One step beyond accepting whatever is happening is loving it. Once we accept what's happening, then we might as well love it. Loving whatever is happening just means getting involved, or absorbed, in it, jumping right into it and having the full experience of it. Thinking dilutes experience and keeps us from fully immersing in whatever we are doing. Thoughts accompany most experiences, and keep our attention from being completely on whatever experience we are having. Whatever you are doing, really do that, jump in with both feet. If you're going to eat that piece of cake, then really experience it, unaccompanied by thoughts of guilt or strategies for how you will make up for the calories.
So often, we commit to doing something without really committing to it. We have one foot in an experience and one foot out of it. While we are doing something, we question whether we want to be doing it, complain about it, or think about something else. Being involved with our thoughts dilutes the experience we are having. It removes us from that experience and makes it hard to enjoy the experience.
If you can't commit to being fully in an experience, then one option might be to not do it at all. Do you really need to do it or do it at this time? The ego pushes us to do things on its timetable and to do things aligned with its goals. It pushes us to do something and complains about doing what it's pushing us to do. If you're going to do something, then commit to doing it with joy. If you can't do something with joy, then consider not doing it at all or not doing it just then, if you can.
Any experience can be enjoyable if our attention is fully committed to it. The secret to enjoying life is committing our attention to whatever we are doing. When we do that, we land in the Now and in Essence, and Essence loves life. As long as we continue to give our attention to what we are experiencing, we will feel love for life, however life happens to be showing up.
Giving our attention to what we are doing is much more difficult when we are doing something we don't like to do. If we didn't like doing something in the past, we often assume we won't like doing it again, but do you really know that? The reason we don't like doing something is because the mind gives us reasons for not liking it: Doing it is uncomfortable, messy, hard, tiring, scary, and so on. Such complaints seem reasonable from the ego's standpoint. However, we can love doing something even though it's uncomfortable, messy, hard, tiring, scary or whatever. Besides, no experience can be summed up in a few words. These are the ego's stories, which don't capture the entire, real experience. The mind emphasizes the negatives and ignores the positives. When we focus on the negatives, they become magnified, and the rest recedes into the background. The result is that we have a negative experience.
Essence loves experiences the ego considers unpleasant just as much as it loves pleasant ones. It doesn't categorize life as good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, like the ego does. It doesn't evaluate or judge like the ego does. “Pleasant” and “unpleasant” aren't in Essence's vocabulary. Whatever is, is just the way it is, without a particular definition. Accessing the part of us, Essence, that loves the experience we are having is always possible, but to do that, we have to ignore the ego's point of view.
Complaining about something while we are doing it makes it impossible to enjoy it. Check it out for yourself: Has complaining ever improved an experience? What happens when you give up your complaints and become absorbed in the experience rather than in the pain, discomfort, or resistance to it? Without the ego's complaints and fears, even physical pain can be accepted and more easily endured. Without the mind's complaints, enjoying, or at least accepting, anything is possible.
The ego likes to complain because complaining gives it something to talk about. The chatterbox mind has to say something! So the mind finds something it doesn't like and gets very busy building a case against it. The problem is, if we are complaining about something when we're doing it, complaining becomes our experience of doing it, and we're no longer having the full experience of the Now.
To love what we are experiencing, all it takes is our attention. When we give our attention to something, love flows to it. So if you want to love what you're experiencing instead of resist it, give it your attention. That's the antidote to the ego's resistance. If we give our attention to our resistance, we are loving resisting. Then resistance is magnified and becomes our experience.
Because the ego doesn't want to love, we have to find within us that which is willing to love life just as it is. We have to summon that to counter the ego's complaints and resistance to life. We summon, or align with, Essence by giving our full attention to the Now.
From Embracing the Now