“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Real talk. 2025 was a hard year for a whole lot of people, with so much suffering in the world – war, corruption, oppression, destruction – that we wish wasn’t happening. The good news as we enter this new year? Change is possible. Inevitable even. The other news? Before we can truly affect change, we have to actually accept what is happening. To that end, CEC’s first theme of this brand new year is “acceptance”.
Accepting something doesn’t mean you like it. Acceptance is the act of acknowledging. This exists. That is happening. If I break my leg, I have to accept its brokenness in order to proceed skillfully. “Good vibes only” power of positive thinking isn’t going to unbreak it. Denial and avoidance will only make it worse. Feeling the pain, seeing the injury for what it is, is the first crucial step to making it better.
Acceptance doesn’t always show up as equanimous calm or detached observation, even for the most seasoned meditators. Sometimes it comes with big feelings – anger, frustration, sadness, despair… the whole Kübler-Ross gamut and then some.
I like to call this version of acceptance “fuckceptance”. It gives it a vaguely nihilistic flavour, a slightly punk rock feel. It helps me to acknowledge the shittier things in life – the injustices and heartbreaks of the wounded world – and also the hard, true feelings that accompany bearing witness to those things. Fuckceptance comes with a lot of fucking feelings (and a lot of swearing, obviously).
Last year this beloved meditation community CEC hit some hard times financially. As the person most responsible for the organization and aware of the day-to-day operations, I cycled through all the stages of grief. “Maybe I just won’t look at the bank account and it’ll course-correct on its own? Ok if I reduce my own salary enough, maybe i can buy enough time to turn this around. Does anyone care?!? Why doesn’t anyone realize we’re in trouble?? Oh god I don’t want anyone to know we’re in trouble!!!”
It took me some time to accept the hard truth that without significant intervention, this job and community that I love so much would cease to exist. I felt like a failure, and was stuck in that guilt and shame spiral until I really opened up to the reality that I couldn’t fix it on my own. I needed help. Fuuuuuuuck.
I am notoriously bad at accepting help, let alone asking for it. But I fuckcepted my way into being candid with my fellow CEC board members about the state of things and they in turn reminded me that I’m not alone in this. Together we made a plan to put out a call for help to you, the larger community, who overwhelmingly came through with support and encouragement and cold hard cash and we all lived happily ever after.
I hope. At least for now…
Meditation practice is an amazing training for developing acceptance. By turning attention again and again to what is happening in the here and now, we sharpen the focus on our inner and outer landscapes so we learn to see (and hear, and feel) more clearly. Then, when discomfort arises in our experience (as it inevitably does), we practice being with it, observing its form and function. This expands our capacity for tolerating what’s difficult. Instead of turning away from the challenges of life and world and hiding out in the comforts of distraction and denial, we get better at accepting (or at least fuckcepting) what’s going on. All the while, we practice compassion and kindness, for ourselves and for others. We try to give ourselves grace, and recognize the shared humanity in our struggles and missteps. “Cause it’s fucking hard work. And it’s the work that needs to be done.
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