Reconciling With What Is

Now I need to say up front that I do not mean giving up or ignoring things that need change and can be changed when reconciling with what is. I think I may mean that what we are doing is acknowledging what a situation is and moving through it. I remember Michael J. Fox saying that acknowledging something is not necessarily accepting it. It is just acknowledging whatever it is so that you can move through it. 

Reconciling or acknowledging does not mean giving up; it does not mean accepting things. It means being realistic about what is going on around you or going on in the world. Being unrealistic can keep us stuck in the place that we and the world are in. It can mean suffering, because if we are unrealistic about a situation we are not seeing clearly. And, when we are not seeing clearly we may not see the solutions to a problem or the work that we are called to do. It can be like altering a photograph so that it partly obscures the "real" photograph, just like I altered the one to the left. Could anyone tell whether the stone work needs repair from this picture? Of course not. We might be creating a vision of what we think should happen rather 
than receiving a vision about what we should be doing, acting and feeling. Or we can be ignoring what is. 

Does this make sense? I hope so. An example of this is that a number of years ago I decided in my rational mind that I should be leading meditations on a regular basis. It was not a received vision. It was a created vision. I could not make it happen. On most evenings no one showed up. One evening, one person showed up, and I had to return her money because of the noise happening outside. She didn't come again. 

I know that this is a seemingly minor example of what I am writing about, but it is a clear example. I was not clear about the situation. It took me longer than I should have taken to become clear and reconcile with the fact that this was not something that was for me to take on. But, when I reconciled with this, or if you prefer acknowledged the situation, I was able to let go and move on. That meant I could put my energies somewhere else. 

The interesting thing about the above meditation image from my book, Opening the Heart: Meditations on How to Be (here) is that, by working with this image, we can see how we actually are, what our situation actually is, rather than having a fantasy of how we are. The paired meditation image for this image is this: 

In the current world environment, it might be useful for all of us to let a vision come in about what we are called to do in our lives and our work. I believe firmly that we should be fighting for something rather than against something. If we continue to fight against something, we can end up just using the language and tactics of those we are fighting against. I believe we need a vision of how to be, to act and to feel differently. This thought became firm in my mind after reading Charles Eisenstein's The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible. Receiving a vision allows more flow, more congruity with ourselves and the world. We can create new language, new stories, new ways of being. 

So, reconcile with what is and take the vision that comes through to you to move forward.