This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
The DWD goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
Radical acceptance and radical faith
One of my favorite terms of art used in the recovery community is “radical acceptance.”
The idea is simple: no matter what happens, you consciously and deliberately accept it.
The alternative is to inwardly resist reality. To reject what has happened on a psychological level. To avoid facing the truth of the circumstance at all costs. And, as Steven Pressfield so masterfully explains in The War of Art, resistance is what drives almost all abuse, addiction, and self-harm.
But why radical acceptance? Isn’t regular acceptance enough?
If you have a bug bite, you can probably get by just fine with regular acceptance. You say ouch, take a deep breath, and move on. No big deal.
But what if you lose your job? What if riots break out in your neighborhood and your house gets burned down? What if your whole family dies in a car accident?
The idea that you could somehow accept those kinds of things seems a bit radical, doesn’t it?
And this is why the practice of radical acceptance requires faith. Faith in what? Faith in some external metric of virtue that somehow justifies every point of suffering. Faith that it is somehow cosmically OK, even if things go as badly as possible.
Faith that no matter how terrible something is, resisting it will be worse than accepting it.
None of this is to say that we shouldn’t try to make things better. On the contrary, the only hope we have to make any improvements in the life we’re given is to radically accept reality as it unfolds, with an open heart and an open mind, and then decide what, if anything, we can do about it.
It takes faith to keep our minds and hearts open, and it takes faith to do the things we can. But perhaps it takes the most faith of all to recognize those times when we truly are powerless, and all we can do is say, within our wide open hearts, “Okay. I accept.”
Regular versus radical acceptance