Acceptance Part 2 | Opposites or Complementaries?

This article continues on from where Acceptance Part 1 left off....

The opposite emotions are not only not enemies, they are partners. Like real partners they complement each other. As the song goes, "The only way to feel your joy/Is first to feel your sadness."This is true of our physical reality too.

If we want to be sure of a sound night's sleep, do we practice relaxing all day? No, we do exactly the opposite. Work the body and mind to the maximum, and we are ready to plummet into unconsciousness as soon as our head hits the pillow.

When Angels Dance with Devils
Imagine: you are lying on a carpet of autumn leaves, melting into the gossamer-fine silence that surrounds you. Suddenly a bird begins to pipe a song...and just as suddenly ceases. The texture of silence is that much richer because of the single thread of sound now woven through it.

    "If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well."     Rilke

Psychologist Paul Ekman notes in his book, Emotions Revealed, that it is misleading "just to divide emotions into positive and negative, as many emotion theorists do. Each of the so-called negative emotions can be positive in the sense that some people enjoy experiencing them."  (And, to further complicate things, as Ronald de Sousa points out in his book, The Rationality of Emotion," many apparently positive emotions have a dark side.")

My suggestion is that, at least in the context of our emotional world, we drop the concept of negative. One definition of the word is 'lacking any positive qualities'; yet the negative has a positive role to play in life. When we understand that, we take a quantum leap forward in our inner growth. "Everything in life," affirms British psychotherapist Frances Wilks, in Ekman's book, Emotions Revealed, "is potentially transformative if we can find the key."

The method that follows can enable you to experience acceptance. Simultaneously, it gives you a taste of the complementary flavours of what first appear to be opposing movements – in this instance, the incoming and the outgoing breaths.

                                                      The Breath Cycle

Step 1: With your eyes closed, without trying to alter it in any way, watch your incoming breath as it enters your nostrils and moves through the air passage into your lungs.

Step 2: Continue watching as the breath moves out from your lungs, along the airways and out of your nostrils.

While watching the in-breath, be aware of taking in life.; each inhalation  is, in a  way, a small rebirth. This is the positive polarity: it is activity, and your masculine aspect. Just be aware of it without any judgement or internal commentary.

When your breath moves out, feel yourself releasing the life energy, and relaxing into a 'mini-death': this phase is the passive polarity; your feminine aspect.

By and by you might feel the interplay between these two phases and how one supports the other. In addition, while observing your breathing you might have noticed the little gap between the inhalation and exhalation. This gap is neutral: neither active nor passive, neither male nor female, neither life nor death. Or, to put another way: The gap is the point where those two apparently opposing aspects merge in a space that transcends both.

If you took a few moments to try that method, you now have a first-hand experience of how apparent opposites – inhalation and exhalation, activity and passivity, life and death – are complementaries.

*

The next technique is based on the same understanding as the Breath Cycle, but reaches it from a quite different angle. The method is simply the remembrance of the message in the Sufi story that follows – to accept that all is part of a continual flow, and not to be lost in any of one's passing thoughts and feelings.

                                                                        This Too Will Pass
Many many years ago, the wanderings of a Sufi seer led him into the vast lands of a wealthy king. Hearing of the Sufi's presence, the king invited him to his court. There, he asked the seer for an axiom, just a few words, a phrase, perhaps, that would help him face any situation in which he might otherwise lose himself.

The mystic silently removed a small ring from one of his own slender hands, and gave it to the king. "Inside this ring lies what you are asking for," he told the king quietly. "But there is one proviso: you must open it only when you really need to."

Used to having his curiosity immediately sated, over the years that followed the king found it difficult not to take a peep. But he had promised the mystic that he wouldn't and, for all his royal foibles, he was a man of his word.

Time passed, and the king had grown so accustomed to wearing the ring simply as an ornament that he forgot what lay inside it. He had also become complacent about the security of his kingdom and, one day, a marauding band of outlaws marched into the capital and seized power.

Along with his closest aides, the king fled, his black Arabian stallion swiftly bearing him away. By and by, with the enemy in hot pursuit, the king became separated from his men. Yet his valiant steed bore him on, across a river, up its embankments and through a deep forest. Finally it came to an abrupt holt, sweat streaming from its sides, at the edge of a precipice. Below lay jagged rocks and a wild sea.

His heart pounding, the king glanced back, for he could hear the shouts of his pursuers. This was surely the end; there was no possible escape. How inglorious to have to face his enemies or jump to his death! Then, from nowhere, he remembered: the ring! The ring! Surely if he were ever in need, now was the time. He prised the ring from his finger and, trembling, opened it, to read the words inscribed inside: 'This too will pass.'

That simple message penetrated his heart. The terror of his situation receded as he was reminded of this great truth – to live each moment, with neither fear nor favor, for no moment lasts forever.

Returning from his reverie, he realised that he could no longer hear the crazed stampede of approaching horses. His enemies must have taken another route. He was saved! The enemy vanquished, our hero was reunited with his army. His people wept for joy as they lined the streets of the town. The majestic blast of bugles was interspersed with the jubilant singing of maidens and the wild dancing of young men. As the king entered the city's rose-garlanded gates, pride swelled his chest. Ah! The adulation of his people! What a victor's welcome!

Just then he saw, dazzling before him as if written in diamonds, the words of the ring: 'This too will pass.' He closed his eyes for a moment, and nodded inwardly.

And so it was that the crowds now saw before them their monarch, a softer, humbler man. It were almost as if – as some of the more astute of them whispered later – he was illuminated from inside. As indeed he was.

*

Compare this state of trust with that of hope. To hope that his situation would change for the better – when his enemies were pursuing him – would be to reject what life was presenting him. And later, when he was being hailed as a victor, if he'd hoped to extend that moment, again he would be rejecting life's constant change in favor of a desire to live victoriously ever after.

This is the inner alchemy – a problem disappears if you accept it, and a problem grows more and more complex if you create any conflict with it.             Osho

Our Shadow Self
All our feelings – even ones such as worry, anger, and impotence – have their own reason for being. We may not like them. We might not understand why they are pursuing us. But just as Emerson observed that a weed is "a plant whose virtues have not been discovered," so, too, one of our least-loved moods might have a 'virtue', some significant information hidden within it. If we're busy trying to sweep it under the mat, we'll miss out on its message.

*

No matter how fast you run,

If we accept all our so-called negativities, our shadow aspects, aren't we endorsing them? If we are, I don't see anything wrong with validating any feeling. They are all on our side: we need emotions to survive.

Professor Antonio Damasio, one of the world's leading experts on the neurophysiology of emotion, has this to say (in his book, The Feeling of What Happens) about the significance of our feeling world: "The biological 'purpose' of the emotions is clear, and emotions are not a dispensable luxury.... Emotions are about the life of an organism, its body to be precise, and their role is to assist the organism in maintaining life."

So, there's nothing wrong with feeling. Trouble arises when we reject our emotions, or react blindly because of them. Rejected emotions do not go away. They hang around in the bodymind in the form of blocks and tension. Sometimes this tension becomes so much that we react to even minor triggers. Thus we release tension in ways that can leave us feeling shattered, and which can set up a whole chain of events that we may regret bitterly later on.

Saying Yes to No
Some years ago I was offered the editorship of a print magazine. It needed a face-lift, a whole new approach, and apparently I was the woman for the job. I found it stimulating and fun; work that triggered a constant stream of ideas, which I intended to develop over subsequent issues.

However, suddenly management proposed a change of plan. It was decided that, as the magazine was now flourishing under my editorship, it shouldn't be restricted to the print form but be more widely available as an online magazine. The content would not change but, nevertheless, many aspects would of necessity be dropped and new ones introduced.

The magazine was going online because, I was told, my editorship had enhanced its quality. Yet I felt resistant to the new proposal. And that bothered me: it was a new and uncomfortable sensation to be at variance with my colleagues. It was bewildering. It was embarrassing. Where was my usual enthusiasm for going for the new and for 'stretching' myself?

But in spite of myself there it was: a hard knot inside me that stomped its foot and said "No!"

After a week or so, with the knot of stubbornness only growing stronger I thought a physical break might give me a new perspective...might help me shake off this pesky feeling. But even sunbathing on a beach, with thousands of miles and the Indian Ocean between my office and me, I found my resistance tagging along.

Time past and, by and by I felt ready to face my work situation again, and so returned. The first morning I woke, I mentally asked my resistance: "Are you still there?"

Yes, I could feel the now very familiar knot lodged in my belly.

"Right,"I declared," up we get and off we go to the office. I know you don't want to be there but we are going anyway."

That continued for perhaps a week: every morning I'd wake, check to see if the knot of no was still there; it was, and we'd take ourselves off to work. I wasn't fighting my resistance, but on the other hand I wasn't 'feeding' it or allowing it to influence me either (involved as I now was in effecting the change to the online format of the magazine).

Then, one morning when I woke and called to my knot, there was no response. Without so much as a "See you!"my resistance had – as inexplicably as it had entered – simply tiptoed out of my life.

See Acceptance Part 3