The key to peace, fulfillment and growth is acceptance. Acceptance of our life conditions right now helps us to see their innate blessings, which then leads us to acknowledge that we are exactly where we should be for our optimal growth and learning.
Once we can accept everything exactly as it is, without desiring any change in the external conditions of our life, we can begin to see that any change that needs to occur must come from within us, because we created our circumstances with our own choices.
Although we think we desire change we often don’t see the causal links between our choices and their results and we continue to choose options that do not lead to the effects our soul desires.
If it is difficult to see how we actually create the very conditions we wish to change an alternative is to to look at how we choose not to change them.
Whilst we all desire peace, love, and fulfillment, in the moment of choice, in the moments that count, we choose their opposites. There are many reasons for this, including the need to be right; the desire for hatred, revenge or attack; the impulse to gossip, judge or vilify others in order to relieve our own pain and fear; and the temptation to lie, cheat or betray to satisfy our imbalanced appetites.
Until we can identify our feelings of unworthiness and inadequacy, which drive these behaviors, we will remain unable to choose differently and will continue to perpetuate the very life conditions we wish to change.
So the aim is not to seek to change the external conditions of our life. Rather, we need to heal the pain that fuels our fears. When we are no longer motivated by the need to allay our fears and numb our pain we find we make completely different choices. We have the courage and strength to leave situations where we feel diminished, degraded or abused, knowing that we will be ok even when it entails the loss of the security of a life companion or family member, a guaranteed paycheck, or a comfortable home. We avoid situations where fear, hatred and disrespect rule and we naturally move towards the people and places where peace, love and non-judgment reign.
When our sole intention is to align with our true soul nature, motivated only by the desire to express love, acceptance and peace, we attract into our lives the people who not only cherish us but allow us to grow and expand in ways our soul demands, until we are fit and able to make the choices that actually lead to the life of our dreams.
Rainer Maria Rilke writes in his Letters to a Young Poet:
“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and…try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then…you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
