Listening to Tara Brach’s inspirational and soothing talk on ‘Genuine Acceptance’ today. Acceptance is about being with what is here. Not our story around it but the embodied present moment experience. So mindfulness is our pathway, our tool, to be with what is – the bodily experience of the unpleasant: the sensations and emotions. The resistance and how that feels in the body. Mindful awareness helps us to feel the experience of the ‘fight-flight-freeze’ reactivity. To sit in that space. To acknowledge and be with what is here. This is how acceptance is not passive and is not about being ‘the doormat’. It takes courage to experience vulnerability, imperfection, unpleasantness. We’re trained to avoid. That is the default. Words that touch me are the idea of being with the ‘heart-breaking’ as this ‘reveals the love that is beneath’. That is often the fear – the uncertainty of what lies beneath. It is a deep love and wisdom. I can believe yet I can still resist the pain of a breaking heart. In that space, I practice being with.
She references a poem, White Dove by Donna Faulds:
“In the shared quiet, an invitation arises like a white dove lifting from a limb and taking flight. Come and live in truth. Take your place in the flow of grace. Draw aside the veil you thought would always separate your heart from love.
All you ever longed for is before you in this moment if you dare draw in a breath and whisper “Yes.”
Such soft melting words and powerful imagery – drawing aside the veil that is around your heart … captures the almost invisible quality of the fear-barriers to openness, to vulnerability and to the potential of what lies behind that veil.
Blog previously posted on ‘Sensational Being’ Oct 2015.
[post_grid id=”382″]
