Acceptance

Good morning all,

There is an aspect or level of our awareness that can always pick up when someone is trying to get something from us  - or put something on us.
If we join with this, we make mutual transaction, we make social rules and expectations of behaviour.  We set up conditions for 'love' such as if you behave as I desire, you will please me, and if you do not you will hurt my feelings and make me upset. Of course this gets very very complicated - except that none of it is real, so much as an attempt to make reality (and the reality of others) fit the ideas or the wishes that are given priority or held dear. When people join in the attempt to make reality fit their own image - they believe it! - and live out from such belief as if they actually were together in the ways they imagine. As if Life (the Living Universe) actually is supporting and enacting our plan for it.

But when we meet someone who is accepting of us as we are, we find a spaciousness in which we can feel, and move with what we feel, for our defences are not triggered into reaction  - unless we are afraid of being without such structures of control, in which case we become aware of the tight fit of our own mask - and thus invited to become self aware of our presentation.

When we can truly be ourselves with another, we feel it as love. We not only feel loved, but feel a freedom to be love's expression.
But the way of this is like a dance in that the self-revealing and the acceptance are not transactions of getting something - nor of getting away from something - but are a cooperation within the 'movement' and the music of our being. one could say a deeper sense of connection with Life, with ourselves and each other. But it is actual, rather than symbolic. Real rather than rehearsed.

Such communioned sense may well become the basis of a new set of transactions - in attempt to have it again, or get more of it, or make sure we don't lose it - and so it is temporarily lost to our awareness while we engage in attempt to make life work - as if it is not already working. But it remains true that when we accept and embrace the moment (of ourselves and each other) exactly as it is, we become available to Life and Life becomes available to us. We have - so to speak - rejoined the dance!

It is very possible to define life and joy in terms of struggling in the dark in terms of moving toward light - if one can get others to join with such definitions or meanings.
Nothing is so lost as that which we set out to find, in the conviction we do not have it!

Sharing the experience of the moment - by neglecting to withdraw, withhold or make separate, may initiate an awkward silence - and unexpected intimacy. Yet if we abide in the moment without reinforcing our reactions, something occurs between us that is in effect 'uncovered' or restored to us - of relating in a way that is unforced, and natural. So many cling to the surface simply because they avoid the personal chaos or conflict that underlies the sense of being 'guilted' by rejection, exclusion and inadequacy. The first time another man hugged me, I froze up. I said (though it was also obvious) - but I said, "I'm all froze up" and he said, "That's ok". And it was - because it was simply honest of that moment - acknowledged and embraced - and moved on.


Brian