Acceptance

Well hi there. It’s been a little while since I’ve been on the blog. There have been a number of challenges in my life over the last month: the relatively small (strep throat, a rainy camping holiday), and the large (the loss of my long time animal companion, my parents selling their home and then struggling to find a suitable new one, and a suicide in my extended family). I’ve been working with acceptance. Acceptance that circumstances aren’t what I expected, that people often don’t do the things I expect them to do, that life doesn’t always provide the solutions I imagined.

Let’s taking camping in the rain (that's me in a toque and a down vest in Canada (Emerald Lake, BC) in June). I planned a ten day camping trip with my family from British Columbia to Alberta at the beginning of the summer. Imagining that I would miss the new normal of smoke season in August, I decided to go in late June. Well, we certainly missed the smoke (which was blessedly absent this summer in our part of the country as it happens), but what we also got was torrential rain. Every river and stream and lake was at capacity and our tent, well let’s just say that water resistant is perhaps a better word than waterproof to describe how it behaves in that much rain! All this to say that I had options when faced with these circumstances. I could a) practice acceptance and try to get as much as possible out of our holiday anyway, b) be mad that the weather didn’t cooperate and add a grumpy parent to the social context of our holiday, or c) cancel the vacation and go home. I tried to stay in a) acceptance. Though I admit we bailed on the last night; our ten day trip was shortened to nine days so that we could celebrate my daughter’s birthday in a restaurant and sleep in our own (dry) beds! So, a little bit of c) too.

A camping trip is a small place to practice acceptance. Kind of like your yoga mat, really. A small place to practice being the sort of person you want to be in the world. Want to be a kinder person? Maybe start with thinking kind thoughts when you struggle with a pose in your yoga practice (towards yourself and your teacher!!). Want to be someone who is in flow in life? Maybe practice that during the morning rush to get out of the house to work/school/wherever your need to be – try to build in moments to simply breathe and enjoy the moment, however busy.

Acceptance is a practice, not a destination. Most of the issues that were present at the beginning of summer are still there in my life; bereavement, uncertainty, challenges of various kinds. Each day I get the chance to try again, to see the circumstances in my life as just that: circumstances, or naked reality. Then I get to consciously layer on what I am going to think, feel and do with that information, to get the outcomes I really hope for in my life.