02/07/2024
Acceptance.
Hello. This post is about some thing that I have both experienced and studied but I have also encountered it with some people very close to me.  I will start it by giving you my definition, what it means to me, and where I have seen it in my own life. Maybe it will help you identify a feeling and after that, feel free to be curious with it and see where it goes. This one will be long but I believe it is one of the most important things going on in society right now.
I define acceptance simply as a feeling that is created in a circumstance. It’s a feeling that one feels emotionally, spiritually, mentally, and or physically. It could be one of these or it could be all of these but most importantly, none of them are wrong.
To keep things very simple, the opposite of acceptance could be rejected. One could also use acceptance and non-acceptance. Lastly acceptance creates a feeling of love and sometimes nonacceptance creates a feeling of non-love depending on each situation.
I’ll start off by offering a simple exercise to help understand this. If you draw a line down the center of a piece of paper vertically two times and make three equal columns. Label the first column as the event, the second column as accepted in the third column as whatever word you choose that you feel is the opposite of accepted. The sky is the limit from this point on so let your curiosity guide you.
The goal here is to write an event in your life and then you simply put a checkmark in the feeling that you’ve got from that event whether it was accepted or not accepted. And example might be getting fired from a job or let go from a job. Then simply check did that experience make you feel accepted or not accepted. Try not to get too literal and see this for what it is, it is just an exercise to help identify a feeling. You can dive deeper into each item later on but the purpose is to help identify patterns that may be present. I’m guessing that most people would associate being fired as feeling some level of nonacceptance. Another example could be when you won an award at school and everyone came up and was patting you on the back and giving you accolades. That would probably fall under the acceptance header. One important thing to remember here is that this isn’t about negative versus positive it’s just about learning how to identify feelings.
The main purpose of learning how to identify feelings is so that feelings do not control your life. Feelings are simply messengers that can tell us many many things. I’ve heard so many people say, I don’t know why I do that or they say something like, that’s just the way I am. What if we all understood why it is that we do particular things? I believe that our world would be much more loving, compassionate, empathetic, and understanding of others. There is no greater skill that we can have in life than the ability to “know thy self”!
I’ll start off with some personal examples just to get the juices flowing in the mind. Some of the examples below are real and Some are just examples:
Won medal in wrestling/Accepted
Landed a new job/accepted
Did a charity 10K fun run/accepted
Was told that the B on my report card could have been in A if I had worked harder/not accepted
Girlfriend /boyfriend breaks up with you/not accepted
Told that the assignment turned in at work wasn’t good enough/not accepted
You’re overweight/not accepted
Your body looks amazing/excepted
Is this the best that you can do/not accepted
Thank you so much for your effort/accepted
You’re a loser/not accepted
You’re a winner/accepted
You’re capable of doing anything you put your mind to/accepted
Those are some easy ones but now I’ll show you where these things are hidden within our lives.
You cannot leave the table until you finish all of the food on your plate/not accepted
You should be grateful for what you have/not accepted
I did not have it as good as you do when I was a kid followed by the old statement of, I had to walk uphill both ways to school in the snow so you should feel fortunate/not accepted
You are a spoiled little s&$!/not accepted
Your feelings don’t matter/not accepted
Who cares what you think/not accepted
You are the reason that (fill in the blank)/not accepted
I don’t understand why you can’t just remember what we did yesterday/not accepted. 
I could keep going forever but hopefully the point has been brought to the surface. I’ll be perfectly honest and say some of these are from my own life. Others are from the vibes of people that I talk to. Some are from people that I worked with.
When you get into studying the human they say that the two things that people want most our love and acceptance. We will do almost anything to feel love and acceptance. They may be synonymous meaning that love creates the feeling of acceptance or feeling except it creates the feeling of love. Neither is right or wrong it is just information for the individual.
For many reasons much deeper than I can explain here there has been a transition to a me me mentality that has ramped up over the past 10+ years or maybe longer. What that has spread to is a blame mentality almost as if we are keeping score. There is such a desire to win that we have disconnected from the people that we call the losers. I get sports because it is a game in there will always be a winner and a loser. However the majority of us are not playing sports we are simply trying to survive and get through life the best we can. As things like AI comes online the human experience is being dehumanized. At the end of the day we are all just people and people have emotions. People usually learn by observing and doing. our brains are forming the most and gathering information in the early years which is usually spent watching our parents. We do what they did, they do with their parents did, they do it their parents did, and so on and so on and so on. I’m not saying that there is a literal copycat effect but very much of what we see we end up doing, or saying, or acting like.
One might see something and see that it is wrong , although wrong and right is often times based on one’s perception of something. Even that statement alone might create a charge in somebody based of a perception and that is OK because the first thing that all of us were granted is free will.  We hear things like wrong is wrong and right is right.  but my question is, who was it that is granted the power to define wrong versus right in all situations. I am not speaking of things like crime but even crime or what we determined as crime divides Many of us. An example of this would be Cannabis. There are many who believe that it is a crime but then there are also many that believe that it is our right. That’s not the point of this discussion so we won’t go there.
The main point of this post is to highlight these events in life called traumas and also talk about mental illness. I like to keep things simple in the find a trauma hours in event or situation that creates a reaction. That may be too generic for some but that’s OK. To keep it simple, I would say that mental illness is the brains inability to understand a situation possibly such as a trauma.
The oxford language is definition of a trauma is a deeply distressing or disturbing experience. The mayo clinic defines mental illness as a disorder that affects your mood, thinking and behavior. So now we go back to the list. Let’s use the example of the statement, is this the best that you can do? I would imagine that for many people that could create the Oxford definition of a trauma being that when somebody says something like that to them it creates a deeply distressing or disturbing experience. Then if that is followed by the mayo clinics definition of mental illness and it affects ones mood, thinking, or behavior, the percentage of people who have experienced this is probably much much higher than the people who haven’t. It’s essentially all of us to some point
A simple way to check and see if you have experience this is to ask yourself the question if you have experienced it and then simply close your eyes and sit in a quiet area and I can almost guarantee you that within 1 to 3 minutes you’ll have an image of a time in your life that fits the definition to each of those. We are not talking about what we call big T traumas, we are talking about situations like I noted at the beginning.
I have been blessed in the past 7 to 10 years to learn from some of the greatest doctors in the world and they have simply helped me create an awareness. However, the first step in awareness is connecting with others whether that be in person, through the Internet, or through books so that you can learn about what is taking place. The irony is that nearly anything else in life that we want to learn about we use that same approach so that we can learn and better understand for a variety of reasons. Maybe it’s for work but it can also be simply to understand and be aware. There seems to be an incredible stigma around the word trauma and the words mental illness. Words like shame & guilt too many times stop amazing, loving, compassionate, empathetic people from simply raising their hand and helping them better understand the feelings that they have. Then when people bring up their feelings, often times they are told that they cannot feel that way which creates another spiral of feelings. They cannot feel the way that they feel because others have not been taught how to help them with the way they feel. 
The unfortunate part is that we are not taught how to deal with these things as we grow up with your what are called the informative years. Much of this is driven by fear. Fear of rejection or as I stated in the beginning, fear of acceptance. If we think about it from a primal level we all started off as hunters in preparers. Men went out and hunted the food and most of the time the women prepared the food and then we would repeat the pattern day after day after day. When a hunter became ill or got hurt he was not able to hunt or assist in contributing to the tribe which was probably a pretty scary feeling. Many times it came down to the cold hard fact that there was just one more mouths to feed that was not giving back. 
We must realize that it is the year 2024 and we do not have to Hunt for food anymore because we can just go buy it. The hunters can be the preparers in the preparers can be the hunters. It happens all the time. However we see time and time again that that primal mentality is still present. A few things that dissolve this fear is true love, kindness, empathy, and understanding.  awareness and love are the most powerful tools that we all have. We can get by when unexpected things come up. Yeah just like in the primal times, the better we are at hunting and gathering and preparing the easier it is for everyone. I understand it is not always easy but if we look at life, was it ever really easy? There are always exceptions but hating/disliking those that put in more work, a.k.a. better prepare doesn’t help anyone. 
If there’s a pattern in your life that keeps popping up I could almost guarantee you that the simple exercise of writing them down on a piece of paper and then noting the acceptance or non-acceptance feeling will help you identify where it happened. The beauty of this work is that there’s no blame because the goal is to simply create awareness so that each of us can move on and live life without those little tiny weights that are carried around in the metaphorical backpack. Too many little weights start to feel like a lot of big weights and that’s tough for anyone.
God bless you all and may you be free of any of the weights of nonacceptance collected through life and replace them with beautiful feelings of acceptance and love. 
❤️🙏

