I'd Like to Hear Your Thoughts on Acceptance

I just remembered that I had highlighted the 13th section of the Tao Te Ching in my book. Since we are talking about acceptance, I wanted to hear you guys thoughts on it:

Accept disgrace willingly.
Accept misfortune as the human condition.

What do you mean by "Accept disgrace willingly"?
Accept being unimportant.
Do not be concerned with loss and gain.
This is called "accepting disgrace willingly."

What do you mean by "Accept misfortune as the human condition"?
Misfortune comes from having a body.
Without a body, how could there be misfortune?

Surrender yourself humbly; then you can be trusted to care for all things.
Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things.

"Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery." - JK Rowling

Rosalyn J wrote: Of the three, understanding stood out to me as probably one of the most difficult. So what is it that we are "understanding"

To understand something you have to find a way to relate to it. If you read peoples' journals here they mostly come up with different understandings of each lesson, but that's because they relate to it in different ways. If understanding is the path to acceptance that one chooses, then one has to be able to relate to what they're trying to accept. It could another person's opinion, world view, action, a death, some event that happened in your life; It could be anything.

In order to relate to something, I personally like the Buddhist idea of always trying to look at something from a compassionate standpoint. Example: Somebody hurt you. OKay. Why would they have done that? Could there be a reason to which you could relate? Yes. Can you find a way to be compassionate towards them in light of this realization? Hopefully. If you can, then you can accept their action and go from there.

Go where? That's up to the individual. It all depends on the individual, but forgiveness is usually a good next step.

If people weren't so self obsessed they would have no reason to worry

If you can put your self aside, you can do things for the whole world, if you love the whole world like this then ..................You are truly ready to serve it

Acceptance for me is the wisdom to know "that's the way it is" regardless of what "it" implies.

rugadd wrote: Acceptance for me is the wisdom to know "that's the way it is" regardless of what "it" implies.

That's how I see acceptance, but I make one addition. Acceptance is not the same as saying that we can't change the way it is, it's just acknowledging that that's the way things are now. Some times we can't change them, some times we can. To me part of acceptance is knowing if we can or should change things.

For example: I can accept that I have cancer and do everything in my power to fight it. Not accepting cancer would be denying that I have it.

Nicely put, Goken. Part of my "that's just the way it is" inslcudes myself and what I can(or cannot) do about it.