Accepting What We Cannot Change

Sometimes the thing we keep trying to fix is asking to be accepted, felt, and understood.

In this walk, I reflect on acceptance, addiction, and the Serenity Prayer as a path back to truth. I explore how repetitive behaviors, loops, and coping mechanisms often point to painful realities we have not yet been able to accept. A thoughtful episode about blame, self-betrayal, personal authority, and the healing that begins when we stop trying to change what cannot be changed.

Walk with me.

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Hello. Good morning. Welcome to Embodied Wisdom, a walk in the talk with Dr. Brook. Live from my neighborhood. Um So today I wanted to talk about acceptance. I'm a big fan of the serenity prayer. It's a big theme in the anonymous rooms that I've ever been to an anonymous room. There's Alcohol Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, uh Overeaters Anonymous. There's the family groups, adult childhood alcoholics. There's um I think there's sex. You know, sex a holic and anonymous, these things. Um really it's about you know those rooms are about finding your way back, I think, or were intended so that you could find your way back to your truth that laid behind your underneath your addictive behavior. And that part of that uh or a piece of that or how you uh would interpret it is a spiritual issue. That addiction is a spiritual issue. I once, I once um heard um, well, it was before podcasts. Before podcasts. I feel like I the times before, before times. It's a lot of before times, I think uh my generation has lived through. But anyway, so before podcasts, there were like, you know, you download the audiobooks or the talks on Audible, or anyway, so it's before podcasts. And um it was uh talk about addiction, and it was by a woman, her name is Carolyn Meiss, I think. I think, and and she talked about addiction, like it's the space between, it's like the space between where you're um, so like let's say your soul, your soul, your your highest self, your soul, your spiritual, the spiritual piece of you that goes on and on if you believe in reincarnation. Um, that addiction is like the place, it's is like the space between that and your personality, that and your humanness, and that that disconnection is like why we're neurotic or what like we're trying to find our way back there, and somehow the addiction is a bridge. And I didn't really expect to talk about addiction to this. Very interesting. Okay, so I so if addiction is a bridge um to your to your um your true self, so psychologically, I look at it like that, um, that there's a psychological bridge. Um, and sometimes these symptoms they basically are telling you or informing you that you're not in your truth. Um that you you know you you're coping with untruths, and you do that by uh, you know, these repetitive sort of behaviors that we find to be comforting or regulating of our nervous systems when we get upset because of a self-brayal. But you know, but the the reality is is we're not we're not in a truth. So this holds, this is like a space holder, right? So one example of that could be you blame yourself, you blame yourself because you don't like because you don't like another person. You know, that happens, I hear hear that a lot. Like I was so upset because I was, you know, because he called I was being an asshole. You know, he called me an asshole, and it's all my fault, and I shouldn't have said it that way, and I don't know, just was so upset, and I'm and and I'm listening to the story, and I'm like, well, you know, actually it sounds like he was an asshole. Oh, oh, oh. So maybe you're just like an asshole back, or maybe, or maybe not looking at it like contextually appropriately, where you see that what you said was is really about something much deeper for you. I see this a lot with women. He didn't take out the garbage, he didn't do this, he didn't do that, little nitpicky thing. And I'm like, no, actually, I just think um you're he he's not emotionally available to you. He's not paying attention because the examples that are being given it sort of I asked him to do this and he's not doing it. Like kind of like he doesn't hear me, he doesn't hear me. Um he doesn't hear me, you know, like and we could say then, so then you you you blame yourself for the way you say it. Right? But underneath, I think the point I'm getting at is there's no truth. The truth is you're not emotionally available to me, you don't pay attention to me, you don't pay attention to our children. I have to ask you before you do anything. You're not here with me, or you're consumed by work, or even when you're here, you're not here. People don't say that, right? They could become very upset and they think, oh, only I said it better. But this is where the addiction stuff comes in. It's like it's like a silent type of killer where now you're doing these behaviors to soothe these lies you tell yourself. But first of all, it's very upsetting, it doesn't work. So the issue is that people go to the behaviors because they can control it. I mean, this is like cliche, but they can control that. There's a whole thing with eating. I can't control what's going on inside of me, but this I can control, this I can regulate with eating disorders, and and there's just a truth to that. Like if you can't control something or someone, and instead you could control this, you see, it's like a parallel universe or a parallel lifestyle that really um is showing you what's unspoken to yourself. So if you look at it, you will be better off. In other words, it will direct you to look at those things, these behaviors that are so actually aggravating and annoying. Okay, so if I go back then to this type of idea of addiction, control, the AA phenomenon, and I give you back this serenity fair. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I've recently translated that to my own version, which is God grant me the serenity to accept the assholes as they are, the courage to hold conviction of the truth of who I am and what I am responsible for, and the wisdom to know the difference. I'm gonna say that again. God grant me the serenity to accept the assholes as they are, the courage to hold conviction of the truth of who I am and what I'm responsible for, and the wisdom to know the difference. Okay, so you see how that there's this link between betrayal and not seeing things as they are, and acceptance. So if we accept that it is what it is, we accept that it is what it is, whatever is in front of us, it hurts, and we can't fix it. God grant me this running to accept the things I cannot change. Because it hurts. And a lot of us are fixer-uppers. Gotta fix it, gotta fix it. We're gonna fix that feeling, and we're gonna fix that feeling with the addictive behaviors, we're gonna fix that feeling by going to work, we're gonna work harder, we're gonna produce something, we're gonna make this right, and we do it on freaking repeat, like, oh my god, it's just exhausting. But wow, it works, and wow, it's distracting because in the end, when you can't fix it and you just need to sit with it and you don't critique it, I think we have to like just look at the idea that self-critique must not be uh self-critique must not be um a it has to the conditions have to be set for neutrality if you're gonna accept the things you cannot change, because if you have an internalized mechanism that you blame yourself for what's in front of you and you think you can change it, first that needs to be kind of uh neutralized, straight line with it's okay, I'm gonna look at this, I'm gonna look at it for what it is, and maybe in the end, I'm not gonna be as hard on myself because I'm gonna realize kind of how screwed up the whole thing really is, and how the assholes involved are ignorant. But these types of things they can be enormously heartbreaking because um we don't want them to be true. Now I talk in other spaces, you know, about things are the way exactly the way they're supposed to be. God circled a spot, and it's right here right now, uh, and there's no way as things should be. This is the thing. It still feels shitty, and it feels icky and it feels upsetting, and we build defenses against that, just as a means of survival. Not because, not for any other reason. It's like auto. It's auto, it's auto-built in to the humanness that we are. You know, um, there was this old school psychoanalytic writer. I mean, really, really old school, named Schiller. My wonderful mentor, Dr. Evercino shared this with me. Very complicated writer. When he gave me the book, I was like, I mean, it was like Chinese to me. But, you know, I read at the end of that, at the end of it, there was a um speech given about this guy at probably one of the psychoanalytic societies. And what this guy said about him was that he he he didn't see mental challenges, I'll say, or I guess we'll call it mental illness, mental dis ease, being dis at ease in your mind. He started as a built-in space in human thinking, even like something if you guys have ever seen, I'm sure a lot of you have not seen this, because hopefully you've not spent, unless you're trained to do so, haven't spent a lot of time in a inpatient mental mental health facility. But if you do ever happen to have walked in those spaces, you understand that people have thought disorders, they um they think in a loop and they can't they can't stop the looping. And it's when you see it, whew, it's intense, it's intense. So this guy goes says, you know, that's in all of us, it's a part of being human. You know, it doesn't go off the rails for all of us, you know, it just can vary, but he was seeing it as like a a wholeness, that there was a wholeness about us. And that wholeness, so if this gets triggered by stress, by DNA, by he didn't say any of this, but you know, that's what I'm saying with the let's say later models. Um then what we get in the end. This is nice. Take a picture. You know what? How nice is it for it to be spring this year? I like this picture. This picture is the uh coming from the different way of the original, just you know, the original picture that's on the podcast, this is from the different direction. Not that you would care about that, but if you do. So I don't know, little tip. Um so if we understand that we don't need to apologize, we're not pathological just because we can't accept what we can't change. We're not that and like you know, it's kind of like we're built that way. That's what that's what he's basically saying, and that we're whole, that that's part of our wholeness. And so, yeah, can anything in our body go off the rails? Sure. You know, people have all different kinds of things that go off the rails, and he would probably say the same about that. That's built into the body, it's a malfunction of the body. Um, and I could argue that, like, if we look at the addiction, she's she, you know, Carolyn Mice is going, that's a function of the human experience. That's a function of spiritual uh ignorance. That's a function of not knowing who we are, what we could be, of the soul of our existence, of the other planes, of what we can't see. And then we think it's us. And then we have to soothe that because we blame ourselves for the things we can't change. This could be like, I mean, we're talking about on such a practical level, where over and over again, I mean, this is a big thing in my heritage, and I'm finding myself doing it, like fighting about the same thing over and over again, fighting for the same thing over and over again, saying I will not be conciliatory again, and saying it over and over and over. But what does that mean if you're dealing with the same issues over and over again? What it means to me is we're not accepting what's in front of us, and it it's seemingly easy, seemingly, seemingly easy to conceptualize. But when I tell you how confusing this is, well, at least for me, I could argue that it's more confusing for me than a lot of the people I serve sometimes, because sometimes that clicks in and they are good to go. They get it, they're able to um digest it, and they walk forward. And me, it's like, okay, let's digest it again. Unless I I, you know, I have a certain job to do here, so okay, it's my job, so I'm gonna digest it again, and then I'm gonna digest it again, and then I'm gonna digest it again. Because the way that my denial can run, I guess based on the Schiller concept, is I will be restored, I will restore myself back to my wholeness, and this is part of that concept, this is part of that process, because if we think about what Carolyn Mice is saying, and we make these connections, at least we acknowledge these connections that our soul and our personality are not necessarily aligned, and that there's this space between where we try to get back to that knowing, and because we forget what we are, we forget where spiritual beings having a human experience. I know that for some people that's not a foreign concept, but for others, so it's this idea that that idea is coming from the idea, as I said earlier, that your soul travels and that this isn't the only life it's had. It's had more than one lifetime, and that spiritual body knows that there's that this is only one playground, that the human playground is just one playground, and that soul has a contract of what it's gonna play out. This is a Carolyn Meiss concept, uh, what it's gonna play out in this life, and those soul contracts are playing out kind of whether we like it or not. And this mechanism of obsession, thought sort of thought looping, um uh a piece that I guess here I'm likening that in a way to addiction, or but you know, this guy's like that's not pathological. Cal Mace is like, that's not pathological, that's a part of it. So it's nothing to be fixed, even with our mechanisms within ourselves, it's to be recognized, known, there to be an awareness, because then we don't have to take more responsibility than is necessary, because we don't have a need to do that anymore. We don't have a need to blame ourselves for the things we can't change, for the way we said it. Because if you look at these things, I'd like I'm gonna look at these things I fight with over and over and over again. Same themes. It's the same theme my mother fought about, it's the same thing theme I would argue her mother fought about in some similar way. About the way people are and the way they view the world, and when you're around them, and that way of being to you is not truthful and it's corrupt, and yet you're engaging with it, it feels icky, and there's nothing you could do to get away from it. Because even if you don't talk to your mother anymore, right, because you decide to separate, or you don't talk to a relative, you know, you're still connected to them. So you still may need to see them, or you still may choose to see them because of your decision around those relationships. But they still are what they are. It's like almost like, oh, I'm gonna look, I'm gonna do this differently this time. And then I think I'm gonna feel differently, it's gonna look different, but it's always the same. And if you sit into it, it's like, oh god, icky, yucky, and it's and then so instead of being like, oh, I gotta pop out of here. Oh, I shouldn't have said that. Oh, I shouldn't have done that. Oh, I I you know, I shouldn't have gone. Shouldn't have gone to that. It's still dealing with the same thing, still dealing with the same thing. Or um, and then what are you doing? Your hand is in the chips, your hand, you're at work, you're working again, you're drinking again, smoking again, whatever you're doing, you're doing it again because you're doing this again and again and again, and then maybe one day you wake up and you go, what am I doing? And a lot of times, just by the way, everyone's like, I can't believe this happened to me so late. I wish I knew this sooner. You don't usually figure these things out, everybody, till midlife-ish, because you have enough information about what it is like to live on this planet and do these things that are built into our system and restore the truth. Restore your personal authority because the restoration of the truth is the restoration of your personal authority, and that's what I've called you know, this no pun. And they attended sanity. I established. And it's a pun because this idea that you come back to the sanitarium, you don't get locked in there because you're crazy. No. You come there to get whole. Because none of us are really crazy. I mean, okay, a small few. Are really, really crazy. And what I mean by that is that's the real space where there's that malfunction, and that malfunction goes off the rails, and that could become extremely, extremely difficult for a human. Because when that type of mechanic goes off the rails, you can't think straight. Okay, but most people can. They can. Just like most people don't have juvenile diabetes. I look at it that way, and God bless you if you have something like that. But this is also as rare as that. So otherwise, you're just a normal human trying to get through the day, trying to accept the things that hurt a lot, that you can't change, that you wish were different, that you were told most likely was about you. This is the gaslit phenomenon. And at the end of the day, this is what we do. So there's no, it's never too late to discover it. I keep discovering it again and again. And for anybody who has issues, you know, same thing, like is so dedicated to finding the truth that they're loop until the deepest, deepest, deepest, darkest secret within themselves comes out, there's nothing to apologize for. You're in good company. Um, but it is annoying. So practically, it's like, how do you figure this out if there's a mechanic inside of you that allows for you to not accept it and do this other thing instead? So I think it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Like let it let it let it breathe. Because either way, you're being honest with yourself. So whether it's more like that idea of taking too much responsibility for what you can't change or what an asshole another person is, that's very painful. So what really what we're just trying to do here is reduce suffering. Right? Or understand our suffering better. Misunderstanding is a mother of all misery. That's a big one I like to say. Misunderstanding is a mother of all misery. So if we accept these things, and if even if you just look at these patterns happen over and over again, you could just look at them. It's most likely connected to something that you can't accept and that you you need to you think you need to change. But you don't need to change it. You just might need to feel it, you need to sit with it, you may need to stop blaming yourself for it. And what that does is it restores you to a higher level of wholeness. And I think that's where um the psychology field will be is headed. Um it's what like you know the psychedelic type of phenomena are that you're going back to find a part of yourself that got uh sham, you know, got what I'm saying here, got lost somewhere. The truth within got lost. That's what psychedelics really do. They they help you go back and restore parts of the things you can't remember so that you can come to different levels of truth, and this mechanism doesn't really need to fire off because the acceptance is now neuropsychological. Because just by the way, this is also becomes neurological. So there's a body component, is what I mean, and that's where the food and all these things come in as like a self-regulatory um component. Um and so if you then need to regulate, sorry, I was about to close up here and to just uh be distracted for a second. Um if you come to a greater and a higher level of truth in your mind, as I've said, well your neurology is part of this too. So it takes a minute. So it could be like you know, you're going to an event and or something, and you're like, you're you know in your head's on straight that you're going into a potentially toxic environment. You have named it, you understand it, but your body goes, no, no, not exactly. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So it's a challenge. So be good to yourself or be kind to yourself, be more reasonable with yourself. And welcome me again. Thanks so much again for joining me. Always uh always a pleasure.