Practice the Feeling of Acceptance

“Situations don’t make you unhappy,” explains Eckhart Tolle in his book Stillness Speaks, “Your thoughts make you unhappy. Your interpretations, the stories you tell yourself make you unhappy.”

Has anyone ever not written or called you back and suddenly your mind starts inventing a bunch of reasons why? “They must hate me,” or, “They’re rude and disrespectful,” or, “There’s something wrong with me.” None of that is necessarily true, yet the mind races to create these narratives. These narratives, Tolle says, “are unconsciously designed to enhance our always deficient sense
of self through being ‘right’ and making something or someone ‘wrong’.”

But how much of those narratives is actually true? If someone hasn’t explicitly told you, you have no idea why they do what they do and inventing some kind of story around it never helps. By just accepting it as it is, you can move past suffering and into the present. Even when it comes to things that are out of
your control, like the weather, you have a choice whether you allow it to affect your mood.