Episode 97, Finding Joy part 4 – Acceptance
This is the 4th episode in the Finding Joy series. Once you have been able to step back and see your circumstances with a wider perspective, found humility and let go of your ego, let yourself find humor in yourself through it all, it is much easier to come to acceptance for where you are and what you are experiencing. Acceptance is difficult to do when you are busy telling yourself things and people in your life should be different. But, it is a vital step in finding joy in your life. You literally can’t find joy without coming to accept what is.
Acceptance is the 4th pillar of joy and the 4th pillar of the mind. Listen to these episodes to learn about the first three pillars:
Episode 97: Humor
The Finding Joy series is based on the book, “The Book of Joy” by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama
Takeaway #1
Acceptance is the bridge that allows you to see a circumstance in your life, and then to learn and grow from that same circumstance
Takeaway #2
Joy is created by what you choose to do with your life circumstances. Remember, you are the creator. Your life doesn’t just happen to you. When you are the creator of your own life. You live a life on purpose, and a life of intention.
Challenge
Try some weather yoga, what can you say yes to? Do you want to say yes to the weather literally to the weather, you can do that. What about the number in your bank account? What about the number on the scale? What about to that thing that your spouse just said to you? What about the thing that you just said to yourself when you looked in the mirror? What about your job? What about your children? Remember, this is not resignation, or defeat and rejection. It’s acceptance of what is. And once you release the stress, anxiety, judgment and frustration, you can begin to see more clearly and begin to make decisions to move forward.
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Full Transcript
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
life, joy, acceptance, circumstances, resignation, perspective, accept, episode, story, brain, emotions, create, mind, creator, humility, children, stuck, snowing, suffering, pillars
SPEAKERS
Tina Gosney
Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Tina Gosney, I’m your host, I am very happy to have you here. And I hope that you are experiencing as beautiful of a spring day where you are, as I am where I am. So I love it when everything starts to come alive again, after a long, cold winter. If you’ve been following along with the finding joy series this month, then you have probably figured out that joy is not something that just happens to us in our life, we actually have to be the creators of joy, with what we do with the circumstances of our life. We become the creators of our own life.
I’ve really been leaning into this identity of being a creator and exploring this identity for myself, and with some of my clients recently. And I love how we can make correlations with the Savior, or he was a creator on a really big scale. But we also are creators. We are the creators of our own life. We get to lean into that and just be like him a little bit as we lean into the Creator part of ourselves, and practice that every day in our own lives. And as we do that we are following Him, and we are becoming more like Him.
Because you’re becoming a person. If you’re a creator, think about this. You’re becoming a person who was acting for themselves, and not just being acted upon. You’re not being a passive, bystander and victim in your own life. You are acting for yourself. You can’t create joy in your life when you allow yourself to be a person who was acted upon.
There was another really big series that I did this year before the finding joy series. And that was the no love groceries for the whole month of January, February and March. I had many episodes in February, on love, acceptance, love equals acceptance in that Know, Love, Grow Model. And I recommend episode 83 which is Finding Love for Who You Are with Amy Gianni and Episode 87, The Love Recap, all of the episodes that that month are very good. And if you’re wanting to dive deeper into acceptance and into love, and see in more detail what you might be missing or what you need to work on in your life, that is a really great month to go back and review the episodes for so I invite you to do that.
But as we work on creating acceptance for ourselves, we have to really come into these three pillars of joy first, the ones that we’ve already covered this month. And the first one was perspective, we have to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. We get really tunnel vision sometimes and we don’t see the big picture.
When we can take steps a step back, we can see the perspective. And we see maybe there’s things that we missed. We can also see things from other people’s point of view at that point. And when we do that, we can see a bigger piece of the world. We can see our part, we’re clearly in the world, good and bad, whatever is good or bad. And we’ve approached that with humility. And we are on equal footing with everyone else in the world, no matter what their circumstances are, no matter what our circumstances are. And when we can do that, we develop perspective and humility. And then we can just kind of view ourselves with a little dose of humor.
Then we can start to find acceptance. I covered the steps for perspective in episode 94 humility and episode 95 and humor In Episode 96, and these are the pillars of joy that deal with their minds, let’s just add acceptance onto those, these first four pillars, all have to do with the way that we are viewing the way that we are leaning into these really complicated minds of ours. And in order to truly find joy, we need to question what our mind is doing and what is playing into our thought processes.
Because a mind left unchecked, will not be a deep thinking, perspective, finding joy producing mind, it will be a black and white thinking, ego driven, fearful mind that creates lots of other emotions. But it doesn’t create joy. And that’s just part of being human. It’s part of the natural man, when we read in the scriptures that the natural man is an enemy to God.
That’s part of it. A person who does not keep their own mind in check is allowing their natural man to take over more often than they are willing to admit. I’ve recently been re doing some things that I did, some books that I’ve read and programs that I participated in, I’ve been doing them again, and this is from things that I did years ago.
One of them is a course from Thomas McConkey called Transformations of Faith. And in that course, he talks about something called weather yoga. I thought this was really interesting, this weather yoga concept of his directly ties to acceptance. That’s why I’m going to talk about it today. His practice of whether yoga is you know what, when I say no, when I fight against the things in my life, I suffer. And then my body experiences suffering, and my brain experiences suffering.
But when I say yes to things, even if it’s not my preference, even if it’s something I really don’t want to have happen, then I’m actually allowed to suffer less, I can have more perspective, I can see things with more humility and more humor that allows me to access that part of joy of being in this part of my life.
He said, A great place to start with this is the weather, how often do we get up in the morning and complain about what the weather is doing? I know where I live, it’s been pretty consistent over the last, oh, I would say six weeks, we’ve had some really difficult weather in the last six weeks. And most days, I have heard myself or other people complaining about the weather. But what a great place to start just getting up and saying, Yep, it’s snowing today. And it’s April. Not my preference, but I’m going to say yes to it, there has to be some benefit to this to somebody for this snow in some way. So I’m just going to say yes to it. And I’m not going to fight reality, because it is snowing outside my window.
It’s called whether yoga, it’s a great practice, to do with whatever. I’ve had so many conversations with people about their adult children, about their teenage children. And usually it goes in this direction that the parents are disappointed in the choices that their children are making, no matter what their ages are. And they say something like, you know, it’s not supposed to be this way, or you don’t understand. They were headed on this different direction. And then this thing happened and they just totally reversed. And it was not supposed to be this way they had so much promise.
Parents are really stuck in a lot of suffering, for the choices that their children are making. And often that suffering includes a certain amount of judgment, or denial or rejection. And I covered acceptance, rejection and resignation and episode 84. Because those are just three things that we struggle with acceptance, rejection and resignation. When we are rejecting something in our life, and we have this knowledge of I know I need to accept this.
Because we keep hearing it from somebody, maybe you’re hearing it from me, maybe you’re hearing it from somebody else, maybe you just have this feeling inside of you that I just need to come to some peace about this. I just need to come to an acceptance of it. The next easiest thing is to go straight to resignation. And to just say, well, I give up then, because everything I’ve been trying isn’t working. And just why should I even keep trying is so much effort.
If it’s just going to be this way anyway. I can just not put in the effort and it will be the same. So what’s the difference? But resignation is actually a near enemy of acceptance. So, it seems like we’re accepting we’re not really accepting. And near enemy is a Buddhist concept, that it’s actually something that seems like what we’re supposed to be doing or what you want to be doing. But it actually undermines your very ability to get what you want.
It seems like it would give us the outcome that we want, but it actually undermines our ability, resignation underlines our ability to get to acceptance. What’s happening, if you’re really just stuck in this, I don’t like the choices my child is making here. There’s a lot of energy spent probably getting your child to make different choices or trying to figure out how to influence them to make different choices. When you spend so much energy doing this, and you say things like, they won’t listen to me, I have tried everything, you actually minimize your own influence.
No one wants to listen to another person who is judging them, or not accepting them for where they are and who they are and trying to get them to change. I’m referencing a lot of podcast episodes today, this was directly talked about in the period of pyramid of influence, with Brent Bartel, Who you are being in the world is the foundation of whether or not you have influence in the lives of other people. And that includes your children. And you can see that in Episode 65, and 66.
The truth is, we are so enmeshed with our children, and we don’t even see it. We are so caught up in what they’re doing and the choices they’re making and how that reflects on us. And making sure that our families and our life look a certain way. That’s enmeshment. But it makes sense that we are that in that place. Because we have rarely been shown that there is another model, that there is another place to go.
But one of the hardest things to do is to let go of what you thought your children’s lives were going to look like and allow them to create their own life. I’m actually working on a class right now that is going to help you do that. So, I want you to stay tuned, if this is interesting to you, I want you to stay tuned for more details on that coming up. But when you do let go, and you accept where they are, it actually is the biggest gift that you can give them.
And it’s a huge gift that you can also give yourself. And just because I say it’s a gift does not mean that this is an easy thing to do. It’s actually a lot of work. But it is meaningful, and life changing work. In second Nephi where it says Adam felt that men might be, and men are that they might have joy. It is literally talking about the human experience that we agreed to when we decided to come to this earth. It’s literally talking about these things that you are not wanting to accept that use these things that you’re fighting against, or you’re resigning yourself to.
But if we are rejecting the very circumstances of life that we’ve been given, we are not actually fulfilling the measure of our creation, we are created to find a joy. But it doesn’t mean that we find that without doing the work. And when we don’t look at our circumstances with perspective, humility, humor, we literally can’t go into acceptance. So instead, we’re probably going to experience a lot of frustration, some anger, a lot of disappointment, healthy dose of sadness, despair, shame. And let’s just throw in a ton of fear on top of that.
We stay stuck in these negative emotions, and we can’t affect positive changes in our life when we are stuck. It’s like we get in that roundabout that I’ve talked about. So many times, we’re on the inside lane, and we don’t make it to the outside lane where we could actually have a change and get unstuck from creating the same thing over and over again. Because when we get stuck in these emotions, they take over. And they fill us up to the point where we can’t see anything else.
Now, I don’t want to tell you that emotions are bad actually think that emotions are powerful. And I think they are teachers. And I think they are good. Even the ones that you don’t want to experience I think that so many of them are good. We are here on this earth to experience a wide range of emotions. If we don’t allow ourselves to experience that wide range of emotions, we’re probably not also going to be able to experience joy.
Joy does not require you to eliminate those uncomfortable negative emotions from your life. It’s actually the opposite. Joy requires you to experience all the emotions, and to accept them. As part of the human experience. It says, I’m here I’m showing up, I’m present in my life, I’m not going to numb these emotions and push them away. And I’m keeping it all in perspective, I’m learning from all of it. And that’s okay. I’m here for myself. That’s a hard thing to do. That is a hard place to get. But it is an important and vital place to get the same time. From this The Book of Joy, oh, I think I forgot to mention that. But this eight pillars of joy come from the book of joy written by the Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama. And this is a quote from this book.
“So many of the causes of our suffering come from are reacting to the people places, things and circumstances in our lives, rather than accepting them. When we react, we stay locked in judgment and criticism, anxiety, and despair, even denial and addiction. It is impossible to experience joy when we are stuck this way. Acceptance is the sword that cuts through all of this resistance, allowing us to relax to see clearly and to respond appropriately.”
Go back to that weather yoga. How many times a day? Do we tell ourselves, I don’t like this, I don’t want it to be like this. I don’t like this thing in my life. I don’t like what this person just said to me. I don’t like this traffic. I don’t like the lines at the store. I don’t like the weather. I don’t like the way I look.
We do this all day long. And it’s a big block for us when it comes to joy. But we can tell ourselves a different story. I know you’ve probably heard of do you look at the world as if the glass is half empty or half full. That analogy has been used to death. I don’t like to use that one. But it’s actually kind of true. Because perspective is the story that we tell ourselves. You can literally look at your life circumstances with a different perspective. And you get to choose what story you tell.
Your perspective is directly tied to what you tell yourself. If your brain automatically goes to a negative story, you have some work to do. If you want to create something different. You can tell yourself and tell your brain what you want to believe. And when you do this, you begin to create a new neural pathway in your brain. You can’t just tell your self to stop thinking the old way that you’ve been thinking for so long, right those, that’s a really strong neural pathway, just a high fast speed highway in your brain. But you can purposefully direct your brain to a new pathway, and focus on where you are going.
Because neurons that fire together wire together, what you focus on, you will begin to create within your own mind. This is not just positive affirmations, this is offering your brain an alternate storyline, which could also be true. You don’t have to accept the truth that your brain gives you as a fact, because there are many truths in this world, many different perspectives. And you get to tell yourself whatever story you want to about a circumstance.
And so many of us have painful victim stories. We’re not rewriting the truth by seeing it from a different angle. We’re gaining perspective, and we’re choosing to look at our circumstances in a different way. Because the truth is, we rarely if ever know 100% of the truth. So why not tell a story that helps you instead of hurts you. Most of what you see in your life is your story. Not fact. So, choose a different story.
What story gives you good fruits? What story helps you instead of hurts you. So, if your child is leaving the LDS church, what story are you telling yourself? Are you saying this is awful, they’re sending our eternal family is falling apart? I have failed. It’s my job to bring them back and so on and so on. Are your thoughts going that way? Or are you telling yourself they’re an adult who’s exercising their agency, they’re making a choice and they will learn from these experiences in their life. And they will learn from everything whether they are inside or outside of the church. I trust my child I trust God this is not my preference. This is what is happening.
Which story helps you to come to acceptance so that you can move forward in a loving and compassionate way? Of course it’s the second story.
Question that that’s in your brain, whether they are helping you or hurting you, and are they taking you in the direction that you are wanting to go? Here’s your takeaways for today:
Takeaway #1
Rejection is the opposite of acceptance. Resignation is its near, near enemy. Now, this does not mean that you have to love what’s happening, or that you will still have pain about what’s happening. But it does mean you stop fighting against reality. Because every time you fight against reality, you’ll lose 100% of the time.
Acceptance is the bridge that allows you to see a circumstance in your life, and then to learn and grow from that same circumstance. I go into this in quite a lot of depth in the no love growth series.
Takeaway #2
Joy is created by what you choose to do with your life circumstances. Remember, you are the creator. Your life doesn’t just happen to you. When you are the creator of your own life. You live a life on purpose, and a life of intention.
Challenge
Here’s your challenge for the week. Try some weather yoga, what can you say yes to? Do you want to say yes to the weather literally to the weather, you can do that. What about the number in your bank account? What about the number on the scale? What about to that thing that your spouse just said to you? What about the thing that you just said to yourself when you looked in the mirror? What about your job? What about your children?
Remember, this is not resignation, or defeat and rejection. It’s acceptance of what is. And once you release the stress, anxiety, judgment and frustration, you can begin to see more clearly and begin to make decisions to move forward. So, notice what happens when you say yes to what is how does this help you to find more joy in your life? “You should be able to accept anything that happens to you. You accept the inevitable frustrations and hardships as a part of life. The question is not how do I escape this? The question is, how can I use this as something positive?” (Book of Joy)
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Until next time, have a great day. And I will see you next week.
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