To experience unconditional happiness you need to accept the way things are. You can work to change the way things are, but to be happy, you also have to emotionally accept them as they are right now. You have to loosen the hold of your desire for things to be different than as they are. Any emotional attachment to a desire for things to be different will hold your attention, and prevent you from finding happiness. If you make happiness contingent upon things being other than as they are, you cannot find lasting happiness.
Acceptance involves three separate actions:
• You need to know the way things are.
• You need to accept your responsibility for your experience of the way things are.
• You need to emotionally accept the way things are.
Knowing the Way Things Are
Acceptance of the way things are is difficult. Some of that difficulty arises from not really knowing the truth of things. It is hard to accept something if you do not know its nature. Often when we do not understand something, we fear the worst, and when fear gets involved, acceptance is difficult. Knowing the truth of things, through study, mindfulness, and meditation, can make acceptance easier. I talk about mindfulness and meditation in Chapters 8 to 10.
Accepting Your Responsibility for Your Experience of the Way Things Are
In Chapter 4, I talk about the way you experience your world, and how your experience of the world is your own creation. I do not say that you create your world. Some believe this, but I do not experience myself as creating the actual world, so I have nothing to say about it. I do acknowledge, however, that the way I experience the world is my own doing. It is my responsibility.
As I say in Chapter 4, quoting Swami Satchidananda, depending on how you perceive your situation, “the same world can be a heaven or a hell.” [114] Part of acceptance is recognizing and accepting your responsibility for the internal version of reality that you have created for yourself.
Emotionally Accepting Things as They Are
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of acceptance is emotional. To accept something fully, you have to emotionally accept it. For purposes of this discussion, emotional acceptance means not making your happiness depend on things “going your way.” In other words, your life need not be a particular way for you to be happy. Emotional acceptance is not allowing your happiness to be held hostage to the way things are.
An important aspect of being human is that we care about specific things. In addition, we have ideas about what we care about. Some center on the way life is going, and others on the way life should be going. Once we have our ideas, desires, and opinions in place, we do not like to change them. The self-centered self sits at the center of all of this caring, feverishly orchestrating.
Not only do we care about “things,” but we are emotionally attached to them as well. Most of the time we condition our emotional feeling of happiness on circumstances being a certain pleasing way. One of the Buddha’s central teachings was that the dissatisfaction with life that makes us unhappy comes from self-centered desires for things to be other than as they are.
Sometimes we consciously know that situations are not as we would have them be, and this makes us unhappy. Other times we may be unable to consciously see that things are not quite “right,” yet some unconscious part of our mind knows that they are not, and this makes us unhappy.
If you can learn to emotionally accept the way things are, regardless of how they are, you can allow yourself to be happy. Accepting things as they are, you allow what you care about to be as it is. You needn’t let go of your ideas about how things should be. You need only acknowledge the way things are, and then emotionally accept them.
Emotional acceptance is never easy. However, until you can do so, you may be dooming yourself to a life of frustration and unhappiness.
For example, we will all die. There can be only one way to deal with this fact: you have to emotionally accept it, and then proceed to live your life. Living with the certainty that death can come at any time, if fully accepted, will have a powerful and positive effect on your life. Learning to accept death may be the first and most essential step you take in accepting life as it is. Such acceptance is a major step toward unconditional happiness.
The following well-known part of the “Serenity Prayer,” generally attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), encapsulates a large part of what it means to accept something emotionally. You can find the entire prayer in Chapter 19.
God, give me the grace to accept with serenity
The things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things which should be changed
And the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
Changing What Should Be Changed, While Emotionally Accepting Things as They Are
If you find things unsatisfactory in your life, by all means work to change them. However, as you do so, try not to tie your happiness to the way you want your life to be. Adopt an attitude of emotionally accepting circumstances as they are, for as long as they are that way. Such acceptance enables you to remain happy and focused as you work to make things right.
Acceptance does not mean passivity or fatalism in response to a situation. It means acknowledging it for what it is, and not allowing personal happiness to be affected by it. You accept something as it is, and then if anything is wrong with it, you try to change it, all the while emotionally accepting the way it is.
In accepting something as it is, you can see it - and yourself in relation to it — clearly. In addition, by accepting something as it is, your emotions do not get in the way of what you want or need to do to change the way it is.
Let me illustrate emotional acceptance with the following example.
While Henry was in his second year of college, his father died, so Henry had to leave school to get a low-paying job to help support his mother and younger sister. He plans to return to school in a few years, after his sister graduates from high school. His low-paying job is unsatisfactory, but there is little he can do about it until his sister graduates.
Even though Henry is doing the right thing, he may not accept the situation emotionally. His happiness may be conditional upon being in college. Perhaps he cannot permit himself to be happy until he is back at school. In this case, his attachment to the idea that only being in college can make him happy results in his being unhappy.
On the other hand, he may fully accept the situation as it is. He can still have his desire to return to school, but he knows that he will be happy even if he does not do so. He takes the world as he finds it every day, and then works to improve it. His happiness does not depend on whether his efforts to improve his world succeed. He remains happy.
In the second scenario, Henry is more likely to get what he wants because, as indicated in Chapter 1, happy people are generally more successful than those who are not happy.
True acceptance is acceptance without reservation, without holding back, and without dissatisfaction. You might ask, if you truly accept things as they are, are you not allowing a bad situation to stay bad, and possibly get worse? The answer is no. You can emotionally accept the way things are, without reservation, and still have it as your goal to change the situation.
As I said, this acceptance is emotional acceptance. You can maintain a goal to change things, but your motivation is the fact that things are not right the way they are. Your motivation does not come from a belief that change will necessarily make you happier.
We’ve seen how unhappiness and dissatisfaction are not very good motivators. Being miserable usually does not stir you to accomplish constructive goals. Nor do happy people just loll around being happy. They tend to be “achievers.”
Harold has a new job working in a New York bank. He is exceptionally smart, but he went to a state university while his peers all attended Ivy League schools. He feels that these friends are excluding him, and this makes him unhappy. In fact, they often do exclude him. Mostly they do this unconsciously, but sometimes they consciously decide among themselves to exclude him from non-work activities, rationalizing that he may not feel comfortable or fit in.
Harold can choose to be unhappy about the situation. If he does, his unhappiness will affect his work and his chances of advancement. The better option is for him to emotionally accept the situation as it is, focus on remaining happy, and work hard to reach his goals in the company.
It is true that certain things are not acceptable, and unless you are a saint, you will likely react with distress. For example, if you are suffering from a painful illness, if your child is sick, or if you are being attacked, you will react emotionally. It is difficult to accept these kinds of situations calmly.
Most of the time, however, life’s problems are not inherently harmful to us. When we are dissatisfied with the way things are, it is usually because they do not make us happy.
Perhaps we do not like the way we look, perhaps we think people do not like us, or perhaps we do not like our boss. These are not trivial matters, but they are not harmful to us. It is possible to emotionally accept them while at the same time working to change them.
Drawing the Circle Bigger
By its very nature, your own unique perspective has much to do with the way you see the world, determining the degree to which you can emotionally accept things as they are. If your perspective is to view situations in isolation, then whatever is wrong will loom larger in your life than it actually is. But if you will “draw the circle bigger,” you can often put things in clearer perspective, so that you can easily accept them.
The Dalai Lama says:
…if difficulties come, they may appear enormous when you look at them closely, but if you approach the same problem from a wider perspective, it appears smaller. With these methods, and by developing a larger outlook, you can reduce your frustration whenever you face problems.[115]
Here is an example.
Jack is a nice-looking young man who is getting ready to go to a high school dance. Just before leaving, he spots a pimple on his chin. In his mirror, it looks enormous. He tries to cover it up, but it still shows. Self-conscious about the way he looks, Jack is made miserable by a single blemish. At the dance, his girlfriend has no idea what’s wrong. She doesn’t even notice the pimple. She worries that Jack is going to dump her.
Jack needs to draw his circle bigger. His blemish is a minor thing for everyone else, but because his focus on it is so narrow, it is a major issue to him. He just needs to accept it, and get on with his life.
Letting Go of the Emotional Need to Control Things
There periodically comes a point when everything seems perfect, yet one stands there with an anxious look on one’s face saying, “I don’t know — something’s just not right!” We do not know what that “something” may be, but it nags at us. We cannot let it go. We cannot accept things as they are, and we are not happy. Why is this?
I imagine a mother, just before her daughter’s wedding. She has been preparing this wedding for a year. Her daughter is happy and in love, the guests are happy, the father of the bride is happy, but the mother is not happy. She keeps looking for things that are wrong. She frowns at a place setting that is a little out of place. She notices that the waiter has a spot on his coat and that the room is a little warm. These things get fixed, but still she looks for things to be wrong. Why is she doing this?
The mother of the bride may be demonstrating her need to control the way things are. Even if nothing is wrong, she stands there, in control, waiting to do something or fix something. The last hurdle before acceptance is the latent desire to control what happens around you.
To allow things to be as they are, without feeling the emotional need to control them, is a significant shift in the way of being in the world. It may feel like you are letting your guard down.
Periodically, we all have to make the final shift to the acceptance of the way things are. To find unconditional happiness, we have to give up control (or illusions of control) and allow things to be as they are.
You do not necessarily have to let your guard down in order to accept things. You just need to let go of your emotional need to control things.
Do Not Be Afraid to Be Happy
There is a strain of thinking in Western culture that says that too much happiness is not good. It may even be wrong to look for happiness. I suppose that some people subscribe to this thinking. Honestly, I have never met people like this, but I am sure they exist.
These people aside, almost everyone just wants to be — and enjoys being — happy. Therefore, this book is just about being happy for no reason other than the one that is most important: we want to be happy. The great success, better relationships, and longer and healthier lives of happy people are just bonuses.
Here is a little experiment. Try to imagine that you are happy right now, deeply happy. Imagine that you are happy without anything in your life changing. If you can imagine this, how does it feel to you? Does it feel a little odd? Does it feel a little crazy?
My belief is that it is crazy not to feel happy all the time. As long as you are not currently suffering a trauma, there is no reason not to feel happy.
I believe, however, that much of the time we cannot let ourselves be happy. We may hold back out of guilt about being too happy. Perhaps we feel that we do not deserve happiness, or that if we were happy, we might let our guard down for a moment - — just long enough for the world to come crashing down on us. We would then (the subconscious reasoning goes) be more unhappy than ever.
Fear of releasing one’s guard is especially common among victims of trauma, such as abused women and children, and veterans with PTSD. Because of their experiences, they may feel, with good reason, that they can never let their guard down.
It is true that happy people are less alert for danger. Our genetic coding, inherited from primitive times, may link being too happy with being inattentive to threats to our safety. Living in a constant state of alert probably insured our survival in the jungles and plains of long ago.
Most people reading this book live in the developed world and in relatively safe communities where they can afford to be happy, and relax. Yet they do not do so! Now, the anxiety that kept us alive 100,000 years ago can kill us. Stress-related diseases, such as hypertension, cause many deaths. On the other hand, attack in the night, which we may still be unconsciously on the alert for, is rare.
The unhappiness and stress of being constantly alert to danger used to be adaptive, and helped us to survive. Now it does more harm than good, while learning to relax and be happy is what can ensure a long and healthy life.