No time like the present! Desire and Radical Acceptance
I’m sitting on my bed and my dog and cat are sleeping at my feet. I hear music playing from my phone, muffled under the pillows. There are moments like this one that remind us to listen, and I’m sure yours look a little different. In these spaces it seems as though the pace is so slow that it’s stillness demands your attention. Suddenly, you are where you are, and your mind goes to address the depth of the current experience.
Imagine your mind is a house. Your attention walks the halls, investigating the contents hidden behind doors. They look at fears, anxieties, memories, future goals, aspirations, interests, or whatever stimuli your mind is consuming; each hidden behind some door, occupying some room. Sometimes they are unfamiliar things, or uncomfortable, or they aren’t.
When you live inside your head, your attention is primarily internal, the external world muted by its poor placement in another less desirable realm. Imagine hearing cars hum on the street outside your windows. You walk ceaselessly through the house; you don’t often leave it.
The last time I wrote on here I talked about transitory experience, and I spoke about resistance. This in some ways is a continuation of that. If you are a person in the world, odds are resistance is something familiar to you, whether you think it or not.
Like I said last time, resistance is innately linked to desire. I think of resistance as a psychic process, an internal friction that we develop in service of our egos to preserve thought patterns that protect us emotionally, physically, etc. These are sequences of actions that demand repetition. Simply put, our brains like routine; even what we feel is our chaos, is a part of a wider pattern.
So back to desire. Desire is wanting. You have tons of wants. Some are necessary and they allow us to act in service of better circumstances. We don’t like where we are, what we are offering or being offered, or really whatever it is that our dissatisfaction has latched onto, we want to change that.
Odds are, most of your accomplishments are owed to your wants. They can be incredibly progressive. Resistance is active, after all.
I want to be clear that I am not saying resistance is entirely regressive, or that it always maintains the status quo. What I mean to say is that desire is an awareness of what is not immediately available, and therefore takes place outside of presence.
Because desire occurs exclusively in past and future tenses, we spend this time abandoning right now, and cradling ourselves in what we want or what we wish we could change about the past.
Where this becomes a problem is a fine line that I will never fully be able to sift out. However, I think it involves the perceivable ‘locality’ of the thought. What I mean by this is I think desire becomes regressive when the thought of ‘want’ is attached to uncontrollable external forces (i.e. anything not available in the present).
Now you might say, how do you get anything done if you don’t consider the future or the past? First, I would say to never take anything as true all the time, there are exceptions to every rule, and it is unfair to your mind to rely on certainty in any conversation.
Second, I would say, well, I think we must consider that desire is active, and we cannot act on past or future circumstances. In that way, we cannot satisfy that desire, we are longing for what we cannot immediately receive. It’s like driving into a wall if the walls were the confines of presence. Resistance.
However, we can work in the present moment to achieve an eventual outcome. This is where wants can be progressive. It’s where wants can attach to controllable internal forces. We can motivate ourselves, engage with our surroundings. Active, remember that.
The problem then occurs somewhere between wanting better for us and a pattern of dissatisfaction that exempts us from opportunities to enjoy our immediate experience, or even to be excluded from our own embodiment.
How can we toe the line? Well, when we talk about resistance, we must talk about acceptance. Remember that resistance is active, acceptance is passive. This isn’t to say that we should accept poor treatment, or the horrors of the world. Tara Brach has a fantastic definition of acceptance in her book, Radical Acceptance. I’d recommend reading it if you haven’t already.
Essentially, it outlines radical (meaning root) acceptance (meaning surrender) to say that at the root of our circumstance we can accept their current state.
This does NOT mean that we are passive victims to our circumstances, but rather we allow ourselves the right to be alive in the circumstance that we are already within.
I was introduced to this concept at a particularly awful time in my life. I was, at the time, within circumstances that demanded significant mourning, following the loss of a childhood best friend and my mother just 4 months after. I remember thinking, yeah right, I will never accept these things, because in all honesty, I shouldn’t have had to.
But we all have something like this, something that is so unbelievably uncomfortable, so cruel or painful, why should we accept that these bad things happen?
Well, it was made clear early in the book that this really had nothing to do with saying these things were okay with me, or that I was inviting or allowing more grief into my life. But rather, it was suggesting that these were my circumstances, despite how much I wished they weren’t. Those events and their impacts were the reality of my life at the time (and still ongoing) and there was nothing I could or can do to change it.
It became evident after a certain point that I was doing myself a disservice holding onto the weight of the grief. I pretended it could be alchemized into something that I could easily digest. But life is hard on the stomach, things aren’t always going to be palatable.
It was through this that I was denying myself the warmth and comfort of the present, and the opportunity to sit alongside my discomfort and offer it the attention it needed.
In short, I had to leave the house for a moment, I had to look around outside. But I really didn’t want to.
Still, radical acceptance quickly held hands with meditation, and the CBT and DBT treatments I received in the years since. I want to be clear that it has been 5 years since I learned about this concept, and I can say with confidence that I will be its student until it is my turn to die. But this is still an important part of the practice, in my human estimation.
Presence and radical acceptance unite along the principle that it is okay to sit in the centre of desire and say there is nothing to be done. It also means I can weave my fingers through my wishes and identify the parts of each one that can be addressed. For example, if they were wishes for more comfort, I could then ask how can I bring comfort to myself with what I have available?
At the same time, I was incredibly angry with God. Though I didn’t even believe in him, the circumstances felt personal. I doubled down on my atheism (which I no longer subscribe to either) and I stripped my worldview bare. This anger and destruction being far easier than believing it was okay for two very important people to cease to exist, especially so young. Frankly, if one more person was going to tell me it was a part of some plan, I was going to lose it.
Over time, I had essentially allowed my grief to multiply, to extend to other parts of my life that quickly also became endings. I dropped out of school, I moved home, and left that part of my life behind. These were not unnecessary grievances, but certainly the capacity to which I suffered could have been lessened had I not been so eager to resist my circumstances, and to hide behind my anger.
I spent the months following each of their passings attempting to further isolate myself from my peers, I was adamant that no one could or would understand and I wanted my suffering to match how I thought I should feel given ‘god’s plan’.
But eventually, I made some steps to alleviate the discomfort, I adopted my trusted dog Tango, started some medication, landed a new, less stressful job, and I re-enrolled in school the following year when I felt ready. All of which I would not have done had I not accepted that this pain was no longer necessary, and that I simply did not deserve to suffer for as long as I had been.
None of these were aimed to change the loss of my friend and my mom, but instead to make my grieving more comfortable. Now imagine this in the context of other hurts or dissatisfactions.
How can you look to your desires and recognize the areas that are actionable? Can we be honest with ourselves when things are beyond our control? Can we let them go?
I often tell people that my anger is what got me away from it, paradoxically. Because I was sick of feeling angry, I was upset that I was carrying so much frustration. I had to put it down. It didn’t feel fair to keep forcing that suffering, I was already in pain.
So here was the necessary call for balance, for me to sit and surrender to the unchangeable forces that I simply could not tackle (some of which I will never be able to). It meant really looking at what was within my control, and instilling trust in the natural order of things to present changes when they were within my realm of ability. Eventually, they all did.
For the most part, my world became much simpler, I no longer tried to carry the weight of objects that weren’t there, or that weren’t ready for me yet. I no longer wish to be weighed down by circumstances that are not happening, the present is hard enough as it is.
So radical acceptance, sitting in these moments that demand our attention and welcoming the realities of our surroundings, these are moments of refuge. They allow us to set down our resistance, and cope with what is immediately occurring. I still try to trade my regrets and fears for this moment, but we are human after all.
In the grand scheme of things, I’m sure these moments are less frequent than we would like them to be. Still, life is observably relational, and we bargain for our perception over our world.
These are one of the few things we have control over. We can interrupt ourselves when our resistance speaks louder than our compassion for the self or for others. No one is perfect, but we can show up for ourselves in a way that gives us permission to live with desire, without trying to dig ourselves deeper into our suffering.
We can then cultivate refuge, and like suffering, multiply its frequency as often as we can. I won’t pretend that it’s not scary, because it is. But once you welcome the fear it becomes an avenue for eventual relief. It’s like putting down a boulder and allowing your muscle to inevitably contract from bearing all that weight. It is just an adjustment pain.
So, imagine your mind is a house. Your attention walks the halls, investigating the contents hidden behind doors. But this time, you walk to a door at the end of the hall, and you open it. The sun welcomes you immediately. The sounds from the house get quieter as you walk further and further outside. You stand at a distance from that door now. You can still sense its presence, but the birds can be heard from where you stand. You see life around you. Grant yourself permission to listen.
Purchase Tara Brach's book here.