How to Accept the Non-Acceptance 🙏🏻

The final call for our retreat, and the 3 stages of radical acceptance.

This is the final boss of Radical Acceptance.

The upper echelons of spiritual process.

The reconcilitation of paradox, and the inevitable convergence of opposites.

There is a 3-part process to digesting acceptance, but if you’re not careful, you’ll get stuck in the quicksand of part two like countless among us…

Part 1 – Don’t Accept, Suffer.

Part One might be called the ‘default human condition in modern society’. 

Plagued with various manifestations of non-acceptance, you suffer. You don’t accept your body, your culture, your environment, your past, your present, your bank balance, the way you smile, how your friend sneezes, or how your partner dresses when you go out for nice meals. 

This non-acceptance inevitably gives rise to a series of narratives and their associated emotional content. Jealousy, anger, envy, resentment, depression, disappointment – the polycule of psychic itches. 

Dissatisfaction writ large. 

Part 2 – The Two Paths.

No one wants to suffer, and two paths are taken at this point: violent rebellion, or wholesale acceptance. 

Violent rebellion gives you the do-it-by-force family of misfits, the hustle-grind, motivation world. David Goggins and his lackeys. Punishment of Self to the Promised Land beyond Suffering. Or, more accurately, creating the Promised Land out of Suffering. 

Or the second group: wholesale acceptance. 

The ‘love and light’, everything is perfect, blessed spiritual rainbow community. They go the exact opposite direction, radical acceptance of the here and now, as best they can, as completely as they can. 

This is the path that I took. There is merit, wisdom, and value to be found here. 

But it is incomplete. 

This community falls victim to spiritual bypassing, of painting over the disgusting, the abhorrent, the morally perverse, and the unacceptable with the broad brush strokes of Divine Perfection. 

It’s all perfect, they say. The abuse I’m taking from my partner is part of my karma. The pain I feel is resistance to the perfection of reality. Or the outlandish stories that the child in Gaza whose parents, siblings grandparents, friends, and community were bombed into unrecognizability were completing their karmic soul contracts with Eternity and ‘called it in’ for themselves. Any ‘negative response’ to that is unresolved triggers or mismanaged emotions, and they need a somatic breathwork session to move through it. 

This approach highlights a fundamental shortcoming: unconsciously, unspokenly, there remains a vast swath of the human experience they are not accepting. 

Even in the middle of radical acceptance, much of conscious experience is rejected. 

Part 3 – Accepting Non-Acceptance.

What is missed harkens us a clear indication of incomplete non-dual integration. 

The feelings of non-acceptance, of resistance in all forms, are part of reality to be accepted and integrated, like anything else in experience.

Are you unhappy with your present circumstances? Good! Use the sacred fire that the dissatisfaction gives you to drive change. Are you disgusted by the state of your culture? Excellent. Use it to enter the arena of cultural architecture and shape the future. 

The existence and experience of non-acceptance, from anger, sadness, disgust, horror, fear, confusion, hurt, and heartache isn’t a sign of your weakness, it’s here to be accepted and integrated as part of consciousness. 

It is true that with radical acceptance, individuals converge toward a more emotionally balanced disposition, but that doesn’t mean entire categories of human experience disappear. 

People in the spiritual community I’ve met harbor an unconscious belief that if they “do the work properly,” entire aspects of emotional experiences like anger, sadness, and confusion will disappear like smoke fading into the atmosphere. This is not true. They continue to arise. And they can be accepted as they are, not as indicators of anything else, but as a direct part of the human experience.

Accept Non-Acceptance. Use it. Work with it. Notice where resistance arises, and what it beckons you toward. 

The adventure of your lifetime might be waiting for you there.

We help people digest non-acceptance, and turn it into a healthy fuel source for a brilliant life of aligned action and deep engagement.

The doors to the retreat close this week.

The final space is available to you, should you rise and take it.

With love and acceptance,
Eric Brown & the Apotheosis team.