MEDITATION NEWSLETTER

Acceptance

A few days ago, my dear friend and therapist Robert Jameson told me that every year he chooses a word, a mantra, to live by for that year. This year, he chose the word “ACCEPTANCE”.

I’ve been thinking about this and reflecting on how my ability to accept has shifted throughout my life and transformation. As a child and into young adulthood, I had never even considered accepting any negative circumstance that came my way. It didn’t even occur to me that accepting something was a possibility.

For most of my early life, I reacted to everything with resistance. Not being able to accept my circumstances caused a great deal of anger, resentment, and frustration. It caused pain, not only emotionally, but also physically. Being angry all the time hurts physically. As my friend Abdi would say, if we live this way, “we are not living; we are just surviving.”

In the early days of my sobriety, I learned a profound AA slogan from page 417 of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous: “Acceptance is the answer to all our problems today”. It took me a long time to put this into practice, but now, after all these years of spiritual practice and improving my emotional health, I often think of this short sentence.

When I say accepting, I don’t mean that we are giving up. Instead, we surrender to the circumstances and the attachments to the results of our endeavors. We accept where we are, and sometimes there is nothing we can do. Sometimes, we accept that we have to fight for what’s right, just like Arjuna told Krishna on the battlefield.

I often ask myself, ‘at what point one is in tune with what it means to accept, but not give up? How do we not become passive and adopt a “whatever” mentality? By accepting our circumstances, we choose freedom. Accepting that we have no control over the results of our life endeavors and accepting our helplessness is also freedom.

Still, a reminder from Robert to accept was a welcome moment.

We know we have the freedom to ACCEPT but most of us need to be reminded.

I am reminding you now!

XO
Pernilla

Running from Pain
(Part 1)

In this episode our discussion revolves around the theme Running from Pain – the process of confronting and addressing pain in the context of personal growth and spiritual awakening.

Listen Here

The Madhya: Finding the Pause

in Meditation

When you meditate, it’s always interesting to see what happens. In the beginning, grasping the concept of a pause, or as they call it, the madhya, was quite challenging.

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Abdi Assadi

Website
Books:
A Healer’s Handbook
Shadows on the Path

Abdi Assadi is unlike any other healer or spiritual teacher ever encountered. He is an expert in martial arts, and a dynamic healer practicing a diverse array of Chinese and Eastern Medicine, indigenous shamanic rituals, and meditation techniques. With a clinical practice in New York City for almost 4 decades, Abdi has accumulated a vast knowledge of real life experience working with several thousands of individuals, guiding them through the most difficult times, and teaching them how to understand themselves. One of the greatest things about him is he merges the human psyche with the spiritual psyche.

Steeped in deep wisdom and insight that is rare to find on this planet in these modern times, Abdi has an extraordinary ability in perceiving and comprehending human souls and their individual psyche. Guided by the divine, Abdi guides you to open up and see beyond your limited Self, into your own soul. His impeccable discernment enables him to unleash personal remarks that pierce through your veil, statements that you will never forget and in an instant alter your perception of yourself and your reality.

– Quotes from Shadows on the Path by Abdi Assadi:

All spiritual masters teach us that love is an activity before it is a condition – and that love is all-encompassing.
Page 18

It felt like I was coming off a race track and driving in a school zone. He knew, years before I did, that my speed was my way of suppressing my early childhood anxiety, and that only slowing down could heal it.

Why do you need to use all these words like God and spirituality? It is right here Abdi, all around you, all the time
Page 40

one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
Page 51

Ultimately it keeps grace out of our lives because we are using our will power to manipulate every event and person around us.
Page 74

His lesson, which I had begun to learn for myself, is that outside circumstances do not define our internal experience if we can surrender into them. Painful or undesirable situations will always arise; true suffering comes from our ego’s desire to resist life as it is.
Page 77

Note from Pernilla:
I met Abdi in the fall of 2014 and when I arrived in his office the first thing he said was, “It’s time that you stop carrying other people’s anxiety.” In the year that followed, my entrenched codependency patterns reared their ugly heads and I was confronted with a part of myself that I had never even known was there.

A few years later, Abdi said, “When are you going to start writing your book?”I looked at him in surprise. I was not a writer. My expertise was centered around creating crazy good Excel spreadsheets. However, I started writing and collecting notes about life issues and life experiences … and here we are a few years later.

MEDITATION NEWSLETTER