Catherine.Flournoy

Accepting change requires letting go of how we think things should be, embracing what we have, and trusting that we will understand why change happens. Start by learning to accept the things we cannot change, changing the things we can, and having the wisdom to know the difference. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

We can all use more serenity in our lives, whether we pray for it or seek ways to create it from the inside out. Acceptance lightens us up by shifting those all too familiar and pesky heart-heavy feelings of resistance, and transmuting them into clarity and direction, time and time again.

Change isn’t all bad though. If you’re unemployed, and a job you’ve wanted becomes yours then change is more than welcome, isn’t it? Accepting change also triggers a series of realizations that one might not have been able to grasp without first accepting change, or life as it may be. If you’re wondering, how do we know when we are resisting change? Check in with your heart. Just as the heart sends good vibes and lets us know when we’re right on track, feelings of resistance weighs like a pressurized knot in the heart.

Vibrational cues are sent throughout our body to let us know whether consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously there are misaligned energies to pay attention to and release. If you are in a constant state of physical, mental or emotional dis-ease then you need to LISTEN UP. Your body never lies, but at times the mind can either be misleading or unable to grasp the actual energies, or undercurrent of energies, at work, so always check-in with your internal compass, your center, your heart, for the truth.

Practicing acceptance is a mindful exercise, and depending on what needs to be accepted or let go of, it can be downright elusive when we want to accept change the most. These six steps can help with accepting change peacefully:

1. Pause. Accept. Now, Be in the Moment.

It’s true, we’ve all thought about how we could’ve made different choices leading up to those tough times – but we had to have been operating altogether with a different awareness in order to do so. This means the frequency from which we were functioning in that moment had to be different. Knowing this now, do you feel more accepting of your past and present? If you notice a heightened shift in perspective, then the energy of your thoughts is shifting, opening your heart, subsiding your negative ego (while strengthening your positive ego) and tapping into a higher consciousness where acceptance and better choices are more accessible right in this very moment. Stick with it.

2. Acknowledge That Big ‘Ol Ego.

Undesirable change can be unsettling, especially when it involves matters of the heart. However, the uneasiness needn’t last for long. Once you experience acceptance, there is an undeniable energetic shift in your heart as much as a cerebral shift in perspective. It’s natural to feel pain but we needn’t suffer through it, unless masochism is your thing (totally cool if it is, no judgment here). Just realize that any kind of emotional and mental suffering is a function of major resistance to change that only our injured ego and heart can perform so well.

But, wait…there is relief! You see, the opposite is true too. Embracing change will bring you to a state of balance and upliftment. Be mindful and learn to identify the interconnectedness of the ego, its relationship to change and how this interplay mutes or expands the heart. Identifying this releases us and gives us the internal freedom that only we can initiate and cultivate, if we choose.

3. Live Honestly. Learn to Let Go.

Let’s not kid ourselves, mastering the art of acceptance is a constant work in progress that requires an honest inventory of the current status quo and making iterative improvements to better handle life’s ups and downs with strength and grace. The beauty is, once we’ve spent some time identifying and releasing what no longer serves us, we never lose sight of what we can achieve and what we’ve learned. Consider this the “Art of Getting Unstuck”. It’s a muddy process but well worth the effort once we clean ourselves up, begin to see the forest beyond the trees and live mindfully again.

4. Give Away What You Most Want.

Acceptance can be a difficult lesson to learn, especially if we have unresolved issues from childhood, such as consistently being faced with not being accepted one way or another: either by our parents, peers, or anyone who played a meaningful and crucial role in our young lives. However, the experiences we want the most – acceptance, patience, understanding, love, etc. – are the ones we must put into practice by freely giving these acts of kindness to ourselves and then others (practice makes perfect), especially during times of adversity. Easier said than done, initially, but never impossible.

5. Allow Your Character to Prevail.

As we strive to be more authentic and accepting of ourselves, people, events or circumstances, our true caliber comes into play when faced with elements we either wish to prevail or learn to embrace. The mind is a powerful, powerful tool – don’t let it mislead you. Your (re)actions should always serve to enhance your life not drain you of vitality. Be mindful of your disposition in every situation and stand in your power. If the temptation arises to close your heart and build a great energetic wall of China around yourself, opt instead for this exercise: silently repeat the word ‘acceptance.’ You’ll be amazed how it instantly shifts you right to the center of your heart, the safe zone. Take flight from there!

6. Don’t Be a Turkey, Cultivate Thanks Giving.

If you haven’t been able to accept change by giving thanks for past experiences and the people involved, then the growth or realization that is required to learn and move on (ie, detach) from those experiences has yet to fully culminate the valuable lessons they brought. This leaves within you an unidentified aspect of yourself that you either aren’t aware of, don’t like, or have yet to fully understand. Understanding comes with freedom and realizing your world is 100% a reflection of you, a mirror aspect, in order to accept the deeper truths about who you are. Who you are beyond the limitations of pain and suffering is absolutely more gorgeous than any “Photoshopped” image, more powerful than all the currency in the world and more lovable than Boo the cutest dog in the galaxy (and he’s terribly cute, it’s unreal). 

Change can be welcomed or unwelcomed as any experience that we had not hoped for, planned for, or somehow requires us to alter our life as we know it. If I’ve learned anything from accepting change by now it is that my inner life has greatly improved following change. If you’re seeing the same manure on different days, then freedom comes when we, at very least, recognize that patterns of self-defeating behavior do indeed repeat for our enlightenment until the message clicks, the pattern breaks, and we move on.

Often times, we break patterns through repetition to align us with our true or empowered self and the life we’re meant to live. Change also serves as an exercise to make us resilient – not resistant – to it. So, the next time someone asks, “Got change?”, say ”Yes” and give them change with the consciousness that what you are gifting will indeed initiate positive change in both of your lives. If you can remember to do this consciously, then on some level you’ve accepted change as a multifaceted opportunity to create even more freedom and deeper happiness in all areas of your life. Wishing you peace of mind and heart on your journey!

These are some excellent tools to help accept change and manage stress with ease: 

• Meditation
• Truth and Higher Teachings 
• Open Mindset: Positive, realistic and honest with an attitude of gratitude.
• Breathing: correct and conscious.
• Learning and Reading: Educate and entertain the ego through insight from “out there” [hello article]; eventually the insight gained will facilitate a shift at the core of who you are making you rely more on your inner wisdom.
• Physical Activity and Music: separate or together, depending on how you feel!

There’s a tremendous amount of grace in patience. At times it can be the most beautiful gift to give yourself and others.

I recently asked myself, how well is patience truly understood? When faced with resistance, do we take full advantage of the value that patience has to offer or is it taken for granted? Have we become impatient with ourselves and therefore with each other? How are our lovers, friends and family impatient with us? In other words, how are they mirroring an opportunity to see how we can be more patient? These days, as I look at relationships around me, it seems as though the world is saying that we can use a little more patience on our side.

But where does patience come from? It comes from knowing who you are, which starts with love.

The due diligence is in recognizing this message through the relationship we have with impatience, also known as fear, doubt or judgement, i.e., love’s opposite. Understanding patience allows us to understand ourselves, and in doing so we can change the dynamic of our relationships – with ourselves and with others – for the better.

Every experience and interaction eventually reveals its opposite, life has shown us that truth to a degree. The opposite of patience is impatience, and respectively the feelings that drive each action are love and fear. It takes knowing we have an inherent toolbox that makes us fully equipped to experience life at its best more often than at its worse.

It’s possible that we have unconsciously and unintentionally taken virtues for granted and inadvertently cultivated a behavior of lack: lacking the natural ability to access our inner toolbox of creativity such as heart centered patience even in the most trying of times. One might argue that in the most perfect and highest spiritual sense there is no such thing as good or bad, right or wrong but because we live in a world of duality we require benchmarks for discerning good and bad so we don’t actually or metaphorically kill each other through our endeavors to rise above personal struggles and therefore relationships. I for one can certainly de-clutter my path to patience and keep it nearby in my proverbial holster. In an exploration of what it means to be patient and how to get the most out of patience I came to grasp some of its benefits.

Patience & Conscious Semantics

I’m pretty much a native English speaker even though Mandarin was my first language, and Chinglish was my second while learning proper English through family, a formal education and playground slang. At times I like to look up the definition of an emotion or labeled aspect of myself that I am learning more about. I do this for several fun reasons: 1) apparently I love semantics and want to make sure I fully understand the cultural meaning of something I’m recognizing in myself in an effort to guide my process more clearly and accurately towards self understanding and therefore understanding of others, so that I am 2) better equipped to begin a process of self realization and of relating to others, starting with those really important and dear to my heart so there isn’t any confusion because 3) let’s face it, just because we’re developed enough to apply shared languages doesn’t mean we were brilliantly socialized and emotionalized to understand ideas exactly the same or always to our benefit. That’s why dictionaries are great; in times of hardship it helps to bridge communication with others and within ourselves as we find ways to express our experiences. At very least, dictionaries are entertaining.

The English dictionary’s definition of patience: 

Patience is the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset. 

I really love that definition for getting to the heart and essence of patience which is “to accept without anger”. This was pivotal in helping me reflect on how patience, or impatience, has impacted my relationships and being mindful of where there’s room for improvement and awareness. Understanding that anger and being vexed actually hinders us from taking the necessary steps forward from patience into right action is like being handed a flashlight to find keys in the dark. Though patience requires one to “tolerate suffering” do not misperceive this as a weakness because this requires having the capacity, or strength, to allow a person to have their process while remaining in a state of heart centered understanding, or loving detachment. No need to tell me twice how challenging it can be, I might as well have written The Book on that topic. But it gets better because that capacity comes from love. 

Patience is Love

Finding meaning is one step towards integrating a sense of understanding, it is an early stepping stone towards freedom. Being in touch with our heart, however, is the mother of all steps. For example, in difficult times when thoughts arise and take over our emotions a heart-mind gridlock occurs. Learning to educate the mind through the heart and opening the heart with loving thoughts creates a fully functioning two way pipeline dependent upon balance and a great dose of trust. Being in touch with our heart is vital to the life we want to live and preserve. Scientific research shows how the heart governs the mind, so as cognizant beings we are capable of applying emotional intelligence in any situation to fully understand, work with and appreciate the function of being human when words just aren’t enough – become fluent in patience so communication in our relationships allow us to thrive. Hopefully, when the need arises, the world will be patient in return; which illuminates the point of this article: I think at the core of who we are we are the same – we live, breath, love, emote, think, sleep then rinse and repeat this daily process. We may have different lives, breathe a different quality of air and sleep in various positions but one thing that remains true and constant is our need to first and foremost be loved for all that we are, warts and all. The rest will sort itself out from here because the truth is love is love is love which allows patience. How we display love can be as varied as the languages and dialects we speak, but the energy of love is universally the same so recognizing its presence is something I think we can agree on: it’s quite simply an undeniable feeling at our center, a truth, a knowing within our hearts and in our body that everything is okay and that in this very moment we are safe. And if we can agree that safe is how we always want to feel, then we can agree that patience is a gateway to having that experience, whether we are being patient with ourselves or patient with each other. It becomes an elegant expression of us at our best.

Patience is Graceful

Some of the safest moments in life during the most trying times is in the presence of someone who is patient. In being patient, that person transmits wisdom by demonstrating how to compassionately honor a person’s process. Whether or not we had consistent experiences of patience, or role models in our life who helped us understand, define and put patience into practice, know now that we are fully capable of making it a significant part of our relationship building tools. Maximize on the degree of patience we wish to cultivate, lend and hopefully receive when needed. Hopefully. No expectations; right? Just hope. So, when we hear wisdom like patience is a virtue it has a whole new meaning that implies empowerment of self through clarity, kindness and understanding. In which case, chaos, though unavoidable and at times necessary, needn’t run nor ruin our lives. Let’s take grasping the concept of patience and put it into action by more freely and naturally being patient without expecting anything in return; by doing so we immediately elevate and protect ourselves and others from the chaos of our overstimulated, neuron firing mind [hello ego], and that alone is such an act of grace, and grace is simply beautiful. And soon enough our relationships will reflect that beauty time and time again.

Stillness - being in the world around us but not of it. The more effortless it is the stiller we are.

When I use to think about stillness my reference point was identifying the calmness and serenity of the outside world around me where activity is constant, sometimes chaotic and not without its moments of relief. I wanted to know how I could experience that stillness within myself. I was learning to connect as one with the world around me and it helped me connect to the infinitely supportive, colorful and multidimensional world within me.

Today I’ve come to understand stillness as an ability to exist in the world around me without being of it. Meaning, I can consume but I needn’t be consumed by it. Sort of like being the biggest fish in a very large ocean. The more effortless I find it is to be still, the more I am able to recognize the increasing quality of this stillness as my level of internal happiness. This happiness is what allows me to move forward in life and successfully engage in activity, or inactivity, which ever is required of me to choose the highest path at any given moment. That was a pretty long sentence. How about a relatively long illustration to drive this point home?

Imagine a river with its rocks, its size, its depth and the direction the water flows. The river bed is like our reality, our container; and our consciousness is the all enveloping body of moving water. The rocks, earth, living creatures and activity that exist in and around the river are like the characters of our life - people, places, things, ideas, events - so as the water moves steadily in one direction it moves with its environment continuously flowing as it needs to get to where it’s going. It plays its crucial part in nourishing and supporting the success and health of the ecosystem that it is inextricably a part of. If for a moment we can relate our unique existence to this metaphor it becomes easier to grasp how we can experience a sense of stability and stillness within an active life without being consumed or distracted by it for too long. One way of putting it is there can be moments of pain but suffering does not need to be prolonged. If suffering prevails, consider our consciousness of stillness morphing into a stagnant body of stinky, infested water. It’s true, that was a pretty undesirable description of a polluted mode of existence. And it needn’t be the case, unless there is a purpose for it and there is always purpose in every moment of our life.

So the take away from this message is that stillness is a gateway to navigate life from an empowered place in time and [an often unpredictable] space. This stillness can only be accessed when we go within first to successfully live from that inner world to the external world that is around us at all times.

There was a time when confronted with a challenge focus became difficult for extended periods and I’d procrastinate until I had no choice but to work under pressure. It’s not a bad thing, just that these specific occurrences weren’t conducive to my work ethic. And, my mind had a tendency to go in-and-out of worrisome thoughts which somehow became like second nature. The truth is, these habits didn’t fit who I am but somehow through circumstance became a part of my life. It was a matter of time before I began understanding how to use meditation to my benefit like break unsupportive habits and regain control of my thought process again.

I began meditating when I was twelve and it started when I was shuttled off to study about 495 miles north of Los Angeles. Totally resisting and crying all the way up, and 12 hours later, having briefly viewed San Francisco and Van Ness Ave through my seat window, I arrived at an international Chinese zen Buddhist school tucked away into a seemingly strange but beautiful private community in a town called Talmage. The sprawling school is known as The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas and I was living away from home for the first time. There weren’t really 10,000 Buddhas on campus but there were lots of wild life like peacock, deer and the town locals, who made up in entertainment for the lack of actual Buddhas. I wasn’t a particularly rebellious child, just willful and adventurous, but my spirited nature was actually quite worrisome for mom and she thought it would serve me to study at this particular boarding school. I basically went from an urban southern California pre-teen life to a very quiet and simple way of living with perks like clean air, the sound of traffic had disappeared and I was living on a landscape of lush greens and mountainous terrain. Here I owned my first proper winter peacoat, dark navy blue wool from L.L. Bean (thanks aunt Michele). I spent warm days taking my first hikes and straddling fallen trees to get across rushing creeks. It was a religious way of life in The City with meditation class once a week as part of the curriculum, and back then it was the hardest time I ever had wanting to be quiet or still. I didn’t master meditation here, or even come close to understanding it then but I think my environment had deeper and lasting effects that would later have a hand in nurturing the meditator in me.

It wasn’t long before I was expelled from this institution. Truly, it was not for anything I had a hand in (but the story that went down is far more entertaining than the truth), and in hindsight the event was a necessary blessing. Much like the way I arrived at CTTB, I was in tears flying back to Los Angeles; but not before I had at least a school year’s worth of studies, a vegetarian diet, meaningful friendships and kinda mean girls for balance and flavor, no boys, no tank tops, no skirts or pants above the knees; care packages received, pay phone calls made, walking meditations, pre-dawn walks to breakfast, ceremonies, being defecated on by birds released in said ceremonies, lectures, unfounded punishments and scoldings (mostly scoldings) and enough restrictions to turn any child into someone a parent might actually have to worry about; and, yes, seated meditation. I think it was in my cards to practice meditation before getting expelled and uprooted again from a place that became home; where, despite the expedient discipline from teachers and darhma masters, the bonds I created with classmates made me feel more loved and supported than I did in Los Angeles at that time. Life went on, I survived and new friends were made.

22 years later through exploration and inner development I have a meditation practice that is consistent and a joy to maintain. There is some effort in the process and what comes of it is the inspiration for this blog. Meditation, in a way, is like sending my consciousness to a higher place from distractions so I can allow an inner landscape of answers to unfold. Meditation has helped me replace spiraling thoughts with more trust in life; instead of feeding doubts and uncertainties I’m more grounded and I think I see life a little bit more clearly. Harnessing my focus during challenging times is no longer the issue it once was and continues to improve. Mediation has become second nature and totally fits who I am. It seems when I was ready to see the value in it, somehow meditation made its way back into my life, or me back into its realm. It really is just a matter of time and of living life for the pieces to click.