Radical Acceptance: Becoming Teachable

I want to talk about what I think is one of the biggest obstacles to healing and growth. The term is radical acceptance, although it means different things depending on who is using it.

This is my understanding of it.

Radical acceptance means not only being honest, but being able to be honest with yourself without bells and whistles and without spiritual bypassing. In other words, I’m not going to say, “I have a terrible temper, but it’s because it’s in my chart,” or, “That’s how my mother was.” I’m going to begin by simply saying, “I have a bad temper.”

Then I want to continue with that honesty. I’m not going to jump immediately into compassion and self-care or balance everything out by saying, “Anger has good and bad sides,” even though it does. First, I have to look at the price I am paying for this trait and the price other people may have paid because of it.

To begin healing, I want to look at what I call the dark side, because most people have an extraordinarily hard time looking directly at traits they don’t like in themselves. I do need to add a caution here: if you are in a crisis, having a panic attack, spinning out, or having a breakdown, this is not where you should begin. But if you are fairly centered—even if you are uncomfortable, slightly depressed, or not feeling particularly good about yourself, but you are basically functional—this can be a useful place to start.

Let’s say I have a lot of anger and a bad temper. Rather than speaking generally about “my anger,” I want to look at the specific places where my temper has hurt people. Perhaps I yelled at my sister Sarah when she was sixteen, she went out and got drunk, and then she got into a car accident. To this day, I may still feel that the accident was my fault because of my terrible temper. Or perhaps my husband or wife received a promotion, and instead of being happy, I became angry because I felt neglected. I wasn’t simply “an angry person.” I became angry at a particular moment, under particular circumstances, and my reaction had consequences. This is what twelve-step programs call taking inventory: looking not only at a trait, but at the actual events surrounding it.

“I get angry. I have a temper.” Fine. When did you get angry? What happened? What did you do, and what happened afterward? Perhaps I say, “I feel terrible.” Let’s go deeper. Maybe I felt so terrible that I drank for a week, broke up with my lover, or did a whole series of things that grew out of losing my temper and causing harm. Radical acceptance asks me to look at the whole sequence rather than reducing it to a vague statement about having “anger issues.”

Why go into all this darkness? It already happened, so why revisit it? Why torture myself? Why not move on, think positively, practice compassion, and forgive myself?

Because it doesn’t work. It simply doesn’t work that way. We are still carrying that material inside us, no matter how effectively we explain it away. Personally, I don’t work directly on forgiveness because I never know whether my ego-brain is tricking me. Forgiveness looks good. We are supposed to forgive, we want to think of ourselves as forgiving people, and perhaps other people are urging us to forgive. It can become another performance.

Instead, I work with the hate, guilt, vengeance, revenge fantasies, blame, and all the irrational, off-the-chart, “not healthy” feelings and reactions I actually have inside me. I don’t approve of them or act them out. I acknowledge them, work with them, and give them to Spirit.

How do I give them to Spirit? This is where radical acceptance comes in. Every time we can face something honestly, we become teachable. When we own what happened—including our judgments, fear, remorse, guilt, rage, or self-hatred—we become present in our bodies. We are no longer immediately trying to forgive, balance everything out, intellectualize, rationalize, solve the problem, think about the future, get over it, and move on. Instead, I am sitting in a pile of poop—my poop—and feeling it.

You know the statement, “Everything happens for a reason”? I believe things do happen for a reason. They happen so that we can learn and heal. They also happen for fun, but when we are talking about healing, it usually isn’t quite so much fun. If everything happens for a reason, why am I rushing to smooth the experience over, rise above it, forgive it, or turn it into something positive? I never hear somebody say, “I had such a wonderful day and did so many loving things for myself,” and then hear the response, “Well, I hope you can forgive yourself for that.” We only rush toward forgiveness when we have decided that something is unacceptable.

When we sit in our pile of doo-doo and say, “This is exactly what I did, and this is exactly how I feel,” Spirit can begin to show us why it happened and what we needed to learn. Perhaps we needed to become softer or more tolerant of ourselves. Perhaps another person had already been hurting us, and instead of speaking up and holding a boundary, we did something rather diabolical to punish them. There are many things we don’t yet know about why we made a particular choice and what it can teach us. To discover that, we have to allow the experience to wash over us. We stay present, and it teaches us through the feelings, remorse, thoughts, memories, and fantasies that arise around it.

If I work honestly with my rage, revenge fantasies, guilt, and self-hatred about something specific that I did, I am going to feel pain. That is where self-care becomes necessary. I want to stay present without spinning out, going on a binge, drinking myself into oblivion, or using some other distraction to escape what I feel.

Self-care is not a way of making the feelings disappear. It is how I support myself so I can stay present without damaging myself or other people. By sitting still and feeling what is actually there, I am giving my atoms a chance to be reorganized by Spirit. When we do something horrible, we generally feel horrible. Unless you are a full-blown, diagnosed psychopath or sociopath, you are likely to feel the pain of the harm you caused. By sitting still and experiencing that pain, the feeling itself becomes part of the learning. Intellectual insights can help, but the deepest learning comes through experience. It is like trying to tell a child that a flame is hot. You can say, “No, it’s hot,” a hundred times, but the information is not the same as the direct experience of heat. Of course, we don’t want a child to burn a hand, but as adults, sometimes we have to get burned a little before we truly understand the price of our choices and actions.

While going through this process, I might write angry letters and then burn them, asking Spirit, “If it is in my highest good, please take this from me, because I hate it.” If it isn’t taken, perhaps the lesson isn’t finished yet. I might work with a therapist, healer, teacher, sponsor, or shadow-work group so I am not trying to carry the entire experience alone. Some experiences take a few days to process. Some take months. Some remain active on and off for years.

Then one day, I go back to the incident or think about the person involved, and I notice there is no longer any charge. There is simply nothing there. I am okay. I’m not saying, “I forgive,” and I’m not saying that what happened was okay. I’m saying that I am okay. To me, that is the grace of forgiveness granted by Spirit. I did the work. Then one day, when the lesson had been learned and integrated, the energy and emotion surrounding it were simply gone. It feels like a miracle. You hear versions of this story frequently in Alcoholics Anonymous. People talk about grieving their alcoholism, raging about it, and feeling helplessness, self-loathing, and despair. Then one day, they wake up and no longer want to drink. They don’t quit alcohol; alcohol quits them. To me, that is what it means to work with Spirit rather than relying only on psychology or self-help. Twelve-step programs are spiritual programs. Radical acceptance is the schooling.

Beginning With What Actually Happened

The hardest part of radical acceptance is stopping the narrative. When I ask people what happened, they may say, “I did this because I give so much and I’m such a good person. I didn’t see it coming.” They have often been telling themselves the same story for twenty years, and it has become so ingrained that they can no longer separate the story from what actually happened or what they actually feel. They may say, “I’m a person who gives too much. I don’t know when to say no. I work too hard because I care so much about my family.” Let’s slow all of that down and look first at what happened.

I use drunk driving as an example because it makes this distinction very clear: “I drank, and I put someone in the hospital.” Immediately, the explanations begin: “I had a fight with my boyfriend. My father hit me. I lost my job. I didn’t realize how much I had been drinking. I have a disease.” Those things may all be true and important. But not yet.

First, I am going to say, “I drank, and I put someone in the hospital. That is what happened.” Then I can ask, “How do I feel about that?” I am not yet asking why it happened, what it means, what good might eventually come from it, whether I am a good or bad person, or whether I should forgive myself. I am simply looking at what happened and allowing myself to feel my response. This isn’t about punishment. It’s about letting what happened be what happened before I fix it up into a story I can live with.

Allowing the Feeling to Reveal More

Now let’s use a less catastrophic example. Perhaps I spent years working late, canceling plans, and treating my partner’s needs as interruptions. Eventually, my partner left. My usual story might be, “I worked that hard because I was trying to provide for us. Nothing I did was ever appreciated.” Some of that may be true. But radical acceptance begins somewhere simpler: “I neglected my partner. My partner left, and now I am alone.” I sit with the leaving. I sit with the loneliness. I sit with the possibility that I damaged something I valued. I don’t yet know how this is going to work out or what it is supposed to teach me. I only know what happened and how I feel.

As I remain with the loneliness, something else may emerge. I may realize the feeling is strangely familiar. I have felt abandoned before. Perhaps I felt this way as a child when no one noticed what I needed or when the adults around me were emotionally unavailable.

Then I may begin to ask different questions. Did I become a workaholic partly to avoid the helplessness I felt in relationships? Did I choose work because it felt more predictable than intimacy? Did I repeatedly create distance and then experience other people as abandoning me?

I am not inventing a psychological explanation and deciding that it must be true. I am allowing a possibility to arise from the feeling itself. There is an important difference.

When we deeply believe, “I’m worthless,” “I’m unlovable,” or, “Everyone eventually leaves,” we often create evidence that reinforces the belief. We may withdraw, become controlling, choose unavailable people, or make work more important than intimacy. Then, when the relationship ends, we say, “See? I knew everyone leaves.”

Radical acceptance allows us to see not only what someone else did, but what we may have contributed to the pattern. It may also show us that the present pain is touching something much older. That discovery does not come from sitting down and deciding what everything means. It comes from staying present with what happened and how we feel.

Or perhaps I become enraged whenever someone criticizes me. I tell myself, “People are always attacking me because they’re threatened by my strength.” That may contain some truth, but it may also be a story that prevents me from seeing my own behavior.

The simpler reality might be: “My friend disagreed with me. I humiliated her in front of other people. She stopped speaking to me.” When I sit with that, I may first feel righteous anger. I may continue insisting that she deserved it or that she started it. If I stay present without acting out the anger or rushing to justify myself, embarrassment may appear. Under the embarrassment, I may find fear. Under the fear, I may discover the old conviction that if I am wrong, I will lose all authority and no one will respect me. That discovery did not come from explaining why I behaved badly. It came from staying present long enough for a deeper feeling to show itself.

This is what I mean by becoming teachable. I begin with the facts. Then I notice what I feel. I allow the experience to open rather than rushing to explain it. Different experiences may reveal different things. The drunk-driving accident may show me the full consequences of my choices. The failed marriage may show me how I create emotional distance. The argument with my friend may show me how terrified I am of being wrong. I don’t already know what the lesson is. If I already know, then I’m back to telling myself a story. Radical acceptance means holding enough empty space that I can be shown something I did not already know.

When I ask, “How do you feel?” I would say that eighty to ninety percent of the people who first come to work with me have no idea. They have a story about why they should feel a certain way or why they behaved as they did, but they are not necessarily feeling those emotions in the present moment. I often receive one of two responses. The first is, “I don’t know.” They feel nothing because they have learned to numb themselves. The second response is a narrative: “I felt that if I did this and then did that, everything would work out.”

Those aren’t feelings. That is wishful thinking: “If I do all these things, perhaps the situation will turn out differently.”

Feelings sound more like this: “I feel frightened. I feel ashamed. I feel lonely. I feel furious. I feel as though no one could love me if they knew what I had done.” We do not have to agree with every conclusion contained in those feelings. “I feel as though I don’t deserve to live” is not the same as saying, “I don’t deserve to live.” Radical acceptance means acknowledging that the feeling is there without turning it into the truth or insisting that it must immediately disappear.

As we remain present, memories may return. We may realize, “I felt exactly this way when I was four,” or, “This is how I felt whenever my father looked at me with disgust.”

We don’t have to force a connection or decide that one event explains everything. We simply notice what arises. The present feeling may be opening a door to an earlier experience that is still active inside us.

Holding Empty Space

By becoming present and holding empty space, I am saying, “I’m here, and I don’t know. I know what happened, and I know what I feel. After that, I simply don’t know.” I’m not turning on the television, distracting myself with food, or running somewhere else, but I also don’t have an answer. This is Yin energy: holding empty space, holding a pregnancy, and not knowing exactly what is going on, how it will unfold, when it will end, or what the result will be. I’m not trying to control it or narrate it. I’m simply not leaving.

If you do this work for a while, you will begin to notice changes in yourself. To me, this is the beginning of true faith and the beginning of understanding miracles. If I experience a change like the alcoholic who wakes up one morning and no longer wants to drink, I might say, “Wow. Thank you—whoever you are, whatever you believe in. Thank you. I didn’t do this.”

But I did do my part. I did the hard work. I chopped wood and carried water. I stayed.

I didn’t leave, invent another story, run away, spiritually bypass the experience, or forecast the future. I did my side of the work, and then Spirit could do its side, which was to shift me.

Often, we don’t truly shift until we have learned what that experience has to teach us.

Every time we try to jump over the learning and rush to the next thing, we are likely to repeat the class. There is no rush. There will always be another lesson and another opportunity.

Perhaps we can become more comfortable with the process: “What happened, and how do I feel about it?” Not, “What happened, and what does it mean?” I don’t know what it means, and I may never know exactly what it means.

If I am meant to understand the meaning, Spirit may grant me that information one day while I’m cleaning the toilet or washing the floors. What I know right now is simply what I know: “This is what happened. This is how I feel. This is the self-care I need while I am feeling it.”

Because I don’t know the outcome or meaning—and I am not forcing myself to find one—I remain open. I can be shown something I might otherwise be unwilling to consider: another answer, another possibility, a different interpretation, a different response, or even a feeling other than the one I currently have. I can receive it because I am listening with my entire energetic being.

The way we begin listening is by becoming present. Even when I teach meditation at Life Path Healings, we return to breathing and to the body because the body is a good starting point. How does the breathing feel right now? There is no need to interpret it: “Am I doing yoga breathing? Should I breathe more deeply? Am I doing this correctly?” No. I’m simply breathing and noticing what happens. I’m feeling the ground beneath me, the hair on my head, my skin, and my clothing.

This is a very simple practice, and sometimes it is how we need to begin radical acceptance. When we find ourselves spinning out into a large story, we can stop and say, “Wait a second. Let me return to my breathing and my body. Let me look at what actually happened—not why it happened or what it meant. What happened, and how do I feel about it?” Our first description may still be part of the story: “It was a bad thing. I’m a bad person. I’m a horrible person.” Fine. We begin there. As we continue sitting with it, we may be shown the deeper reasons for those feelings and the price we pay for carrying them.

Sometimes we are shown, “Yes, what you did was harmful.” Other times we discover, “What you did wasn’t actually that terrible, but you still feel terrible about yourself.” Then we have something else to sit with and learn from.

Why Not Knowing Is So Difficult

This is an especially difficult process for Westerners. As a professor, I watched a particular educational method become increasingly dominant: tell people what you are going to teach them, tell them what they are going to learn and how they are going to learn it, and then tell them how they will be tested. You have already instructed them what to look for and what conclusion they are supposed to reach. There is very little opportunity to sit in the unknown and discover how we learn or what each individual needs to learn. Not everybody learns the same thing about the same subject at the same time. The standardized method is efficient, however, which is why it has become predominant.

We are rarely taught to sit quietly and ask, “What am I learning?” Sometimes we are learning many things related to the main subject. We know from the study of memory that there is never only one thing happening: we are smelling, feeling, hearing, seeing, tasting, associating, and remembering. All of that becomes part of learning. I remember teaching a college class in which a man of about forty submitted a paper that repeated everything I had said in class. I told him, “This is a summary of what I said.”

He answered, “Well, yes. That’s what you want, right?”

I said, “No. I want to know what you think. What did you learn?”

He started crying. He told me that no one had ever asked him that question—not in his family, his education, or his work. Nowhere had anyone asked, “What do you think? What did you learn?”

I was horrified, and I was amazed that he had the courage to tell me. To get through the system, he had learned to tell people what they wanted to hear. He had not learned how to remain open long enough to discover his own response. That is what I am talking about: being willing not to know and being willing to be shown something without a performance requirement or a predetermined outcome. It is a very, very hard thing to do.

Finding Support for the Process

Meditation can help with radical acceptance, but I am not talking about guided meditation. Silent meditation allows Spirit to come to us in the silence and in the Yin energy. Twelve-step programs can teach inventory with the support of a sponsor, and a skilled therapist, healer, teacher, or Buddhist practice may help us develop the ability to remain present.

This is not an easy process, and most people will not have all the necessary skills at the beginning. It can be very hard to do alone because, without support, radical acceptance can quickly turn into beating yourself up. You may think you are facing the truth when you are actually repeating, “I’m horrible, I ruin everything, and there is no hope for me.”

Beating yourself up says, “I am horrible, there is no hope for me, and I deserve to suffer.” Radical acceptance says, “This is what I did. This is how I feel. I am willing to remain here, receive support, and discover what I do not yet understand.” One closes the door. The other makes us teachable.

This is also part of the work I do with people. I help them slow the story down, separate what actually happened from the explanations surrounding it, and stay present with what they feel without drowning in shame or escaping into another spiritual idea. Sometimes another person is needed simply to help you recognize the moment when honest self-examination has turned into self-attack.

Especially at first, I would not suggest trying to do this entirely alone. Support might come from a sponsor, therapist, healer, spiritual teacher, or someone like me who is comfortable working with both psychology and Spirit. Radical acceptance is not punishment, and it is not an invitation to drown in shame. It is the practice of remaining present with reality long enough for something deeper than our usual stories to become possible.