(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.
And I also encourage you, especially if you
like what you're hearing on this podcast, to
like, subscribe, follow, share it with your friends,
all of that good stuff.
And if you can, wherever you're hearing this
podcast, drop a five star review, drop, you
know, just a few words, letting others know
that you find this podcast to be valuable
to you, because that's really going to help
others find this important information as well.
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
Planet Music.
This podcast is hosted on the MuseTarmer Media
Network.
Find out more by visiting feathermanesoul.com slash
so and following the links to the MuseTarmer
Network.
Please don't forget to like, subscribe, or follow
wherever you're hearing my voice, or tell a
friend who may be interested.
Thank you.