Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
Dr. Keith’s HotStream LettersTM
Advice, technical methods, advanced psychology, rubrics, tips and
teachings.
Acceptance as a Tool
to Heal Our Lives
By Keith Scott-Mumby MD, MB ChB, PhD
Copyright © Mother Whale, Inc., All Rights Reserved.
All content within this book is commentary or opinion and is protected under Free Speech laws in
all the civilized world. The information herein is provided for educational and entertainment
purposes only. It is not intended as a substitute for professional advice of any kind. Dr. Keith ScottMumby MD, PhD assumes no
responsibility for the use or misuse of this material.
Therefore no warranty of any kind, whether expressed or implied, is given in relation to this
information. This is a comprehensive limitation of liability that applies to all damages of any kind,
including (without limitation) compensatory; direct, indirect or consequential damages; loss of
data, income or profit; loss of or damage to property and claims of third parties.
Always consult your own licensed medical practitioner if you are in any way concerned about your
health. You must satisfy yourself of the validity of the professional qualifications of any health care
provider you contact.
PROF. KEITH SCOTT-MUMBY
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
Table of Contents
Acceptance as a Tool ....................................................................................................................................................... 3
Harmony ............................................................................................................................................................................... 5
Acceptance Level .............................................................................................................................................................. 7
Tolerance .............................................................................................................................................................................. 9
Honoring The Being.......................................................................................................................................................10
Resistance ..........................................................................................................................................................................11
Transformational Psychology Techniques .........................................................................................................13
Forgiveness........................................................................................................................................................................14
The Acceptance Rubric ................................................................................................................................................15
Finding It Hard?...............................................................................................................................................................18
Therapeutic Knowledge Can Heal Your Life Today, Find Out How........................................................19
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
FIRST PRINCIPLE:
To be happy, you need to learn to accept what comes your way. Change
what you can and be glad. However, don’t hurt yourself with regrets about
what does befall.
Acceptance as a Tool
here are two fundamentals rules of rational living. These equate to a happy life,
not only in terms of the "feel good" factor. They also work well as foundations for
personal growth, competence and efficiency, in work, play and relationships.
Following these rules will lead you towards a "stress-free" emotional environment,
meaning no unwanted hostilities. Of course it is not possible to be one hundred
percent stress-free, any more than it is possible to be germ-free or
T
danger-free.
But since most people live way beyond their threshold, mired in
unhappiness, stress and incompetence, there is a very powerful message for living
contained in these few sweet words of wisdom.
The keynote is acceptance. Not the cissy feeble-mindedness of those who cannot
oppose their misfortune and so decide it is "good" for them. But acceptance as the
powerful spiritual strength of those who are able to withstand the buffeting of many
adverse forces that surround them, yet remain firm, facing true north, centered and
strong.
Rule 1. Whatever happens, be able to accept the experience
willingly and get the best out of it you can.
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
If you could accept anything at all which befell you, you would never be unhappy.
Rule 2. Cause only those experiences that other people can easily
accept.
Think about this.
It is fine to say "If they don’t like it, it's their problem" when you do something they
cannot tolerate. But it will certainly be YOUR problem too if these are people with
whom you have to live and work! They will become a source of negative feelings
and energy that kick back against you.
If you want to experience the challenge of living with friends, colleagues and family
members you have disturbed emotionally, then by all means stir them up; do
plenty that is beyond their ability to accept. You will have a hell of a tough time!
However, it is far smarter to create the kind of environment around yourself that is
a pleasure to live in. In which case you cannot violate rule 2.
There seems to be a philosophical principle here of some magnitude: that one
gets back what one puts out. We refer to it often here in these pages.
Antagonistic people seem to find plenty who will argue; those who cheat a lot
seem to find themselves ever on the defensive against crooks and knaves; liars
cannot trust anyone else, it seems. Conversely, those who live by love and care
for others seem to find plenty of friendship and affection in return.
This can be seen clearly in a multitude of situations. For example, if you have a
spouse who treats you badly, it is probably something to do with how you treat
HIM or HER. Rarely would a person who had gone to the great lengths of marrying
another, or at least committed to cohabiting with them, want to hurt their partner.
That sort of scenario is Hollywood nonsense, not real life.
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
But it happens all the time, you say. No; only when one feels hurt is one willing to
hurt back.
Once the trouble begins, it becomes an automatic tit-for-tat. Then the problem
seems to be: "Who started it?". This is a bit like the chicken and egg question. But
there is an answer to this convoluted war of accusation and counter-accusation;
you don't have to find the "truth" of who caused the first wound. You only have to
stop doing it to them and - as if by magic - they will stop doing it to you.
Try it and see.
Harmony
Pythagoras the Greek is best-known for his famous theorem about right-angled
triangles. However, he was also the founder of a great philosophical school, which
existed in Croton in southern Italy in the 6th century BC. It had a strongly religious
flavour and Pythagoras saw great mystical importance in the concept of
harmonious frequencies in celestial bodies. History has christened his belief,
somewhat fancifully, "The music of the spheres". According to his follower, Sarton,
"He (Pythagoras) was the first to connect love of science with sanctity". We should
admire and respect the master for that, especially we who are trying to put spiritual
values into the framework of a scientific methodology and terminology.
We can borrow from this idea of harmonic frequencies, as a metaphor for
interpersonal relationships. It is as if we each have a certain key-note or frequency
within our being. While it is pure, it will resonate with anything sweetly. But if there
should be a discordant tone, this frequency seems to recur all over the place,
setting up reverberations with each and every discord.
The nature of harmony and musical concordance (sounding together) is such that
two similar frequencies tend to reinforce each other in an important effect known
as RESONANCE. You can experience it for yourself next time you are in the
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
bathroom; sing a scale of gradually higher and higher notes and you will find one
which "booms" strongly and is much louder than any other note sung with the
same breath intensity.
What seems to happen in our relationships is that any discordant note within us
resonates harshly and loudly with anything similar in the environment. The two
effects intensify each other, as Pythagoras noticed all those centuries ago.
Certain imperfect aspects to our personality thus make themselves very
prominent.
You could go further than this and say that we can work out what is wrong with our
own personalities by observing what other people seem to be doing to us. It is like
looking in a mirror: what you see in Life is what you are putting there by the
distortions of your own personality.
This is a very sobering thought but at the same time a very practical one, because
it leads to a rapid diagnosis and cure of what troubles us in the behavior of other
people. We are doing it and we must stop doing it.
If your spouse tells lies, you yourself have been dishonest in some way; if the boss
thinks you are no good, that is because you yourself think you are no good; if you
think people behave lasciviously then you may be sure there are sexual thoughts
there, whether you are admitting them to yourself or not.
There is a distinct human trait here. Shakespeare gave us the perceptive maxim
that "Action speaks loudly in accusation". This means that whatever it is a person
rails against is likely to be something they are busily engaged in doing personally.
Only they cannot see it, from their web of hypocrisy and deceit, whereas it is often
obvious to those with an outside viewpoint.
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
Acceptance Level
To return to the theme of acceptance, what do we mean by a person's acceptance
level? Let’s start with some definitions.
I was shocked to find how poor the dictionary definitions were for the word
acceptance. Most used the word accept or even acceptance in their definition!
Webster’s New International, for example, says the act of accepting; state of being
accepted or acceptable; also consent to receive. That’s poor indeed. Funk and
Wagnall uses the exact same definition (dictionaries often copy each other)!
Dictionary.com does better:
1.
the act of taking or receiving something offered.
2.
favorable reception; approval; favor.
3.
the act of assenting or believing…
But then you have to look up assenting and perhaps favorable. It’s such a crucial
thing to have our key words clarified that I’ll help you out here (I think I was a
lexicographer in a past life somewhere!)
Acceptance means the act of or state of mind of…
Allowing something to happen
Allowing it to be
Not resisting or rejecting
Consenting or approving, without changing it
Receiving with favour
Saying YES to
Not arguing with or speaking against
A willingness for something to be the way it is…
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
The key concepts here are willingness and consenting. It means something more
than just “putting up with” something. That’s tolerance. Acceptance is a warmth
and positiveness about whatever it is you are accepting. It’s an act; you DO
acceptance.
Acceptance level is defined as: the threshold within which the individual is willing
to tolerate effects (experiences). Acceptance is a kind of process; a negotiation
with experiential forms and manifestations. It’s an ability that defines your
psychological vitality and dynamism.
The breadth of a person's acceptance is a very good measure of their overall
sanity. An individual with a very low tolerance level is not for this world, which is
harsh, random, forceful and painful. That is to say, we are constantly facing
opposition in the form of counter-efforts, counter-emotion and counter-postulates,
which are terms we use to define the more familiar but little understood concept of
"stress" (see section 61).
Beyond a person's threshold of acceptance, he or she experiences increasing
discomfort and unhappiness. One way to reduce your stress levels then, is to
extend your threshold of tolerance. You would worry less and this could seriously
extend your life!
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
Tolerance
To be happy one should be able to tolerate anything. But this does not preach the
effete New Age fairy’s doctrine of obsessive tolerance, including acceptance of
bad states. For the Guru Express to work, we want to change unwanted conditions
and make them better. This does not mean we don't accept conditions; rather that
we do accept them and so can deal with them. "Tolerance" of the negative sort is
really non-acceptance, because the individual concerned is unwilling to really look
and face up to things.
What would you think of a man who could "tolerate" his wife not talking to him for
years? What about her? She has accepted that this awful life is a way to conduct a
relationship. But it doesn't show any capability whatever.
The whole reason for having a healing philosophy and its Tools of Living is that we
can show that unwanted states, negative forces, unhappiness, stress or failure of
all kinds can be addressed and improved. We have the methods to do that, which
is what people find interesting.
What needs accepting then is the effort involved in making improvements. Far too
many people kid themselves they are "tolerant" when they mean they are too lazy
to take action. In truth they are very intolerant of the confront and cause level it
needs to deal with the problem.
Acceptance then, has an in-built causativeness. You are only accepting something
if you are capable of changing it. Otherwise you are simply at effect, as we say,
and not tolerating it at all.
The practice of the art of true tolerance therefore, which embraces a certain
amount of largesse or compassion, requires a considerable degree of power and
capability to sanction it. It is not for the weak and ineffective.
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
Honoring The Being
One of the most crucial aspects of being able to accept people we call "honoring
the Being". You could say it is the most estimable of all human virtues. At the end
of it all, Being is the only thing we have which is ours; doing and having are not
properties but processes. Take Being away from someone and they are literally
nothing.
To honor the Being means to be able to accept people the way they are, warts and
all ("love me, love my dog"). Yet there are many ways in which we fail to
acknowledge each others’ Being. Criticism, evaluation, snide remarks, failure to
communicate properly all make nothing of a person. If we attack their work and
creations it is like attacking the individual. A chance remark about a new hat or
dress can be equally hurtful, if censure of their judgment and self-image is implied,
which is more or less inevitable.
Women are often rightly resentful of the fact that they are not seen as beings or
persons but made target objects by predatory males. They are made into objects
my males, not seen as beings. I've met this with celebrities, too. They don't like to
be talked to as "stars", which are caricatures, but as ordinary human beings.
People want to be humans, not objects or things.
One of the most inspiring guides to honoring the Being of others is a piece called
"The Gentle Person's Guide To Good Behavior". Manners, of course, are all about
acknowledging others and honoring their Being.
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
Resistance
Resisting (see also section 101) is the opposite of accepting. There is a saying,
common to many philosophies, indeed it is a law of life for those with the wit to
observe it: what you resist you get. This could be important political psychology for
those intent on subjugating a population; make them resist.
There is a classic example of this in the story of Ancient Rome. The emperors
decided to resist Christianity. They fought it tooth and nail. Christians were
banned; thousands were slaughtered in the Coliseum, for the amusement of the
crowds. Result? Rome got Christianity. In fact Rome has been the head of
Christianity ever since. It’s nailed in place, rock solid. Christianity will have to
perish before it will leave Rome!
I see the Chinese making the same barbarous mistake with the followers of Falun
Gong. Already there are said to be 100 million followers of Falun Gong inside
China. That’s twice the number of people that are in the Chinese Communist
Party. The way the government in Beijing fights it, I would say they are likely to
turn the whole country into a Falun Gong state! It would serve them right.
A better way would be to just ignore them or just laugh amiably at their belief
system—which, of course, are quite harmless to anyone but the leaders of an
oppressive totalitarian state, seeking to control even what people think.
To free a person spiritually, you have to bring them to accept everything about
themselves, others and the exterior universe which they don't like. This can be
tough, if liberating. Resistance will block your path to freedom. It gets you badly
stuck to things, as we have seen.
Let me tell you a famous story from the annals of Zen Buddhism. It concerns two
monks at a river crossing. When they arrive there they find a pretty young girl who
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
needs help. One monk picks her up, carries her over the water and then puts her
down on the opposite bank.
The other monk is highly critical of his companion’s behavior, which he sees as
shocking and improper. Hours later he’s still carping and criticizing the other. The
first monk eventually turns on him mockingly and says, “Are you still carrying that
girl around? I put her down at the ford...”
Great parable; I love it at all sorts of levels. But here I’m using it to illustrate the
fact that if you resist you WILL get stuck to things! The enlightened of the two
monks wasn’t resisting. He accepted there was something to do, did it and
accepted it as a kind and necessary act. No thought of impropriety.
Acceptance sets you free.
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
Transformational Psychology Techniques
We can take acceptance and fashion some very useful procedures for
transforming an individual's point of view in a lasting way. To run acceptance is not
the same as looking for the negatives of a case. We do not process lies. You are
looking for what is right about the individual. This is very empowering.
Start with "Tell me something about yourself you can accept?", "Tell me something
else about yourself you can accept..." and so on. Run over and over, this raises an
individual's awareness and self-esteem rapidly.
If it jams up, try rejection. Sometimes running a flow too long in one direction
causes it to seize up. Ask “Tell me something about yourself you are trying to
reject.” Pretty soon he or she will realize there is nothing to reject. It’s them, not
some alien graft.
You can try this also using the Channels of being or R-Zones (section 69). "Tell
me something about your first zone of responsibility that you can accept", "Tell me
something else..." and so on, through each of the 12 Channels or R-Zones.
In fact you can run it on any "hot" area of the person's life, with good effect. Make
sure the individual is accepting things exactly as they are, without having to
change them first or put some imaginary gloss on reality.
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
Forgiveness
Forgiveness is a unique kind of acceptance. It is, as Portia says in her famous
speech about mercy from Shakespeare's The Merchant Of Venice "twice blessed".
It blesses the giver, as well as the receiver.
Being able to accept what others have done, without acrimony or recrimination, is
as liberating to the victim as it is to the offender. It means you don't have to play
the loser; you become a winner.
We use the term victim pejoratively. Someone who clings to the "look what you did
to me..." mode of thought is actually saying "I am effect" or "I am no good..." or "I
can't control things". It is a solution which the victim hopes will enable him or her to
get back at others. When an individual fails to arrest a cause from which they don't
want to receive the effect, the next level of attempted control is emotional appeal,
to make the other "responsible".
A victim is essentially trying to be right. Naturally we are all trying to be right; but
when a victim is made wrong by being attacked or compromised in some way, he
or she does not simply stop trying to be right. In fact the effort becomes more
obsessive.
By promoting the idea of suffering, the victim wants to make the culprit wrong. It is
part of an absurd but almost universal computation that if others are made wrong,
we are somehow made right. Section 17 On Being Right covers this in depth).
Let’s to move on to a very powerful Acceptance Rubric. You can run it on yourself
or by the water cooler or in the car, run it on others, like a therapist! I started this in
1994, before there was such a thing as “Solutions Focus” but, as explained, (step
3) the two connect very nicely.
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
The Acceptance Rubric
Identify and Name
Step One
the Situation
Step Two - Optional
Choose the area of trouble
Ask yourself the 4 "What's"
Step Three
Use the Solutions Focus technique
Critical Thinking
Internal Check
New level of acceptance
Scaling from 1-10
Step Four
Are you willing to allow acceptance?
Step Five
Step Six
Have your feelings changed?
Repeat Steps 4 and 5
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
The first step is to identify and NAME the situation or area to
improve.
Start by making of list of areas in your life where you would like to reduce the
stress you feel. That means anywhere in which you feel doubt, frustration,
overwhelm or fatigue. Sometimes just thinking about some aspects of your life
makes you feel tired, have you noticed? Make sure topics like that go on the list.
Don’t be too general. “My rotten life” won’t work but “trouble at the office” would, or
“My current relationship” might.
Now choose one area of your life and acknowledge its limitations. How would it be
if you could accept that part of your life, just as it is, now, without even changing it?
How would it be if just by accepting it, things did change, perhaps dramatically for
the better? Wouldn’t that be great? Well, be open to sudden surprise
transformations.
This second step is an odd-on sophistication. You can skip it if you
like.
You can choose any area that is troubling you and ask yourself several questions
about it:
What did I do wrong?
What did I neglect?
What don’t I have?
What didn’t happen?
The answers to these are, of course, all negative, unsatisfactory things that are
hard to accept. But take up each answer and teach yourself to accept whatever
happened, as follows:
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
Using the Solutions Focus technique of “scaling”, figure out
where your acceptance is on a scale of 1 – 10 in respect of that
difficulty.
So: “On a scale of 1- 10, what is your acceptance of that situation/problem/
person, whatever...?” If you are doing it with other people, don’t worry about
oddball answers like, 11 out of 10 or minus 50 out of ten. Take them as what they
are: just figures of speech, rather than numbers.
You can use fractions if you want : 7½ out of 10, or 4.25. If numbers don’t mean
anything to you, just use words, like “a lot”, “a little”, “massive” and so on.
Now ask the million dollar question: “Are you willing to allow your
acceptance of that (whatever) to increase?” You are not going to try
to force a better outcome, but simply be willing to “let it happen.”
You want a “Yes”, of course. If it’s OK then say, “Let your acceptance increase” or
if you are doing it alone “I allow my acceptance of this situation to increase”.
Then check: “What is your level of acceptance of (whatever)...
now?”
Get a new number and again ask: “Am I willing to let my
acceptance of that increase?”
Repeat 4 and 5, over and over. Notice how you may feel calmer, lighter and more
at peace as the acceptance numbers rise.
Important: It must be made very clear to the client you are not trying to fix
the problem. The outcome is not the disappearance of the problem or
difficulty; the outcome is the person accepts it, fully and freely.
I’ll be releasing more audios on this very powerful technique, so if you need to
tune in to listen to someone actually doing it, look out for the announcements.
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
Finding It Hard?
If you bog down (or the person you are working with bogs), try breaking it up:
“What part of that problem or area can you accept?”
Ask if it’s OK to allow acceptance of part of the problem area to increase. Let it
rise. Then go to another area or part of the situation that can be accepted. Raise
acceptance on that. Sooner or later, the whole will begin to shift, not just the parts.
If you can’t get any change then you are resisting (or the person you are working
with is resisting). In which case call up the resistance (it needs to be admitted and
allowed). Then ask:
“On a scale of 1 – 10, what is your acceptance level to this resistance?”
Work on that acceptance let it rise and pretty soon the resistance will melt. Then
go back to acceptance of the original issue and that should rise too.
Again, keep emphasizing you are not solving the problem, you are working on
acceptance!
Remember that part of your mind which is resisting is trying to protect you in some
way. There is no need to ask what or how; but at least honor it. Don’t spit and
snarl; thank the part for trying to help you! Accept your resistance and then it will
begin to melt.
When you are training to become a Supernoetics™ pilot, we teach you many other
applications of this technique, most notably running acceptance on difficult people.
These are often the most profound negative influence in our lives and there is little
or no chance of getting them to change. Working on our own acceptance of the
quirks and foibles is the best way to go.
Copyright Keith Scott-Mumby © 2014
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
Therapeutic Knowledge Can Heal Your
Life Today, Find Out How...
Most of you will know I’ve be giving birth to a new book. It’s worse than labour
pains! (just kidding, I know it’s not).
I want to tell what all the excitement has been about and why it was worth the wait.
This is a precious book: if it could heal lives, it would be a cert for the
Pulitzer prize!
You’ll also meet the concept of “healing knowledge”. That in itself is worth
delving into. That’s where I score: I love method and logic. I think reason and
intellect is the best way forward in these troubled times; it got us down from the
trees and put a man on the moon, so it has proven its worth.
Most of what I've developed in this amazing book of therapeutic knowledge is
about doing, not just thinking the right thoughts. Intentions without actions mean
nothing.
If you understand it right and do what I suggest, you’ll find that your whole
world will start to heal…
This book is a bomb burst of tips, tricks, techniques, and teachings to explode your
mental powers and change the way you think, feel and look at things.
Read all about it! Click here and discover it for yourself now!
PROF. KEITH SCOTT-MUMBY
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Acceptance as a Tool to Heal Our Lives
History of this document
Originally published Dec 1993.
Revized March 2014
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