121: Acceptance ≠ Approval

Speaker 1: How to make love. Now, is that from recipe or from scratch? This is How to Make Love. Wow. Oh gosh. Ooh. Oh my God. A little to the left and faster, a show that tests the edges of what love is.

Speaker 2: Worthiness. Empathy.

Speaker 1: Beauty. Sex positive. The borders, it can cross how we do integrity in all of our relationships and its hidden costs and shadows. In a world where we other other people, where we build walls and just tear down walls. Fuck finding it or falling into it. Our future depends on making it.

Speaker 2: Hey everybody, this is Laura. Welcome back to How to Make Love. Thanks for being patient with me while I took a little bit of time off this summer. I hope everyone is doing well and we're going to jump right in with some TMI. So I've been thinking a lot about my body because I'm going through perimenopause and no one ever really talked to me about this. I heard a lot about menopause, but no one ever really talked about perimenopause. And I feel like there's dialogue that's just starting around it. But I've been thinking a lot about my body, not because of one particular dramatic symptom, but because suddenly so much of how I have historically understood my body has changed or is changing. My energy has radically changed. The physical shape of my body has radically changed. The things I eat have radically changed. The pace at which I can recover from a workout or a walk or sometimes even just sleeping has changed.
And so this fantasy that I could continue living exactly how I have been or that my identity in my physical body is the same as it's always been or could be the same as it's always been, those narratives or beliefs have just simply not cooperated. And I keep catching myself thinking, "This shouldn't be happening. I should have more energy for this. I'm too young for this." And it's all kind of ridiculous because I'm 44 years old. This is in fact what bodies with ovaries do. And yet some part of me keeps wanting to negotiate as if reality might reconsider, as if my energy level might negotiate with me. And the more I thought about my thoughts, the more I realized this isn't just a perimenopause thing, it's an adulting thing. I think adulthood is in large part, regardless of the many identities that we all carry, I think it's in large part about learning to love or at least remain in relationship with a reality different than the one we imagined.
The relationship is not what we thought. The organization we were a part of has changed. Our parents age, our bodies change. People disappoint us, our bodies disappoint us, movements can fracture, leaders can fall. The world reveals itself to be both more beautiful and also far more brutal than we ever expected. And over and over and over again, adulthood seems to ask, can you stay in relationship with reality? Can you remain openhearted in spite of what you see rather than denying what you see? And I want to be really careful here because we're a deeply social justice oriented audience. Many of us have been trained beautifully necessarily to resist, to question, to challenge, to refuse injustice. And thank God for all of that. This is not an episode about acceptance in the sense of everything happens for a reason or it is what it is or just let it go or apathy or anything like that.
Absolutely not. I do not accept genocide in that sense. I do not accept racism. I do not accept cruelty. I do not accept oppression. But this episode is about something I think a little more subtle, a little more nuanced, and honestly, much, much harder. It's about learning to acknowledge reality because I've come to believe a handful of things pretty deeply, but for today, one especially, which is that we can't respond wisely or with discernment to realities that we refuse to accept. So today, that's what we're digging into, this notion of acceptance, not approval and what that means for us in confronting the reality, the many realities of the world around us. Welcome to a conversation about making love by making acceptance.
We're going to start right off the bat with a really important distinction. Acceptance versus approval. And they're not the same thing. The distinction is kind of the point of the entire episode. Acceptance asks, is this true? Approval asks, is this good? These are entirely different questions. I can accept that my body is changing. I don't have to like it. I can accept that someone I love is unable to meet me where I am when I need them. I don't have to approve of that or not. I can acknowledge that genocide is occurring, but I don't have to believe that it should be or should continue to occur. Acceptance and acknowledgement concern facts. Approval concerns values. So I want you to think about acknowledgement or acceptance versus approval. And I think many of us collapse these two things together. We fear that if we acknowledge reality, somehow we're consenting to it.
But the thing is, reality does not require our consent. It simply asks for our attention. I think there's ultimately four ways that we can relate to reality. The first is that we can argue with it. And I think this is where most of us spend a tremendous amount of time in our life and in our relationships. It sounds like this shouldn't be happening. This shouldn't be true. What this person did was wrong. This isn't fair. This isn't how I though my life would go. And I just want to be clear, sometimes these statements are morally correct. Children should not be starving. People should not be oppressed. Our bodies shouldn't be in pain. But reality is often unmoved by our arguments. And while there's wisdom in naming what should not be, there is suffering in refusing to acknowledge what is. And arguing that with that reality often keeps us in this sort of suspended state between unable to fully grieve and unable to fully respond.
And I think a lot of us call this burnout, this sense of stasis, of lingering in the middle. But I think it's often exhaustion from trying to negotiate with truths that have already been determined. So the second thing we can do with reality is approve it. And it's what most people fear that acceptance means. Approval says, "This is good. This okay. I endorse this." You don't have to approve of your aging body. You don't have to approve of injustice. You don't have to approve of heartbreak. You don't have to approve of war. You don't have to approve of Trump. You don't have to approve of the fact that someone can't love you the way you want to be loved. Acceptance is not asking you to bless reality. It's just asking you to acknowledge it. The third thing we can do with reality is abandon it altogether.
I think that this comes from a fear beneath a deeper fear. If I accept this, won't I stop caring? I hear that so often in coaching conversations, this deep fear or lack of self-trust, this belief that will become apathetic or indifferent. And abandonment of reality sounds like nothing can be done or why bother or I quit or it doesn't matter anymore. This is resignation. It's turning away from reality and acceptance is turning toward. So acceptance says this hurts, this matters, this is real. And because it matters, I'm willing to remain in contact with it. The fourth thing that I can think of that we do with reality is what this whole episode is about. Acknowledge it and accept it. Ironically, acceptance is perhaps the simplest and easiest of the four to do. It just says, this is true. My body is changing. That's true. This relationship is struggling.
That's true. This organization is no longer what it once was. This injustice is occurring. I am grieving. I am disappointed. This is true. Nothing more, nothing less. Acceptance is just like an orientation. It's about contact with reality. Acceptance is sort of saying, I'm no longer going to spend my energy debating whether or not this is reality or whether or not it should be happening. I'm going to begin here. Given that this is true, how do I want to respond? Do I want to fight? Do I want to rest? Do I want to leave? Do I want to organize? Do I want to build? Do I want to grieve? Do I want to love? Acceptance doesn't answer those questions. Acceptance is the precursor to them. Acceptance just creates the conditions in which those questions can finally and honestly be asked. Before we go any further, I want to make something visible that might not be visible, which is why acceptance and acknowledgement matter so much.
I actually think acknowledgement and acceptance is pragmatically necessary. It's not spiritually superior. It's necessary. If I can't acknowledge that my relationship is struggling, I can't decide whether to repair it or leave it. If I can't accept that my organization has fundamentally changed, I can't decide whether to rebuild or let go. If I can't acknowledge that our democracy is fragile, I can't organize effectively. And if I can't acknowledge that I have limits, my body has limits, I can't care for myself very well. So reality is our starting point. Acceptance simply says, yep, here we are. And only then can we truly ask, now what? Refusing reality doesn't make it disappear. It just makes us less able to respond or able to respond way less skillfully. All of this makes me think about an important concept in Buddhism. There's a Buddhist teaching that I love called the two arrows, and we've maybe talked about it before on this podcast.
This first arrow, so imagine an arrow shooting you in the foot. The first arrow is the unavoidable pain of being human. It's loss, it's aging, it's illness, it's war, it's change, it's disappointment, it's betrayal. It's just the painful experiences and difficult experiences that we navigate in life because we were born into a human body and a human heart and a human head. The second arrow is everything that we add. So this can't be happening. This shouldn't be true. I refuse this reality. Often that second arrow, that's the one we shoot at ourselves. So we're not sure where the first arrow came from. It just landed in our foot. The second one is one we fire at our own foot. And that second arrow compounds suffering a ton. But I'd like to try to complicate this teaching just a little bit because sometimes this should not be happening is morally correct.
Genocide should not happen. Children should not starve. People shouldn't be dehumanized. So I think the really skillful, difficult practice is not giving up on our moral clarity. Sorry, I don't know how to say that without a double negative. It's not that. It's not giving up on our moral clarity. I think the much more difficult skillful practice is learning how to hold multiple things simultaneously. This should not be happening and this is happening. That is the tension. That is activism. That is love. Two things are true. I don't believe this should be happening and it is. And I think that's why acknowledgement is so, so, so important because I'm not sure we can learn to love if we don't accept what's here. I think a lot of us know how to resist reality politically, but I don't think we've been taught or have a ton of experience learning how to.
I've been noticing this in myself. I've been noticing it in my coaching conversations. I think a lot of us know how to critique. We're all pretty good at that. We know how to analyze systems. We know how to name injustice, but we're less practiced at grieving. We don't know what to do when the organization is not what we hoped. We don't know how to feel about that. We don't know how to feel about our bodies changing or when our family disappoints us or when movements in the world take backward steps. And so we remain in this kind of argument with reality. That's not political resistance. It's emotional resistance. We keep trying to resurrect these things that no longer exist, the old relationship or the old organization or the old self, the old body, the old certainty, and it's exhausting. I really think so much of what we call burnout is actually grief that we're not metabolizing and fully making our way through because we're stuck in trying to bring back the things that have changed.
There is a profound grief in realizing this isn't what I thought it would be.This isn't working out how I hoped it would. And all of this begs a real question, which is what if I can't love what's actually here? I think this is an important question because there are realities that I cannot love. I can't love abuse. I can't love white supremacy. I can't love certain losses. I can't love violence. And perhaps this isn't about like, can I love this? But more about, can I remain? Will I remain in relationship with this reality? Can I stay in contact? It's a phrase we use in Buddhism a lot. Can I stay in contact with what's true? Can I resist turning away? Can I resist numbing out? Can I resist needing to create fantasies to navigate this? Can I remain in relationship with myself while this is true?
Can I remain in relationship with other people while this is true? Can I remain? Will I remain openhearted while this is true? We shouldn't expect that acceptance is going to lead us to peace or peaceful feelings. Sometimes acceptance or acknowledgement is just contact. That's all it is. Contact with reality. It's allowing ourselves to witness reality, to be touched by reality and to remain in contact with reality. So what the hell do we do with all of this? I'm going to leave you with some possible practices. The first is when you encounter a painful truth, try asking what is true here? Without embellishment, without catastrophizing, without minimizing. I'm a pro at doing that. Just this relationship is struggling, period. I am grieving, period. This organization has changed. Period. I'm disappointed. Period. This injustice is occurring. Period. So that's the first practice. You feel pain, you feel like something should be the way it is.
I want you to learn to kind of habitually ask what's actually true here? And then strip it of the tendency to want to make it bigger or smaller than it actually is. Just acknowledge it. Then the second part of the practice is having a self-reflection on what, if any, of your values are being called into tension or potentially even violated by reality. Because so often our suffering comes from this collision between reality and the things that we value. And that crash matters. It should be honored. It should be grieved. It should be acknowledged. So that's the next part. What's true? And based on that truth, what of my values are being potentially eroded at here? The third thing is to have an honest conversation with yourself about, am I still arguing with reality? Or in what ways? We all do this. So in what ways am I still arguing with reality or where am I arguing with reality?
What part of me keeps saying this shouldn't be happening? And again, perhaps that's morally true, but it is emotionally exhausting and it prevents us from taking wise action. And the fourth kind of question prompt, I guess if you will, so the first question prompt is what's true here? The second is what of my values might be intention without reality. The third is where am I still arguing with this reality? And here's the fourth. Given that this is true. So given that this is true, how do I want to meet this reality? And you get to choose. Do you want to fight? Do you want to rest? Do you want to leave? Do you want to organize? Do you want to set boundaries? Do you want to grieve? Do you want to build something new? Do you want to stay? Do you want to innovate? This question is so powerful.
It's changed my life more times than I can think. It's not, why is this happening? That's the question most of us ask. It's not that. And it's not, how do I make this untrue? How do I make this stop? Instead, given that this is true, how do I want to live? How do I want to be in relationship with this reality? So as we close up here, I'm going to end with where I started, which is all the memes about adulting. I really think adulthood and why it kind of sucks is it's just over and over and over again, realizing that life refuses to become exactly what we wanted it to be. Our bodies change. People disappoint us. Institutions fail us. Dreams evolve. The world breaks our hearts. And we're asked, can you remain in relationship? Not because everything is okay, not because you approve, not because you're giving up, not because you're making it seem okay, but because reality is really the only place from which we can take discerning action.
Acceptance is not resignation. Acceptance is orientation. It is active work. It's not passive. It's saying, okay, here we are. And from there, then I think we can ask, what does love require now? What does justice require now? What does honesty require now? Because acceptance isn't the end of action. It's typically the beginning of effective action, of wise action. And I think one of the deepest challenges of adulthood isn't learning to love everything that happens or fight with everything that happens. I think it's really just learning how to stay put, how to stay in contact with ourselves, with others, with reality, even when our hearts are broken by what's true. I hope this is helpful, friends. Acknowledgement and acceptance are very different from approval. Don't lie to yourself or create these big dichotomies where that's not the case. And remember, you, any given moment, have four choices of what you can do with reality.
You can argue with it, you can approve it, you can abandon it, or you can accept it. I hope you'll choose the ladder and build a practice of the ladder, but the truth is we're all over the map all the time. There are some things in our life that we're going to be arguing with and some things in our life that we can accept. Just remember that this is a practice coming back to contact with reality over and over and over and over again, and then asking as we acknowledge and accept reality what would love to. I'll see you next time, friends. Bye for now.