When everything you wish would change won’t, here is how you can change:

Acceptance is the first step to feeling better, whatever one’s ailment is.

If you are sitting in traffic, and you’d prefer not to be sitting in traffic, you are resisting life as it is. Since there is nothing you can do to change the traffic, your decision not to accept it is creating anxiety, unhappiness, anger- you can add to this list. It is useless to fight against it.

As Michael A. Singer describes in The Surrender Experiment, “I decided to just stop listening to all that chatter about my personal preferences, and instead, start the willful practice of accepting what the flow of life was presenting me.” Because difficulty with acceptance is really about personal preference, right?

Singer talks about the strife of wrestling with the weather. Simply because we’d prefer the weather to do what we’d like. This may be a place for you to start strengthening your acceptance muscle. (Since “we need the rain” is in the Top 10 Austin Small-Talk topics, let’s use that.)

When you would prefer it to cool off and rain, rather than the played out:

Why won’t it rain? We really need it- it’s been hot and dry for so long. I want it to feel more comfortable outside!

what if you let go of that struggle and chose:

What a beautiful sunny day.

This may seem big (especially when 97° is a “cold front”), but it is only the beginning. These types of choices, to radically accept life as it is, can release quite a bit of internal struggle.

I clearly remember deciding that from now on if life was unfolding in a certain way, and the only reason I was resisting it was because of a personal preference, I would let go of my preference and let life be in charge.

~Michael A. Singer

If accepting all of the things in your life that you don’t think you can stand feels like a marathon, a short warm-up jog might be to entertain a new perspective with something like the weather. Or traffic. Or a line at the store. Here are some examples of a more accepting approach to these things:

• What a beautiful sunny day.
• I-35 is busy again this morning- we all need to get to work.
• This will take longer than I’d expected and I can be content while I stand in line.

The goal here is not necessarily to feel happy about what is happening. Or to change your personal preference. The idea is to recognize that the fight we are choosing is based on the importance we have given to a personal preference. There is nothing wrong with I-35 being packed. In fact, it is 100% RIGHT that it is. Because IT IS. There is nothing wrong with the parking lot being full. We’d simply prefer to have a parking spot open in the shade and near the front door. It’s okay to have a preference. And it is okay when life doesn’t align with our preferences.

Photo by Brianna Tucker on Unsplash

In fact, sometimes magic can happen where letting go of our preferences allows something even better to happen (you don’t need a close parking spot if there is complimentary valet!). But let’s start with flexing our acceptance muscles.