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Diagnosis: Human Antidote... Acceptance by Liz Jorgensen
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s of this writing, we are in the 76th week of the global COVID-19 pandemic. We sit in a marathon of change, caution, uncertainty and all the things that tend to make average humans a bit loopy. This near-universal distress is compounded by knowledge most of us have that we cannot be sure how many miles are left to run. Humans absolutely love the illusion of control. It is our essential “diagnosis” and the reason for much of our mental stability—as well as our suffering. Most of us understand our limited influence in many spheres and yet, we get really squirmy when we know for certain that we are not 18
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in control. It’s the essential tension of our emotional lives. For those who tend toward a spiritual approach, the first assumption may be “there is no such thing as certainty” and having faith that things are unfolding as they should. The key to acceptance is not to fall prematurely into the “spiritual bypass” of avoidance and an over-emphasis on positive thinking, or any technique, including yoga, prayer and meditation. For those who prefer philosophy, Epicurus said it quite well 2,400 years ago: “The only thing permanent is change.” In the world of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, we have brazenly borrowed from many phieNaturalAwakenings.com
losophies to help clients accept life as it is right now in order to feel some relief from the death grip of control-based suffering. We must accept change as it comes at us every day in some form: our just-washed car gets dirty in a day, our plans for a hike get rained on, we want complete “freedom” to travel and do what we please and we are still asked to be cautious and careful due to virus variants. This is the paradox we all face. Some of us are managing it better than others, and perhaps the most vocal of the “science doubters” are masking fear and maybe even terror in a human all-time favorite delusion called “denial”. But truthfully, don’t we all deny things psychologically every day? That we may die in a car accident as we start up our vehicle, that we surely will lose loved ones before we ourselves die, have only a temporary reprieve from some form of aging and illness each day, regardless of additional pandemic anxiety. Maybe we can be more loving and compassionate to those around us who deny the power of a virus that has killed 620,000 Americans so far and millions worldwide. It is, after all, a terrible burden to accept the truth—at first at least. So how can we emotionally and psychologically “work” with our pain and fears? If we allow ourselves to first be afraid, to feel confusion, anger, even small doses of self-pity, and then work to release them, we may achieve what is close to peace, temporarily. It’s important to remember that accepting pain and all our emotions using a form of practice and then eventually releasing the tricky emotions is a skill and a habit that must be regularly practiced, not something we can achieve through shortcuts. The idea of Spiritual Bypass is especially important to consider as a threat as life becomes more uncertain. It is so tempting, even seductive, to believe we can cleanse, yoga or meditate ourselves away from our human suffering—that we can hover above it in a stance of superior bliss. We can’t, and if we try, we fail, and may even hurt ourselves or others in our “enlightened” denial. Whether we “don’t believe in vaccination” or we seek to over-focus on self-improvement, we may still be missing the point. We all are subject to the human
