The Power of Radical Acceptance

(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Of all the tools in my toolbox, whether

that's coaching skills, or somatic work like yoga,

meditation, or breath work, out of all of

those skills, if there's one skill that I

would love for you to take and start

using in your life today, that skill is

radical acceptance.

Radical acceptance is something that is good, not

just in general for us, but also for

dealing with grief, dealing with trauma.

And it's a really powerful tool, one that

I got introduced to a couple of years

ago.

And although I hate the phrase, it really

did change everything for me.

So let's dive into radical acceptance.

You're listening to Feathermane Soul Wisdom, a podcast

for those looking to rediscover their wild spirit

in spite of life's challenges.

If you're living with a chronic illness, or

neurodivergent, or consider yourself disabled, and you're looking

to connect with your own inner untamed essence,

then this show is for you.

Your host is Kit Kaelstow, Wild Spirit Storyteller.

Thanks for listening.

And now on to the episode.

Hello, and welcome to this episode of the

Feathermane Soul Wisdom show on the Muse Charmer

Radio Network.

I'm your host, Kit Kaelstow, Wild Spirit Storyteller.

And today we are going to dive into

radical acceptance.

I want to start by talking about what

radical acceptance is, and also what it is

not.

Because I think when somebody who maybe has

experienced some toxic positivity or spiritual bypassing, hears

the phrase radical acceptance, they immediately get prickly

around that because they think that radical acceptance

means accepting everything.

And it does not.

Radical acceptance is a psychological skill that means

completely and totally accepting reality as it is

right now, without fighting, resisting or judging.

That doesn't mean liking it.

That doesn't mean rolling over and not doing

anything about it.

What that means is going, hey, it is

what it is.

Here's what it is.

And then you can determine what steps you

do or don't want to take.

To break it down a little bit, when

we call radical acceptance radical, it means that

you're accepting the facts with your whole mind,

body and spirit, and you're not judging.

You're not fighting the truth.

If you're dealing with financial situations, if your

job sucks, you're not fighting that.

You're accepting that, hey, my job sucks.

That acceptance is a full sentence.

I want to find a new job is

not going to negate the fact that your

job sucks, but it is a step you

can take to improve your situation.

And also it's radical because it drops the

word should.

Too often, especially those of us who are

neurodivergent or dealt with trauma, think that we

should deal with stuff better.

We don't have it as bad as somebody

else.

We should be okay.

We should be able to cope.

Radical acceptance means dropping the should or asking

why me and simply says, hey, this is

what I'm going through right now and accepting

it.

And if you're somebody who has spent a

large part of your life kind of shoving

down what you're going through, kind of putting

on a smile and keep calm and carry

on that sort of mentality, then it can

seem really radical to stop doing that and

simply accepting radically where your life is.

And again, I want to stress, it's not

approval.

You don't have to like, agree with or

condone what happened.

You don't have to give up.

You don't have to say, you know, ah,

my job sucks.

There's nothing I can do about it.

And it's not a weakness to actually face

the truth of what is going on in

our lives.

I think too often we aren't willing to

face the truth.

And usually that is because of other people's

expectations.

They tell us that, you know, other people

have it worse.

It's the old if you're if you're a

Gen Xer, you probably were told to clean

your plate because there were starving children in

Africa.

The fact that you did or did not

clean your plate has absolutely nothing to do

with anybody else's hunger situation.

And trying to get you to be grateful

for something when maybe you didn't like the

food, maybe you had sensory issues around the

food.

You know, that that's not radical acceptance.

Radical acceptance is, you know what, I really

don't like what's for dinner and I don't

feel like eating it and cleaning my plate.

It does reduce suffering.

Pain is a natural part of life.

Buddhism tells us that attachment leads to suffering.

Fighting that reality makes the pain worse.

Clinging to those attachments makes the pain worse.

It actually saves energy.

When you stop fighting what's staring you in

the face, you free up mental energy, which

is at a for all of us right

now.

And it helps you move forward.

You can't change or fix a situation until

you truly understand the truth of how it

exists right now.

You can maybe make some moves in that

direction.

But until you really look at what's weighing

on you or what you're dealing with, it's

going to be hard to make the kind

of profound impactful changes that will really change

everything.

Radical acceptance was first developed during a type

of therapy called dialectical behavioral therapy.

And the gist of that is that it

helps you hold two things in your mind

that are complete opposites at the same time.

And I think the important part of radical

acceptance is understanding that the reality of your

of your situation does not have anything to

do with you personally.

So a good example might be my job

sucks.

I am still a good person.

I still have worth.

I deserve a job that doesn't suck.

That's the dialectical part.

It is accepting the reality of the situation

and also radically accepting yourself and caring for

yourself and loving yourself in spite of whatever

you are dealing with.

What does that mean for us and by

us, I want to speak to my neurodivergent

community, my chronically ill and disabled community, my

queer communities.

What does radical acceptance mean for us?

It really means that we need to dive

into our stories.

Anytime we hear the word should come up

in our thoughts, that should be a flashing

neon light that tells us that there's a

story that we need to deconstruct.

We need to understand a little bit more

about it.

What it also means is that radical acceptance

often means dropping what we were told about

ourselves from other people.

And a good example is the common phrase

I did a podcast on this not too

long ago of being too much.

You're too much.

You're too emotional.

You're too sensitive.

You're too whatever.

That is something that is told to my

neurodivergent community.

I've heard it myself.

And what you do with that is with

the radical acceptance, you say the truth is

this person thinks I'm too much.

However, I still have worth as a person.

I unconditionally love myself.

And when you give yourself that radical acceptance,

and you see the truth in that way,

you can then look at it and say,

this person says I am too much.

That is that person's belief.

That person apparently can't handle doesn't want to

deal with we may not even know the

answer to that.

But the onus on fixing our behavior would

be on that person.

As long as we are doing our best.

And we're trying to communicate our needs.

We're trying to be kind.

We're trying to deal with overwhelming situations the

best we can.

Then if somebody says something like that, radical

acceptance means that we do not use that.

As yet another pain point for us.

But we understand that we unconditionally love and

accept ourselves.

And in fact, there's an author I'll link

to her in the show notes, who wrote

a book on this.

Tara Barak, who wrote a book on radical

acceptance, as well as other books related to

that subject.

And I highly recommend that that work I

highly recommend that person's work.

It's really helped me change how I look

at things.

When we look at radical acceptance for grief,

the truth is it could be very difficult

to do this.

Because on one hand, acknowledging the unchangeable reality

that if your grief is due to a

loss that the person that the pet, that

the situation or the job is gone and

not coming back, can help you find realization

can help you see that truth and move

forward on how to reshape your life with

that loss or as part of that loss.

Other people may find that accepting that permanence

is too raw in the moment.

And if that happens to you, that is

okay.

Grief is very much a nonlinear road.

It is very much a being in the

moment riding the waves of grief as they

come.

What it will do, though, is radical acceptance

could mean letting go of control and allowing

the heavy emotions of grief to move through

your mind.

And so that means when one of those

grief waves hit you, instead of being like,

Oh, God, I can't cry right now.

I can't you know, I got too much

to do.

I can't get emotional.

Saying, Hey, my grief is hitting me hard

right now.

That is okay.

I unconditionally love and accept myself, which is

the phrase that Tara Barack suggests in her

work.

And then letting that emotion, if you can

giving space for that emotion for that grief

wave to roll through you.

And what a lot of people with grief

find is when you give grief that space,

that it actually rolls through relatively quickly.

In other words, that when you actually allow

yourself that time to grieve, you release rather

than if you try to hang on to

it and shove it down.

A lot of times that initial letting go

really allows things to flow.

Fighting the reality of grief.

And I just you know, last week show

talked about the different types of grief.

And this would be like the grief of

not doing enough.

The grief of the life of what if

even with those types of grief, practicing radical

acceptance tends to stop your secondary suffering.

Because fighting reality adds anger, it adds shock,

it really prolongs your despair because you're not

accepting the loss that happened.

And it really kind of allows that grief

to just linger in a very painful way.

Now I want to be clear, when it

comes to grief, practicing radical acceptance does not

mean making that grief go completely away.

It does not mean that ta-da, you're

healed and everything's going to be just all

fine.

What that means is that you are willing

to companion your grief, that you are willing

to make space for your grief in your

life and learn how to move forward with

it.

With all of that being said, I want

to pivot to talking about radical acceptance and

the wild and how having radical acceptance can

help us really connect with our wild spirit

and with the world around us.

This can be difficult to think about or

to put in terms that we can understand

without actually centering the human experience.

We don't understand a lot about how our

animals move through the world, how they think

about the world.

We are even now uncovering some pretty amazing

things about animal senses, including senses that we

don't really utilize except in very specific cases,

like echolocation, like checking and feeling electrical impulses,

or even various ways of adapting the sense

of touch or the speed of processing of

those senses.

There's a lot that happens in the animal

world that we just really struggle to comprehend

because it's not within our own experience.

When we think about that and we think

about radical acceptance, the question that readily comes

to my mind, at least, is how do

we know that animals practice radical acceptance?

If we think about, for example, a feral

cat, since I work with a lot of

cat non-profits and we have our own

sanctuary here, when you have a cat that

is used to being outdoors and you trap

the cat, or if you trap a raccoon

or another animal to relocate it, that animal

quite often will fight the trap.

They'll realize that they are in danger.

They realize that they are confined and they

will try to get out.

Once the animal is put into a new

environment, for example, you bring the cat inside,

put it in a crate, get it fixed,

get it socialized, even then, depending on the

animal's individual personality, that animal may take months

or years or never warm up to humans,

depending on a variety of different factors.

You could look at that and you could

say that that animal is not practicing radical

acceptance because it's not interacting with you.

It's fighting to get out of the cage.

But one of the things that I have

noticed is that at some point, the animal

will not necessarily accept its fate, but

will at least settle to it.

Now, at this point, you have to be

very careful.

An animal may shut down.

An animal may become closed off.

You need to keep those lines of communication

open.

In the case of one very special, but

very difficult cat that we brought in during

a very extreme cold snap, it took him

eight months to basically become a little love

bug.

And now, you know, he still, he still

is very timid.

For example, he wants attention from me, but

not from my spouse, whom he hasn't seen

as much because he's in my office where

I spend a large part of my day.

He, you know, is still not going to

be the same as a lap cat that

was adopted as a kitten and brought into

the house and given everything, you know, love,

food, attention.

But there is definite willingness to deal with

this situation, to gain what he can out

of the situation, and to find enrichment and

comfort in that situation.

I say this not to imply that every

animal accepts every situation, but that animals learn

to adapt.

They focus on where they are here and

now.

They may not like it.

They may not appreciate it.

And obviously, I can't stress enough that it

is our role as caretakers, as advocates, to

ensure that these animals' lives are as positive

and as enriched as possible.

We can't just accept the fact that a

cat will eventually not fight a cage or

a crate while it's going through a vetting

or taming process as the fact that the

cat is okay there for the rest of

their lives, because that's not the case at

all.

This is a temporary situation designed for the

health and safety of the cat and

the

environment, such as an adopted house, a foster

situation, etc.

That type of radical acceptance allows us to

really look at where we are in the

here and now.

I would also add to that, now we

don't know the actual thought processes that an

animal goes through, but my guess is that

when you look at the Buddhist principle that

attachment leads to suffering and desire leads to

suffering, that animals, while they work to fulfill

their basic biological needs and their social emotional

needs, I don't think they dwell on situations

the way we humans do when those needs

are not met.

For example, during a drought, during a harsh

weather condition, maybe it's a thunderstorm, maybe it's

a hurricane or a storm where they kind

of have to hunker down and not go

out.

When you think about that, my guess is

the bird, for example, the bird that is,

you know, that is hunkered down riding out

a hurricane isn't sitting on its nest going,

oh my god, I wish this was over.

I got stuff to do.

I got food to eat.

I've got to, you know, look for more

twigs for my nest.

Those thoughts feel very human and very much

disconnected from the wild.

And so to me, having radical acceptance connect

us to the wild really focuses on living

in the now, nurturing our social, emotional, physical,

spiritual needs when and where possible, and obviously

working to change those situations that are within

our power to change.

But I really don't think that rumination or

dwelling on things is a facet of the

wild or what nature does.

Nature simply is.

Sometimes it's good.

Sometimes it's bad.

And our job as beings is to get

through that and help others the best as

possible.

Radical acceptance for me has started to help

me be more in tune with rhythms and

cycles of life, of nature, of the seasons,

of my own body, of the way my

mind works.

It's helped me to be less anxious.

It has helped me to really be more

focused in the moment.

And I feel like those two things, less

anxious and more focused in the moment, they

very much could be seen as prescriptions.

And we all know how I don't like

to prescribe things.

But I feel like that that's the benefit

of connecting with the wild and connecting with

radical acceptance.

If you would like to learn how to

incorporate more connections with the wild and with

radical acceptance in your life, I encourage you

to reach out at feathermanesoul.com book a

free call, let's chat, see how I can

help you.

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Thank you so much.

And the wild in me sees the wild

in you.

You've been listening to the feathermanesoul wisdom podcast

hosted by Kit Kaelstow.

Learn more about feathermanesoul at feathermanesoul.com.

As a wild spirit storyteller, Kit is passionate

about helping those who are neurodivergent, disabled, or

living with chronic illness rediscover their own inner

wild spirit.

Visit feathermanesoul.com to receive free gifts or

book a free call with Kit to discuss

how wild spirit storytelling can help you.

Music is Running with the Horses by Purple

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