My life these past few years has been ALL about practising patience and acceptance.

I admit I have spent most of this time fighting and pushing; raging and wallowing in despair; using “positivity” and “high vibes only” to completely bypass “negative” emotions and calling it patience, as opposed to sitting with these feelings and allowing them a seat at the table.

I have shut down and gagged my anger because anger is bad, right? There is nothing worse than an Angry Woman! Or so I’ve been led to believe…. Anger is a sign you’re not in a place of acceptance, which is true, but some things are simply unacceptable. Tolerating abuse is not practising acceptance.

I am well aware of the pitfalls of allowing strong emotions to take over and becoming completely dysregulated. I’m certainly not promoting that. But bypassing them altogether and thinking that makes you more spiritual or some kind of ascending master is foolish.

So, the work (for me) is all about feeling all the feels, and meditating & reflecting on what is really being communicated. Then, and only then, will I hopefully gain some wisdom and skill to know when to act and when to sit still, when to speak up and when to stay silent, and to always question & investigate, and not just blindly trust, especially when my intuition is telling me something is off.

Spiritual practice is a funny beast. It’s the key to unlocking wisdom, compassion, peace, trust and love. However, it can be used as a tool to harm myself and others with shame (“I (you) should be doing more”; “I (you) should not be feeling this way”). Or to avoid and escape the (sometimes) harsh truth about myself and others in an attempt to avoid the shadow work because “that’s so 3D” (read: low vibration). The list goes on and on and boy has many a self proclaimed guru figured out how to exploit this very mentality for financial and power gains!

Today I simply strive to be gentle with myself and others, and gentle with my practices. In gentleness is where I’ll find peace, harmony and forgiveness. And this is where true acceptance, resilience and patience resides.

Below is a beautiful piece of writing I found by author Sukriti Chhopra, which I found particularly relevant today.

Namaste 🙏🏻

“A reminder about acceptance, resilience, patience… three life lessons that have repeatedly been drilled into me.

Acceptance

Acceptance that we neither control the situation nor the outcome.

That control is an illusion and its pursuit will only lead to misery.

That impermanence and uncertainty are truths of life.

That suffering is inevitable.

Life is like a sine curve, there will be crests and there will be troughs and then there will be crests again.

Patience

Acceptance that control is an illusion leads to developing patience.

Things will happen at their own time. Hard work and smart work and passion do not drive results on our terms. That is a capitalistic narrative.

Things may not happen despite practicing patience; that loops us back to acceptance.

My life’s biggest lesson has been that of patience. It is a quality that requires constant refreshers and uninterrupted practice.

Resilience

Once we’ve accepted that suffering can’t be done away with and developed patience to work through the situation without despair, then resilience is the next natural step.

When I am in the midst of a strife or an undesirable situation, I remind myself that this is the trough of the sine curve; the wave will turn and things will get better.

Also, during the good times, I stay aware that this will not last, as the laws of physics (mimicked by life) dictate, the wave will dip. This is not pessimism; this helps us be prepared and to tide over the troughs.

This is resilience.

And with these three tools in my armour, I continue to find joy even in the worst moments and look forward to the next day while living in the present.”

~Sukriti Chhopra