Acceptance is the Key to Healing

I was talking with someone last night who had developed an energy-draining disease. He was bitter with God, himself and life. And he was playing the victim. Life had done him wrong. It had placed him in the path of an insect that could infect him with an incurable disease. Likewise God had done him wrong by allowing this to happen. No one escaped blame for his ailment, including himself.

So I asked him “Can you accept the fact that you now have this disease? Instead of fighting reality through bitterness and blame, can you ask God to help you to take your power back from this disease by accepting that you have it and that you can’t change things back to the way they were before?” He looked pensive, but I could tell that he was beginning to understand.

I went on to say that life may be different now, it may be less pleasant in certain ways, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t work with the illness. We can befriend it and see what it has to teach us about the true value of life. We can then move forward less controlled by the illness. We can ask God to help us each day to walk with the illness instead of fighting against it. We can work to make our lives better despite the illness. We can look for the beauty that life still holds for us and the purpose that we still have to fulfill despite the trappings of the disease.

We all have the ability to take the sting out of anything negative that happens to us by grieving our loss and then accepting the reality of the situation. This moves us forward toward healing and an overall happier life. When we choose to play the victim, we are insisting that reality be what we want (which is denial of the truth and insanity on our behalf) and we choose to blame everyone for the fact that reality is no longer what we desire. We stay stuck in our misery. And this is exactly where this man was who spoke to me last night.

He simply needed someone to open a door for him; to provide him with a new way to consciously and spirituality deal with his dilemma. There’s nothing that can happen to us in this life that can completely rob us of our joy and gratitude for life—unless we choose to give our joy and gratitude away voluntarily. 

The lesson we all need to learn—when bad things happen—is that we have the power to retain our own sense of well-being. We can work hand in hand with our Higher Power to maintain ownership of our lives and our happiness. It will mean that we will have to grieve our losses, but after grieving and accepting them, we will have the inherent power we need to move forward with grace, dignity and a new sense of purpose and contentment—and eventually happiness