacceptable to us in the outside world, it is a signal of what we deny within ourselves. According to Cheri Huber, “All struggle is a struggle to accept ourselves. Our lack of acceptance appears to be about other people, places, and things, but it is not.”
The Buddha taught that people could end their suffering through contemplation of the body, mind, and emotions. This brings us from a place of responding to life out of conditioned responses speaking from our perceptions of victimization to a place of conscious awareness. The process that Huber encourages us to engage in comes from the Buddha, who lived 2500 years ago. It is to recognize a sequence of progression within ourselves. The first part of this is to recognize that movement is a part of everything. Even rock formations and plants move, but because of our limited perceptions, many people are not able to notice this. The second aspect is sensation. We experience the movement within our bodies: the flow of the blood and fluids and the expansion of our chests with each breath. The next part of this progression is that we form thoughts about the sensations we experience. This might be that we feel cold or that we feel heavy and relaxed. Next are emotions. These are how we perceive the thoughts. “I don’t like being cold.” We then turn to a behavior that is conditioned. This may be, “I put on a sweater because it is cold.” By learning to watch this process of movement to behavior, we can identify what our perceptions of certain experiences are and begin to accept them.
We all have many unexamined assumptions that when looked at are really quite small. They may have a large influence over our lives and seem scary because we have denied looking at them for so long, but they are not. We can begin to understand our assumptions by figuring out the sensations that trigger them. We can also notice what it feels like in our bodies when we resist and when we accept. Resistance causes clenching in many people’s bodies. If we can learn to accept more of our experiences in life, we will not use our energy toward resisting and may find ourselves more energized for life. Radical forgiveness and acceptance go hand in hand. They complement each other by giving us more tools in order to come into this new way of being. And what do the people practicing acceptance and radical forgiveness say that these new ways of being can be like? According to Sanaya Roman in Living With Joy (1986) we can feel unconditional love towards ourselves and others all of the time. “If you exist in a feeling of love—if you can find it in everything you do, transmit it through your touch, through your words, eyes, and feelings—you can cancel out with one act of love thousands of acts of a lower nature.”