true acceptance

One thing I reflected after meditation tonight:  true acceptance is very hard to attain, if it is actually attainable at all. It is so precisely because there is no method of bringing about a controlled result or state of acceptance. In meditation, it seems to happen when I have ‘given up’ all the strategies I have concocted to obtain some special state of mind or feeling. Of course, it doesn’t mean that I passively drift. I think that it entails that I am determined to stay on the meditative method for its own sake, rather than trying to find something arising from it. And in that process, an experience can happen where I turn to whatever I cannot accept about that experience, and I embrace it in spite of all the initial opposition I created in my mind to that experience or idea. 

And where does that embrace come from? I think that it comes from an insight that the suffering of trying to reject the experience is actually much more than the experience itself. So one must go through this process where they come to realize or understand the suffering they inflict upon themselves, before an acceptance is possible.

In other words, I get a sense that acceptance cannot be known positively. Rather it seems to arise from going through a whole bundle of actions that resist pain or try to seek something that isn’t in existence. When I finally come to terms with the fact that these actions are futile and pain will exist no matter what, that seems to be when I can truly and wholeheartedly turn to the painful experience and own it as my own.