Acceptance and willingness

To be willing and accepting means to respond actively to memories by remembering them, much

as you might take a friend to see a movie youve already seen. They mean to respond actively to bodily sensations

by sensing them, much as you might take an all-over stretch in the morning just to feel your body all over. Willingness and acceptance mean adopting a gentle, loving posture toward yourself, your history, and your programming so that it becomes more likely for you simply to be aware of your own experience, much as you would hold a fragile object in your hand and contemplate it closely and dispassionately.

The goal of willingness is not to feel better. The goal is to open up yourself to the vitality of the moment, and to move more effectively toward what you value. Said another way, the goal of willingness is to feel all of the feelings that come up for you more completely, evenor especiallythe bad feelings, so that you can live your life more completely. In essence, instead of trying to feel

better,

willingness

involves learning how to

feel

better.

To be willing and accepting is to gently push your fingers into the Chinese finger trap in order to make more room for yourself to live in, rather than vainly struggling against your experience by trying to pull your fingers out of the trap .

To be willing and accepting means to give yourself enough room to breathe.

By assuming the stance of willingness and acceptance you can open all the blinds and the windows in your house and allow life to flow through; you let fresh air and light enter into what was previously closed and dark. To be willing and accepting means to be able to walk through the swamps of your difficult history when the swamps are directly on the path that goes in a direction you care about.

To be willing and accepting means noticing that you are the sky, not the clouds; the ocean, not the waves. It means noticing that you are large enough to contain all of your experiences, just as the sky can contain any cloud and the ocean any wave.

 S. Hayes