03
The third learning
Acceptance, Surrender, Letting Go and Living Now
Beginning from what is actually true — which is the only place anything can be changed from.
The third learning Understand
What this actually means.
Acceptance is the most misread of the eight learnings, and the misreading is always the same one: that accepting something means approving of it, or deciding not to act.
It means neither. Acceptance is the moment you stop arguing with what has already happened. The traffic is already stopped. The email has already been sent. The person is already behaving the way they are behaving. You can spend the next hour insisting that this should not be the case — a great many of us do — or you can start from here.
Almost none of the heat is in the event. Nearly all of it is in the meaning we attached to it.
Notice how much of an ordinary bad day is made of that second thing. Somebody did not reply. That is the event. They are ignoring me, they do not respect my time, this is what always happens — that is the meaning. The event took a second. The meaning can take the rest of the afternoon.
Surrender, in Vernon and Katey's use of the word, is not defeat either. It is the release of the demand that reality should have been different. What is left when that demand goes is usually a much clearer view of what can be done next — and considerably more energy with which to do it.
And living now is what becomes possible once you are no longer at war with a moment that has already passed.
Reflect
Pause & reflect
Think of something that frustrated you this week.
Was the event itself the source of the frustration — or the meaning you gave it?
Practise
Two lines, two minutes.
Separate
Take the thing that annoyed you today. Write what happened in one sentence — only what a camera would have recorded. Then write, underneath, what you decided it meant. Read them back. They are two different sentences, and only one of them actually happened.
Apply
Choose where you are standing.
Same learning. The lens changes what it asks of you — and your choice is remembered on every other page, until you change it.
Acceptance, in a life
Most everyday frustration is the distance between what you expected and what happened. Acceptance is not approval and it is not resignation — it is agreeing to start from where you actually are, which is the only place anything can be changed from.
Where are your expectations quietly setting you up to be disappointed?
Acceptance, in a leadership role
Resistance to uncertainty is expensive. Leaders who cannot accept the situation in front of them spend their energy arguing with it — and make slower, narrower decisions as a result. Accepting the facts early is what buys you the room to act on them.
Which reality are you and your team still negotiating with instead of planning around?
Explore
Everything connected to this learning.
Read
Those who seek the way let go of something every day
A short reflection on Lao Tzu, and on subtraction as a method.
Listen
Letting go — Wu Wei
A guided meditation on releasing effort, from the Deep Relaxation collection.
Listen
Active surrendering
From Healing the Spirit — surrender as something you do, not something that happens to you.
Read on
Living Stress-Free
The book-length treatment of why we manufacture most of our own stress.
Study
The Way Course
All eight learnings, structured — personally or across an organisation.
For leaders
Deciding under uncertainty
What acceptance costs, and returns, in a leadership role.