As a spirit rich feminine business leader, I know in my heart that finding our way through the wilderness of life’s confusions makes it possible for us to enter a state of abundance. Nevertheless, my will struggles with acceptance time after time. As a companion to forgiveness, acceptance is a necessary requirement for moving forward in our business and life. Over the years, I’ve struggled with notions of revoking decisions I can not change; these paths not taken still keep me awake at night or play themselves out in my dreams, encounters with people and opportunities lost.
I am certain I am not alone; spiritual searching all to often is linked to suffering rather than joy. Many of us are taught to “rejoice in suffering.” We may infer from this that the struggle is the point of life itself, not the acceptance of it. Or, we express joy while denying deep pain, splitting our spirit from our experience and fragmenting our inner selves. As women, we are taught by the Abrahamic religions that all suffering is our fault; and many of us agree to carry that blame, that of the great Fall from grace. I do not believe these outcomes are meant to be our crosses to bear.
As a woman, I outright reject the traditional notion of acceptance, or Nihil Obstrat, ‘Stamp of Approval,’ as a patriarchal object of control to create agreement where there is none to serve the organizing structures of the masculine. Used in this manner, acceptance limits human expression by asking another to sit in judgment of our choices, asking for permission instead of taking direct, aligned action toward our desires.
Let us instead turn to an ancient definition of acceptance: to take something to ones self. a A living practice of acceptance offers us presence and integration that we may remain in integrity at a soul level, even as we release or offer our troubles, monetary and otherwise, to Spirit. We see often witness this offering in receipt of loving compassion in Christian faiths to Mary, the Mother, and in Eastern beliefs to Quan Yin. And out of this honor and integrity, the medieval virtue, comes hope.
Hope is our gift at the bottom of our personal box of troubles if we can accept that which has come to pass and turn the dross over to the Divine to be transmuted and transformed into gold.
Joyful expression of one’s fate in life, or Amor Fati, then, emerges from the darkness and allows us to accept what IS so that it doesn’t get in the way of what we may BECOME. The dancing philospher Nietzsche who rejected Christianity coined the phrase Amor Fati in Ecce Homo, an inquiry into the individual concerns inherent to human nature. He writes “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Nor merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.” As this passage suggests, the face of necessity gives expression to the joyful acceptance of one’s fate in life.
Nietzsche chose the belief in Amor Fati as an antidote to fear. Scholars tell us he feared nothing so much as the infinite repetition of unchanging choices, where we make the same mistakes in a repeated pattern throughout our lives. He chooses instead to believe that all life experiences, even those creating suffering, were ultimately “good” with a predetermined purpose – to change our outcomes.
The concept of love as an active force, a political action, more fully came into expression in the 20th century, particularly in relationship to oppressed voices finding the light in the face of fear of omnipresent regimes. Finding the light is also the impetus that compels us to keep moving during a dark night of the soul. In Biblical texts, like Psalms, we are told that “I converse with my heart in the night, I ponder and search my spirit.” And, in my adaptation of a phrase from Romans, “…the love of Spirit has been poured into our hearts through the divine nature that has been given us.” Love, like water, may be poured into the vessel of our persons and fill us within that our cups may runneth over. The power of water is that of “loving acceptance” that fills and fulfills our individual expression of the divine.
In the body, we might come to know this connection between the heart and third eye. It expresses itself as trust that we might give our worries over to Spirit as an honorable tribute to a practice of acceptance of those things we cannot change. In so doing, we free up the energy to create space in our lives for something different to be created. We become a conduit for the active principle of Love to flow into our hearts and inform our lives. Money, like love, has a divine origin which flows to us through other persons, both sourced from a well of fluid abundance.
So be it.
Sherri L. McLendon, M.A., is a marketing public relations consultant, content strategist, and presence based business coach who writes about spiritual approaches to money, manifestation and marketing at http://www.professionalmoneta.com.
Hungry Ghosts Scroll, Kyoto, Japan.
In the emergent, receptive “feminine” view of marketing, we need an understanding of the cycle of related reciprocity – and ways we can actively initiate and activate this cycle to increase prosperity and abundance. The Principle of Reciprocity allows us to see giving to others as a gift we give ourselves.
