Tag: acceptance

  • Accepting Love

    One of the biggest lessons of my life was learning to stop fighting love.

    I think many of us unknowingly build walls around our hearts when we are young. Not just because of romantic heartbreak, but because of life itself.

    Friendships ending. Adults we trusted disappointing us. The death of loved ones. Loss in all its different forms. In my case, it even included the destruction of a forest where I spent much of my childhood, surrounded by trees I considered friends.

    At some point, closing the heart feels like the safest option. If I do not love, I cannot get hurt.

    At least that is what we tell ourselves.

    Fear has a way of making us contract. Like a flower closing its petals during a storm and forgetting to open them again when the sun returns.

    For a long time, I thought strength meant keeping my heart protected…

    …life had other plans.

    The love that eventually became one of my greatest teachers looked nothing like I expected it to look like. I spent a great deal of energy trying to outrun it, reason with it, deny it, fix it, move on from it, and explain it away.

    I genuinely tried. Until I became exhausted.

    What is difficult to admit is that the struggle was never really with another person.

    The struggle was with my own heart. Because every time I fought what I felt, I was fighting myself. Every time I rejected my own emotions, I was rejecting a part of myself.

    That does not mean we should chase people, force outcomes, or build our lives around another person.

    It simply means we stop arguing with our own experience.

    We allow ourselves to feel what is already there. Without shame. Without judgement. Without trying to make it disappear.

    There is a difference between being attached to someone and accepting that you love them.

    For a long time, I confused the two.

    Acceptance is quiet. Attachment is restless. One seeks peace. The other seeks an outcome.

    As I slowly let go of expectations, attachments, and the need for things to look a certain way, something unexpected happened.

    The walls around my heart began to come down. Toward everyone. Friends. Family. Colleagues. Life itself.

    The love I had spent so much energy resisting became the very thing that softened me back into my own life.

    Looking back, I can see that when I was running from my feelings, I was also running from myself.

    At the time, I did not understand that.

    I thought I was emotionally aware because I could sit with difficult emotions. I thought I had become independent because I no longer needed someone else to regulate how I felt.

    Yet there was still one thing I was refusing to acknowledge: My own heart. And it had been trying to get my attention for quite some time.

    What finally brought freedom was not getting what I wanted. It was letting go of the idea that I needed anything to happen at all.

    The love remained. The attachment did not. The expectations did not. The suffering gradually began to dissolve.

    That was the surprising part. Freedom did not arrive because love disappeared. Freedom arrived because I stopped resisting it.

    Because I stopped demanding that it become something.

    It became simply what it was. A feeling. A truth within my own experience. Nothing more. Nothing less.

    There is something deeply peaceful about that.

    When we stop fighting what is inside us, we stop turning our own hearts into prisons.

    The emotions themselves are rarely the problem. The resistance to them often is.

    Whether it is love, grief, anger, sadness, or joy, there is a certain freedom that comes from allowing ourselves to feel what we feel without immediately trying to change it.

    Life seems to teach this lesson over and over again, through experience.

    The more we run from ourselves, the more life gently turns us back toward ourselves.

    Eventually, we realise there is nowhere else to go.

    I thought freedom meant becoming free from love. I thought it meant forgetting. Moving on. Feeling nothing.

    Now I see it differently.

    Freedom is not the absence of love. Freedom is the absence of suffering around love.

    It is being able to let the feeling exist without needing to control it.

    Without needing it to become a relationship. Without needing it to become a story. Without needing it to become anything at all.

    Just love. Simple as that.

    Funny enough, this lesson appears throughout David Hawkins’ book Letting Go, a book that crossed my path for years before I ever opened it.

    By the time I finally received a copy, life had already taught me much of what was written inside.

    The long way. Through trial and error. Through resistance and surrender. Through holding on and eventually letting go.

    Perhaps some lessons can be learned from books. Others seem determined to become lived experience.

    Either way, love remains one of life’s greatest teachers.

    And sometimes it arrives in forms we never would have chosen for ourselves. Perhaps that is part of the gift.

    Because the life waiting on the other side of surrender rarely looks like the one we originally imagined.

  • In Between

    This might be a dark and depressing topic for some, but I find that it can be a necessary step when the time comes in our personal growth journeys: making peace with death.

    For me, this came up after almost getting hit by a bus. I have had near misses at least once a year for the past ten years, and every time, I had clung onto life a little harder. FOMO would hit me like a brick. An adrenaline rush, followed by the sudden urge to connect with people I honestly did not want to leave this life without having spoken to.

    Sounds sentimental, right?

    This time was different.

    The day after, something shifted. I found myself in a state that I can only describe as profound peace. Kind of my own version of an NDE, perhaps, without the physical repercussions and without the visual or spiritual experience we usually associate with one. Instead, I was city-watching on a rainy day. I did not see anything extraordinary, and yet somehow, there it was.

    The knowledge. The peace. The bliss. The acceptance. The love.

    Since then, I have been thinking about death, which was a subject I had avoided for a long time because of fear.

    I have always had a strange feeling that I died young in what seem to me like memories of past lives, and I never really felt like I would make it to old age in this one either. I do not know if any of that is true, and honestly, it does not matter much.

    If you have spent the majority of your life believing in some sort of afterlife, I think there eventually comes a point where you consider the possibility that this might just be it.

    That we might get to be conscious in a physical body just once.

    Everything is happening all at once.

    We are opening our eyes as a newborn, taking our last breath in a body, falling in love, leaving home, losing someone we love, getting through a breakup, making love, laughing, crying… all at once.

    And perhaps, in another sense, we are also our neighbours, parents, enemies, lovers, friends, exes, children. The trees, the air, the water, the wind.

    Everything at once.

    And yet, we are consciously present in just one body, right?

    Whether any of this is provable, right or false ceases to be the important point. The point is that there can come a moment when you accept that this might be the only physical existence you will ever experience.

    And somehow, that can be freeing.

    There is no longer a reason to postpone the things that matter with a whimsical “I will do that in my next life” or “maybe in another life.”

    You simply accept the possibility that this is it.

    And let go of the FOMO: Fear of missing out on life.

    Many of us do not necessarily fear death itself. We fear having lived an unfulfilled life. Not having enough time. Not getting to experience everything we wished to experience. Not becoming everything we imagined we could become.

    And this is where things get interesting.

    Whether we understand it as the path our soul chose, fate, circumstance, or simply the strange unfolding of life, there comes a point where we have to make peace with the fact that life does not always look the way we imagined it would.

    Sometimes, it looks completely different.

    Perhaps the mind has one idea of what a fulfilling life should contain, while life itself has another.

    And if there is such a thing as a path our soul has chosen, maybe we do not get to know exactly what that path is supposed to look like while we are walking it.

    Maybe we only get to walk it. There is a strange kind of relief in that.

    You cannot miss what you were never meant to experience. You can only miss what the mind decided you were supposed to have.

    And somewhere in there comes the “it is what is” mindset.

    Not in a defeated way. In a deeply accepting way.

    The melting of the heart walls. Being one with life, surrendering to your own path, immersing yourself in love.

    By that point, it helps to have a nervous system that feels safe enough to hold it. It does not sound particularly impressive when written down, but there is something incredibly profound about being able to simply let life be what it is.

    To see that everything is constantly happening within a much larger web of things.

    The planet does not ask whether the rain should fall today. Trees do not wonder whether they are growing fast enough. Rivers do not seem particularly concerned with whether they are taking the right turn.

    And somehow, life keeps moving.

    Perhaps our lives have something of that same interconnectedness. Things balance and change in ways we cannot always see from where we are standing. Sometimes we understand it later. Sometimes we never do.

    And perhaps that is okay too.

    It can look from the outside as though one has given up on life. But it can actually be the opposite. One starts caring more. Loving more. Feeling more.

    Just without gripping so tightly. Without attaching the same meaning to every outcome. Without needing everything to become what we thought it should become.

    It all becomes what is.

    Not what was. Not what will be. Not what might have been, would have been, or should have been. It just is.

    Does that mean I am like this every single day now?

    No. It takes practice. Awareness. Practice. Boundaries.

    There are still storms. There are still difficult days, old patterns, fears, desires, and all the wonderfully human things that come with being alive.

    But perhaps making peace with death is not really about becoming less attached to life.

    Maybe it is about becoming less afraid of living it.

    About allowing life to be exactly as it is, without constantly asking it to become something else.

    And somewhere in that space in between holding on and letting go, there can be a kind of bliss.

    I have had a glimpse of it. And I would wish that glimpse for everyone. Not necessarily through the same experiences, beliefs, or paths. Just through whatever path eventually brings them a little closer to peace.

    Because even in the middle of the storms, the direction can still be worth it.

  • Accepting Reality

    Acceptance has never exactly been my strongest skill.

    Give me a problem and I’ll find ten solutions. Give me a closed door and I’ll start looking for windows. If that doesn’t work, I’ll build a ladder.

    I’ve always been the type of person who believes things can change. If something isn’t working, fix it. If fixing it doesn’t work, try another approach. If that doesn’t work, love it into submission. If life doesn’t fit, create a different one.

    Not necessarily because reality is wrong, but because my imagination has always been louder than reality.

    Then came the knee injury. And then another. And then another. (Yes, seriously.)

    Three injuries in ten months. At some point even I had to stop and ask: “Alright. What exactly are we doing here?”

    The answer was annoyingly simple. I wasn’t accepting reality. Not the spiritual reality. Not the cosmic reality. The physical one.

    The very boring reality that a damaged ligament has limitations. The reality that healing takes time. The reality that my body doesn’t care about my plans. The reality that optimism is not a substitute for recovery.

    Humbling. Very humbling.

    The funny thing is that during the same period I had done more inner work than ever before. I learned how to soften. How to stop controlling everything. How to surrender. How to let my walls come down. How to choose myself. How to speak honestly. How to love myself. How to hold boundaries without closing my heart. How to stop abandoning myself. How to sit in peace.

    At times I even touched states of consciousness I genuinely don’t know how to describe any other way than enlightenment, whilst getting my baseline up to profound peace, without getting bored. Because it was absolutely boring at first. If you know, you know.

    And yet. A re-torn ligament still didn’t care.

    Life has a remarkable ability to keep us honest. You can have mystical experiences on Tuesday and still be heartbroken by your knee on Wednesday.

    Both can be true.

    One thing I know for sure for myself is that life keeps teaching the same lesson through different classrooms. For me, acceptance wasn’t only showing up through my body.

    It was showing up through my emotions too. Especially love.

    Now, whether you frame that through spirituality, psychology, attachment theory, destiny, a twin flame journey, or pure coincidence is entirely up to you.

    I don’t care what label people use, because I do not use one, it is what is. Literally. A label does not change the experience of the observer.

    What I know is that for years I tried running from certain feelings. And every time I did, life seemed to have an absolutely incredible ability to sit me back down.

    Sometimes literally. Started with a hip injury. Back injury. Knee injury. Knee injury again, and then again.

    At some point the universe wasn’t sending subtle hints anymore. It was practically throwing folding chairs at my body. Maybe I have just run out of WD-40 though, who knows?

    Run where exactly? The feelings came with me. The lessons came with me. The work I wanted to avoid, feelings I did not want to process came with me. Reality came with me.

    So eventually I stopped trying to outrun them. Not because I suddenly became enlightened. Trust me, if enlightenment were that easy, I would have taken that shortcut years ago. The problem is that you don’t go floating into timeless bliss while hauling around twenty-eight years of emotional luggage. At some point, the baggage starts opening itself. Life kindly – and by kindly I mean by absolutely dragging me by my hair – humbled me until fighting it felt more exhausting than feeling it.

    And that’s probably one of the biggest misconceptions about Instagrammable growth and healing. They treat acceptance as feeling good about something, and detaching completely.

    It doesn’t. You don’t suddenly become a hard rock, it’s the opposite. Acceptance simply means seeing something clearly, and sitting with it without tweaking it into an alternate reality.

    You can accept something and still dislike it. You can accept reality and still wish it were different. You can accept your injury and still be scared. You can accept your feelings and still cry about them. Acceptance isn’t agreement. It’s letting go of control, especially when things do not look the way you want them to.

    And honestly? Some days I’m incredibly peaceful. Some days I feel like sunshine wrapped in human form. Some days I look at my life and think: “Everything really is unfolding exactly how it needs to, it really is what is.” Some days I successfully separate myself from my thoughts – and if you have ADHD level association and mind chatter, Virgo level overthinking, you know how blissfully quiet this could be.

    And then there are days when my knee hurts, and I have to accept now my full healing will take a year, which ultimately reminds me something someone said about how short a year actually was (sir, it has been more than a year in that context, and I still don’t find a year short), and suddenly my mind is taking over things I thought I’d already mastered.

    Enlightenment who?

    The older I get, the more I think real growth looks less like becoming some perfectly calm spiritual master and more like shortening the distance between reaction and awareness.

    You still get triggered. You just don’t react.

    You still get scared. You just don’t build a house there.

    Your mind still takes over. You just have awareness to realize what is going on and know how to process what is coming out. 

    You still have emotions that belong to the lower frequencies. The difference is that you stop treating them like a crisis. You let yourself feel them, process them, and move through them instead of building a summer home in them. Then, when you’re ready, you consciously return to the state you want to live from. Apparently that’s called emotional mastery. My exes are probably laughing somewhere. Sorry guys, I didn’t have that skill installed at the time. Turns out you were right about a few things. Don’t let it go to your heads.

    And oh, accepting that I am human has turned out to be a surprisingly important lesson. You’d think after twenty-eight years I’d have that one figured out by now, right? Apparently not.

    Intellectually, I know I’m human. Experientially? That’s a different story. Most of the time I feel more like the wind than the person standing in it. Like the clouds drifting overhead, a bird crossing the sky, water deep in the ocean, a grain of sand on a distant beach, a sea star, a wandering spirit, consciousness itself.

    What I rarely felt was human.

    Human with limitations. Human with needs. Human with emotions. Human with a body that gets injured, tired, overwhelmed, heartbroken, and occasionally has absolutely no idea what it’s doing.

    There is a strange kind of bittersweet peace in finally accepting that.

    And maybe that’s the point in this day and age. Not becoming immune to being human. Not transcending humanity. But becoming more compassionate and aware with the human experience.

    Because no matter how much peace we cultivate, life will eventually hand us something difficult. A loss. A disappointment. A heartbreak. A diagnosis. A torn ligament that apparently has strong opinions about our life choices.

    And then we get another opportunity to practice. Not perfection. Acceptance.

    Again. And again.

    And again.

    Until one day we stop fighting reality long enough to realize that reality was never the enemy in the first place.

  • The Reset

    For as long as I can remember, I carried a tremendous weight in my heart. My heart used to break easily over everything: a dead bee, a fallen tree, leaving a place that felt like home, opening myself to someone and allowing myself to love them. Every little scratch stayed with me. Every disappointment, every loss, every goodbye.

    Over time, those drops filled the dam. When the dam began overflowing, the tiny construction workers in my heart got busy. They built the walls higher. Stronger. Thicker.

    I became more guarded. I preferred casual connections. I kept people at arm’s length. It felt safer that way. If nobody got too close, nobody could hurt me.

    The problem is, I am not built for that. I don’t think any of us really are.

    Humans are built for connection. We are built to care for one another, to nurture ourselves and the people we love, to offer kindness even when it isn’t immediately returned. Living behind walls may feel safe, but it isn’t the life I wanted to live long-term.

    Ever since I learned about the connection between my knee injury and my heart, about how deeply that injury affected me emotionally, I knew I had work to do. It wasn’t just my ligament that had been hurt. The injury broke my heart in ways I hadn’t fully acknowledged.

    This time, I knew I had to go all in. I wasn’t falling apart, but I had finally become strong enough to hold what was there without collapsing under it.

    People often say acceptance is the key to healing. What I’ve learned is that acceptance isn’t something you declare. You can’t simply say, “I accept this,” and move on.

    That’s only the beginning. You have to feel it.

    You have to let yourself feel the emotions you’ve been avoiding, the grief you’ve been outrunning, the disappointment you’ve been carrying, the pain you’ve been trying to outthink. You have to stop resisting what already exists.

    Only then can release happen. Real release arrives when acceptance moves from the mind into the body.

    Last night, sitting in a hot spring pool inside a dimly lit cave spa, I finally allowed myself to feel things I had been avoiding for a long time. One by one, they surfaced. One by one, they left. Then came the cold plunge. System reset. Later, floating beneath the stars in the outdoor pool, another layer came up. This one arrived with tears.

    Turns out spas aren’t only for physical healing. Sometimes they become a place where the heart gets a chance to catch up too.

    For me, much of this journey has involved healing my inner child. I think many of us eventually find ourselves there.

    Children are incredibly resilient, but they are also incredibly fragile. Like butterfly wings, they can be marked by experiences that seem small at the time but leave lasting impressions.

    That doesn’t mean we all had terrible childhoods. I certainly didn’t. In many ways, I had a beautiful childhood, and I’m deeply grateful for it.

    But gratitude and hurt can coexist. You can have loving parents and still carry wounds. You can have wonderful memories and still have parts of yourself that need healing.

    For a long time, I never considered healing my inner child because I assumed there was nothing to heal. Then life started bringing old themes back to the surface. Memories appeared. Patterns became visible.

    And slowly, I began tending to the parts of me that had been quietly waiting for attention all along.

    Little by little, the younger version of me got what she needed.

    A bandage here. A hug there. A little more understanding. A little more compassion. A little more love. 

    And eventually, she got to go back to being what she was always meant to be: A child. Playful. Curious. Free.

    Since this reset, something feels different. I no longer feel the need to close myself off to stay safe. I can remain open while still having boundaries. Soft without being weak. Loving without abandoning myself. Accepting that life is largely outside my control. Accepting that not everything will go the way I hoped. Accepting that people and circumstances often arrive not to punish me, but to teach me something.

    And most importantly, I’ve learned to trust myself, and stop fighting love. 

    Or perhaps more accurately, I’ve learned to trust the version of me that can already see further down the road. Whether you call it intuition, higher self, future self, or something else entirely doesn’t really matter.

    I’ve gathered enough evidence in my own life to know that some deeper part of me has been guiding the way all along.

    And if time isn’t quite as linear as we experience it, perhaps the future version of me is helping the present version in the same way I now help the younger version of myself. Perhaps we’re all leaving breadcrumbs for ourselves across time, and calling it the “universe” guiding us. Well, babe, we are the universe, apparently. 

    And am I done healing? Nope. Now an entirely different layer I am ready to work on have arrived: deep ancestral healing at the root. Things that began long before I arrived here.

    The work continues. There was a time when that realization would have devastated me. Now it doesn’t. Now I simply accept it.

    Healing isn’t a destination you arrive at one day. It’s a relationship. And for the first time, I think I’m at peace with that.

    With love.