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Think about your future possibilities and the fact that your potential is virtually unlimited. You can
do what you want to do and go where you want to go. You can be the person you want to be.
You can set large and small goals and make plans and move step-by-step, progressively toward
their realization. There are no obstacles to what you can accomplish except the obstacles that
you create in your mind.
Accepting does not mean allowing yourself to be abused, or the abuser. The acceptance I am
speaking of is stepping back for one moment, and watching your emotional reaction to any
situation where you feel resistance. Once you stop, and look at yourself as if you were on a
movie screen and say: “Look at how I am reacting. Look at what I’m feeling because of this
situation. The moment you can catch yourself and “become the watcher”, you immediately
disengage yourself from the emotional drama of the situation. Then, you can accept it just for
what it is. As soon as you accept it, you are no longer in pain.
Your suffering has been transformed into freedom from suffering. You can then look at the
situation with some measure of objectivity, and if you can’t laugh at it, you can at least come to
peace with it. Going back to an analogy to nature, suppose you have a small rose bush in your
garden. You WANT it to bloom, and give you one hundred perfect roses. It blooms, and gives
you two instead.

Do you stomp, scream, and rip the rose bush out of the ground by its roots? No. You accept that
this is what you received. Perhaps it wasn’t yet ready this season to bloom, as you want it to. Per-
haps it will never bloom. It has nothing to do with YOU! It is the same with people. The way they
are, is simply the way they are. Circumstances are the way they are. It is in this moment that you
can make a decision based on awareness, stemming from acceptance, as to a course of ac-
tion or inaction that will serve your best interest.