Acceptance: The Zen Superpower

There are many misconceptions about what acceptance is or is like.

Some people believe it’s about feeling good about things – consciously projecting loving feelings onto what normally troubles them, which feels good if you can stomach it but is hardly guaranteed to turn you into a cosmic ball of love-energy.

Others see it as coming to terms logically with something – simply accepting that something exists or is that way, but of course accepting that cancer is a thing doesn’t mean you’re now equipped to handle it.

Others still confuse it with resignation – in this case, accepting that your neighbour is an ass-hat would mean you’d give in to it, that you’d settle into being continually distressed by them like some beaten-down partner in an abusive relationship, sighing sadly as they unfurl a large sign off the balcony calling your wife a w*****.

Zen Acceptance is none of these things. This acceptance is where you experience life directly without clinging onto ideas of how things were, are or ought to be. The result is that nothing phases you and you can handle anything. You get hit with illness, and you go “Oh, so this is how things are now” and you get on with life. You win the lottery and you go “Oh, so this is how things are now” and you get on with life. Your boiler breaks, causing irreparable damage and rendering you homeless – you stay calm, get it sorted, and you get on with life. That last one happened to me recently and I was genuinely fine throughout. I’m a flipping Zen Master.

But let’s be clear: Zen Acceptance is not a conscious practice. You are not at every new event choosing to think “Oh, so this is how things are now” – it is what you automatically think, the calm you can’t help but sustain as a result of thoroughly accepting reality as it is and emotions as, you know, fine.

So if Zen Acceptance isn’t a conscious practice then you’re probably wondering how the heck you’re supposed to practice it. Well you sort of don’t. Zen Acceptance is more the result of a life led truly empirically. Fine. So how do I live an empiricism-led life? Well that’s perhaps best started by not doing any of the other stuff:

• Quit ‘accepting’ that horrible buffoon who’s destroying the country he’s in charge of by sending him happy vibes – all you’re doing is running from how mad you are that he exists, has power, and that the world we’re in has allowed all of this. Like a mysterious stink under the floorboards, the hate stays beneath the surface, regardless of the quantity of Febreze.
• Quit allowing yourself to disengage with the bad things in life by surrendering to them, resigning yourself to a life lived in muted fear, rage or sorrow – you may be comforted that it’s no longer at full volume, but muted sorrow also means muted joy, and a muted life is a deeply tiring one.
• Quit seeking intellectual superiority and emotional distance from your troubles, digging deep into your logic centres to say “Well now I know that sharks are logically very unlikely to bite my legs off if I swim in the ocean, I can stop being afraid of the sea” – your therapist and you nod in satisfaction despite the fact that if you did go to sea and fell in you would probably s*** yourself to death in fear.

Instead, start to actively accept your emotions. Embrace them until they no longer sting – until joy feels much like fear and irritation feels much like hunger. Use your mindfulness skills to notice when you’re trying to run away from your emotions, including when you’re just creating convincing solutions that are in fact avoidance in another form. And when you notice you’re running, just stop running. Be there. Feel it. Come to know it. That is Zen Acceptance.

-ish.