Acceptance

There's a difference between accepting something/someone and agreeing with it/him or her. I'm improving at accepting reality, I think. In Yoga, we remind ourselves to focus on controlling our perception and behavior, but let go of anything out of our control. Last night, I looked forward to watching a documentary about science and healing. The internet acted up, so I could not get Netflix to play, and I found myself feeling angry and stressed. Laura pointed out how ironic that is--to get angry and stressed about not being able to watch something about HEALING! Instead, I took the time to read a bit. I'd like to start doing Yoga again. After I hurt my back, I stopped running and doing yoga. My body is not happy about quitting yoga, and it tells me so regularly.

I watched the documentary about healing this afternoon, and the entire thing was about how science is now discovering and proving what the ancients already knew--that the mind and body are closely connected impacting one another. Things like Yoga are designed to heal both mind and body simultaneously. They also are discovering the healing effects of pleasing sights and smells and how they release positive endorphins into our brain that can be healing.

I am also working to see my loved ones as they really are. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure I'll still have disagreements and disappointments, but I hope to be seeing everyone more entirely. I've been explaining to family members that my book will be about truth. I will write about both my loved ones' and my own flaws at times, or moments that don't make us look as nice as we would like to. That being said, if I do my job as a writer, my reader will still love and respect these people like I do. When Natalie Goldberg was accused of making both her Zen instructor and her father "look bad" in her book, The Great Failure, she was surprised. She talked about how loving the book was and that she hopes someone loves her enough when she dies to look at her as an entire person--instead of building her up to be some saint that she wasn't. Real love requires us to accept each other's faults, hold each other accountable, forgive, practice humility and ask for our own forgiveness, and I think that's part of why it's so powerful when we have those few people in our life who really know and love us deeply.