Accepting what has come our way as part of our growth

Acceptance is an attitude which opens our heart to the depths of experiences that come our way, even the most painful of them. This is something I am considering watching the episode of This Is Us where the family confront the ways the deal with the grief over the loss of father and husband, Jack. And this episode shows different approaches to grief. I was also thinking while watching the character, Kate’s reaction which is to watch old home movies and cry (or cathart) over and over how that then in some way shuts her a little down to her partner. He accepts the process Kate is going through as she grieves but as the VCR tape gets stuck we see the rising panic that happens when we may be faced with the removal of way of coping with grief or loss or things out side of our control.

In another scene the mother, Rebecca shares how on the Super Bowl Saturday (which coincides with the day of Jacks’ death) she makes his favourite lasagne, eats it and watches the Super Bowl. Son Kevin say simply “That’s sad Mom!” to which she replies “No because on every anniversary your father finds a way to give me some sign that he is still around.”

I was sharing with someone the other day how the last time Dad and I got to connect before he died and was put under by powerful drugs in that final week, we had argued over the fact I had run the car out of oil. It may sound dumb but I had only had the car for 6 months or so and I somehow was never taught that cars need oil. Dad wasn’t that happy about it, I felt attacked and so we argued. And that is a kind of sad final memory.

But accepting my father’s death and processing it well that was going to take me a very very very long time. And its something I am thinking about as I watch this episode since none of my family openly acknowledge the anniversary. When Mum was alive I would make some effort to do something with her, my brother always made sure he was overseas for three or four months around that time. Grief such as this can therefore lie under the surface of many families and I am sure when I sit and talk about my sister today with friends and find myself very close to tears a lot of the time there are a lot of other griefs buried in those tears I am shedding.

That said opening my heart to grief helps to release me and carry the flow of love forward, arguing about how it was unfair, too soon for him to die maybe may all be true on some level but it doesn’t acknowledge the true reality that needs to be felt and acknowledged and grieved in order to be released.

Coming to an acceptance of my mother’s death hasn’t taken me as long as dealing with my fathers. Luckily I was sober for a while when my Mum died and had done a lot of the grieving already in many ways. I still touch base with the grief whenever I relate with my only living sister now. She and Mum were so close and very alike in many ways that somehow it just seems more stark when I am with Sue that Mum is gone and yet on some level I do accept it.

I am reading a book by Karen Casey at the moment and some of you in recovery may know her as the author of a pretty well known book of daily meditations for people in 12 step recovery. In it she covers a lot of themes but one of the most important things is her view that everyone we meet in life and every experience we go through comes to teach us some lesson and we can either be open to the lesson and willing to surrender or fight it tooth and nail, battoning down in resistance. A follower shared an Instagram post with me of Teal Swan yesterday in which she says.

When I am in pain of any kind I have to ask myself, “What part of myself am I trying to push away (usually in response to being awoken by something external to me)? Is it the side of me that doubts the rest of me? Is it the side of me that feels so powerless and cut off from others it is in rage? Is it the side of me that doesn’t feel it is good enough? Can I take that part in as part of myself? Can I bring it closer? This is radical self love.

Self love also means to me that I don’t fight against things meant for me (provided I am not being abused, and then the best solution would be to walk away in the interest of radical self love.) Self love means I open to my true feelings about something that I cannot just pretend do not exist in response to painful out of control things happening in my world. When I accept the lesson and the teacher and surrender to being opened and transformed then it is that I am no longer in an adversarial relationship with any experience, but willing to own it as all a part of my ongoing journey.