Acceptance

 

Medical issues and other physical and mental afflictions can be great teachers for us.  I have seen this happen many times in my own life, the lives of people I knew, and even in a dog.  I’d like to start by sharing some stories.

About three years ago I mysteriously contracted something called sepsis, which is an infection that gets into the blood stream and affects the whole body, including the brain.  I didn’t know this at the time, but in thirty percent of cases sepsis is fatal.  I had a temperature of 105 and spent my first night in the hospital hallucinating.  When my fever broke, the hallucinations went away and I returned to normal consciousness.  Except it wasn’t completely normal. 

Hospital staff would come into my room to check on me and ask me questions:  “How are you feeling this morning?” and “Are you hungry?” or “Would you like an extra pillow?”  I knew that these were simple questions and that I should be able to answer them easily.  But to me at the time with my brain still scrambled, such questions seemed extremely complex and I had absolutely no idea where to even get started answering them.  It was as though someone asked me “How many belly buttons do you have?” and I would be completely stumped as though they had asked me “How do you go about constructing a heart-lung machine?”  Each time, after a long pause, I had to answer “I don’t know” or “I don’t know--ask Sandy (my wife).”  This brain fog lasted the entire six days I was hospitalized.

Looking back on this, my situation could have been very upsetting:  I might have been saying to myself “I can’t answer the simplest questions, I’m losing my mind, I’m going to be stupid and a basket case for the rest of my life.”  But none of this was present for me.  The reason there was no suffering          was that I didn’t object to my condition.  There was total acceptance.  I just accepted that this is the way things were and there was nothing I could do about it at the time.  I simply had no idea how to answer such “complex” questions and I was ok with it.  Acceptance of the truth of the present moment is one of the most powerful teachings in Buddhism for reducing suffering.

The same applies to my earlier episode with hallucinations. The first night in the hospital I wasn’t thinking I was hallucinating and I wasn’t thinking that I was not hallucinating, I was just experiencing some very strange visual perceptions arising, being open to them being there, and not judging them, trying to describe them, or make them go away.   As a result, there was no distress or fear that something bad was going to happen next or that I was losing my mind.  I saw a lot of stuff that seemed real, but I didn’t know it was not real until my fever broke the next morning. However strange the things I saw were, I was ok with them being there.  Once again complete acceptance, no problem.

On another occasion, years earlier, I lived with a dog named Otis who had great difficulty with not provoking fights with other dogs when he went for walks.  The only thing that seemed to help was the “choke chain” around his neck that the vet recommended.  It was a loose chain that tightened around his neck when he pulled hard in order to get at another dog.  One day when Otis was home and safe in his yard, he managed to get one of his feet caught in the loop of the loose chain around his neck. He tried for a minute to get his foot unstuck but couldn’t do it.   As I watched, I saw his attitude shift to one of “Ok, I guess I’m down to three legs now,” and just hobbling around on three legs wherever he wanted to go without complaint until someone got him straightened out.  Looking back on it, his acceptance of a situation he could not change was genuine wisdom on his part.

Another very powerful lesson for me occurred during the later years of my mother’s life when she experienced a marked decline in her mental abilities.  Among other losses, she was unable to balance her checkbook.  This made her extremely agitated, upset and even angry.  “I’ve always been able to balance my check book!  I SHOULD be able to balance my checkbook!  What’s wrong with me?”

At the same time, my mother-in-law Doris was also afflicted with about the same degree of mental decline as my mother.  She couldn’t manage her check book, either. One time when she had forgotten something or found she could no longer understand her finances, she turned to me with a beautiful smile on her face and said “My mind is just at sieve.” (For younger readers out there, a sieve is a sort of basket strainer device that can’t hold any water and is used to rinse things that have been put into the basket.)  For all the lack of agitation it caused, she might have been saying “The sun is out today.”   Because Doris accepted the truth of her situation, there was no suffering.  She happily turned her finances over to her daughter to handle.

Right about now you may be thinking “Yes, I can see how lack of acceptance causes suffering, but how do I actually get to a place of acceptance?”

A good start here is the practice of saying “Yes.”  When I am having difficulty accepting a diminishment of my mental or physical abilities, for example, I can practice saying silently to myself “I say ‘Yes’ to feeling exhausted,” and I can repeat this slowly and calmly each time I relapse into railing against the universe about what has happened.

Another helpful practice is to do breathing and smiling micro-meditations throughout the day.  “Breathing in I am aware of nonacceptance, breathing out I smile to nonacceptance.”  Say the first half on each in-breath, and the second half on each out-breath.  Breathing should be slow and fairly deep, with the attention resting lightly on the sensations of breathing.  When I recognize that I am fighting the truth of this moment, I can repeat the phrases perhaps a dozen times and then just sit quietly for a few minutes.

Yet another useful practice In the Buddhist tradition is something called The Five Remembrances.  We can remind ourselves of our true nature by saying one or more of them silently to ourselves during times of difficulty.

The first of The Five Remembrances says “I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.”  The other four say “I am of the nature to have ill health, to die, to have loved ones change, and to experience consequences for all my actions—for all of these things there is no escape.”  When we remind ourselves that these things are part of our inescapable nature, it helps us to accept them gracefully.  We can even make up additional remembrances for ourselves to fit specific occasions.

Life is full of such opportunities to reduce suffering if we are paying attention.  Way back in high school I had a teammate on the school gymnastics team named Mike who became furious and upset if he was beaten by another competitor at a gymnastics meet.  I would say to him “But Mike, his performance was better than yours, he deserved to win.” And Mike would say “I know, and that’s why I hate him!”  He seemed determined to suffer!  But if we know better, we don’t have to suffer.  Mike could make up his own Remembrance and say to himself “I am of the nature to not get everything I want; there is no way of escaping this.”  No rejection of the present reality--no problem!

 

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Ahimsa Acres Website:  https://www.ahimsaacres.org/

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