Do any job you’re doing well, and you’ll stumble over the right opportunities to do what you truly desire. ~ Betty Furness
Accept where you are. (This is the second word in the acronym for my – and your – friend, Karl™ — and just to remind you, the first was “Know.”)
So, learn to accept yourself. What happened in your past means something. You can’t change it, but you can grow from it. Your personal experiences made you who you are. Your life is a beautiful showcase of the road that you have traveled. Even with scars, and bumps and bruises.
For others, mainly those who believe in the law of attraction or the power of positive thinking, acceptance means that a certain condition or disease would not be happen, if it were given another name. This is not a good thing.
Let me give you a bit more background. According to the law of attraction you create your own destiny by firmly believing in what you want to achieve, regardless of whether it makes sense today, regardless of whether you are anywhere close to your dream, and regardless of whether you feel that you can even achieve that dream.
In other words, you act and live and think as if you have already achieved what you want. In doing so, you put the entire energy of the universe behind you which then has no choice other than to act upon the “fact” that you’ve created for yourself.
Which of course is not really a fact until you believe it. You put out that energy, and that energy comes back as a manifestation of the power of your thoughts, which are now a reality. Ever heard of what goes around comes around, you reap what you sow, etc? All of these sayings refer to the same concept.
There is an inherent internal struggle we have with acceptance in spiritual practice; a divide and conquer concept. Maybe we can’t accept what our reality is because we are afraid that if we do, we will be given something that we might not want. For example, say you’re feeling tired and exhausted lately. Once the doctor tells you that you have a disease, you know that you are, in fact, ill. If you continue to say, “I am just tired because I work too much” you have not manifested a disease as it has no name. In creation and visualization, which is what the law of attraction is, we focus only on the good things; no word of the bad stuff. We fake it till we make it.
But, what if you are like me, and the so-called Law of Attraction doesn’t work consistently? What if there are areas of your life where you can’t think that your dream outcome can, and will, be your reality? Could it be that you first have to accept what truly is, and that this acceptance will give you the power to change it?
Well, we’ll be exploring that in the next few columns. In the meantime, where in your life have you refused to “name” something that was going on with you, be it a situation or a feeling or even a type of illness? When did you decide that knowing was better than not knowing? Let me know – I’d love to hear from you.