Radical Acceptance: What to do When You Have Come to the Frayed & Raw Edges of Life

Photo of old cabin with a view - Helena, Montana (2006). Copyright SJPhotography.

Radical Acceptance: What to do When You Have Come to the Frayed & Raw Edges of Life

There are points in life where you have reached its beginning, its ending, and circumnavigated its edges, and you come to the rawness of life. You have searched, researched, studied, asked, sought, learned, educated yourself and gained credentials, and spent thousands of hours and dollars on your attempts for healing. You have tried endlessly to describe and talk it out with someone else who might have the wisdom of traumatic experiences and resolution to help you. You have staked yourself onto the hard ground of life as the guinea pig – the one to experiment on to find healing, safety, and resolution and try to move past surviving to thriving.

The best minds in mental health aren’t the docs. They’re the trauma survivors who have had to figure out how to stay alive for years with virtually no help.

_Dr. Glenn Doyle, “Just So Ya Know: 30 Things To Keep In Mind While Rebuilding Your Life”

The search feels endless and so we carry on reviewing the newest books and teachings, listening to the latest psychologists, and therapists, attending seminars and retreats, and poring over more research marketed as the magic elixir to heal the past, dissolve the wounds of childhood, and bring forgiveness and rebirth to the traumatized life; anything to let us just be and fill our lungs with full breaths, relax our bellies, and find relief, and ease. We find tiny gems of wisdom and resonance in these things, scour and screenshot bite-sized missives from social media reels and memes as we gather every piece of resonant intel. We string together a necklace of pearls – jewels of wisdom and knowledge threaded onto our string of life. Nuggets of understanding that meet our heart and speak to our aching soul, mind, and body. We hold onto these tiny pearls of insight as the objects that may help us take another step forward and then another step, and another.

Inner strength comes only to those who move forward in the face of adversity.

_Dr. Phil Stutz, “Coming Alive: 4 Tools to Defeat Your Inner Enemy, Ignite Creative Expression & Unleash Your Soul's Potential”

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You surf the waves of life’s losses, ride the next wave of gains, and lose footing in the next. There is an unceasing and easy uncertainty in life that over time makes it seem strangely tolerable but disconcerting at the same time. Maybe you have begun to feel the absurdity of where you think you should be in life yet find yourself far from what you conceived and wonder “how did I get here? Maybe you have begun to recognize the nonsensical nature of life and the world we inhabit. Maybe you have noticed it but without corroboration dismissed its coming as ambiguous, and labeled it just more grief. As we try to live our life as we think it should be lived and fight against what is – we suffer and battle harder against pushbacks and upsets, and suffer more. Yet when we recall the times in our life when we found ourselves in the flow of things – accepting what was and finding peace in the moment we see how in surrendering to the current of life we were ceaselessly carried along without fail.

Happiness is to align what we want with what is; unhappiness is the attempt to align what is with what we want.

_Eckhart Tolle, “The Power of Now”