Accepting the Shadows

There are several spiritual actions that can change and transform our lives. There is gratitude, stillness, humility, acceptance, and more. I have wanted to delve into how acceptance has and can play a role in my spiritual life both in the past and the future. I have been on a journey for some time now, pulling the powerful force of acceptance into my life in regard to my mental illness. At seventeen I began showing serious symptoms, and was hospitalized for the first time when I was 18. I was hospitalized for a week when I was nineteen, and then avoided the psych ward for many years. In my twenties, after the second hospitalization, I accepted treatment fully in the form of medication. Medication was a difficult thing to accept, as I had firm beliefs about natural medicine, had written my thesis on this my senior year in high school, and had dreams of becoming an herbalist. I attended a women’s herbal gathering on Vashon Island at seventeen, and studied and believed in astrology, acupuncture, Chinese medicine and Veganism. Mental health medications were not wholistic in my understanding, but it was clear that I needed to accept this treatment if I was to stay well. This kept me out of the hospital until I was twenty-eight in 2007, my last and most recent hospitalization for schizoaffective disorder- bipolar type.

Acceptance of my mental illness in its entirety was still many layers away, and I work toward this acceptance to this day. Profoundly, acceptance of my drinking alcohol, abstaining from drinking, and practicing the principles of AA has broken new ground with my acceptance of my mental illness, as well. Gratitude, working hand in hand with acceptance, has got me to the place where I am now, seeing the gems and beauty of my life, just as it is. I also must accept my body. I am recovered from an eating disorder that I had in my teens, but because of the nature of this psychological addiction, I still must reckon with it today. I approach exercise as a mechanism for improving my health, not as a means to lose weight. I also do my best at not eating junk or binge eating. Acceptance, still, is the defining factor in transforming my views of self-worth surrounding my body. Acceptance in fact runs so deep into my person that it transforms a sense of worthiness at a core level. I stop looking outside of myself for gratification and an ego propelled identity, and slowly I let acceptance nurture my inner-self and allow myself to embrace love.

If I were to be completely honest about all that lives deep inside of me, it may not sound so pretty. I suffer from rage, shame, self-loathing, and fear. All of these things can be transformed by the medicine of acceptance. But I must work toward this. I must sit in silence and reflect on and feel this inner darkness. If I become too busy pursuing things outside of myself, I begin to stuff my sensitivities and emotions, and medicate with craving, while forgetting that I must look inward for change. Whether it is drinking, working, studying, or some other form of achievement or addiction, what my life looks like on the outside should not be valued so highly, while sacrificing a doorway to looking inward. Recently, I gave up trying to publish my writing in various ways, so that I could focus full-time on my recovery. I still write on this blog, and I am able to practice doing this while processing my inner workings, not ignoring them. As I move further into acceptance for who I am truly, without changing a single atom, I replace these dark inner demons with love and acceptance. Fear is replaced by hope, shadows by light, discord by harmony… and so it goes. My goal becomes bringing the serenity prayer, the Lord’s prayer, and the Saint Francis prayer to actuality. Faith, love, and acceptance require action. “Faith without works is dead.” (Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous p. 88) I must make it my goal to understand how I can actively live what is outlined so beautifully in these prayers. Learning to accept my demons, and actively change who I am on the inside, I will learn to heal. The more I do to work toward spiritual fitness in my life, while practicing acceptance, the better person I become, and my shadows cease to rule my day and my life.