You cannot control circumstances from the outside. So instead of resisting pain and failure and defending against it, you can embrace and encompass your pain and your failures, fully accepting them so that they become part of you. You then can let them go because they are part of your inner environment — they are within your domain — and the loving of your Soul can dissolve them.
– John-Roger with Paul Kaye (From: What’s It Like Being You?, p. 84)
Acceptance : The first law of Spirit is Acceptance. This is one of the most important principles in the unfolding of spiritual awareness. Acceptance asks you to accept any situation as it is and to accept
yourself as you are. You accept what is. The law of acceptance is actually very logical: when you set aside your feelings and thoughts and negative fantasies, what is is all that’s going on.
Inner growth often comes through making mistakes, but many people can’t make a mistake without self-castigation. The first spiritual law offers another choice: instead of condemning yourself for your missteps, you can accept them. We can seldom control what happens in life, but it is always within our power to choose our response.
When you’re fretting about a problem, it usually means you’re not accepting the situation. Similarly, when you’re upset with yourself, it generally means you are n ’t self-accepting. When you are berating or judging yourself, you have strayed off the path to Soul. This is the moment to reach for the road map.
Acceptance doesn’t mean that we agree with, like, or condone what is going on. The law of acceptance allows us to look at every situation as a stepping stone on the path to Soul and every situation as our teacher. Henry David Thoreau summed up this principle nicely when he wrote, “I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.”
You cannot control circumstances
