Jeff Foster, The Deepest Acceptance

 From the perspective of the ocean, nothing is a problem, in the deepest sense. Pain, anger, fear, frustration—they come and go in the ocean, and they are not, in the deepest sense, problems. But as human beings, not recognizing who we really are, we make them into problems. We say: “This wave does not belong in the ocean! It threatens the ocean—it threatens what I am. In some way, it is blocking the completeness of the ocean, and if I could just get rid of it, the completeness will be there again.”

What we are essentially doing is not allowing a wave to be in the ocean. We are not allowing a wave, which is already a perfect expression of life, to be there in life! We are so deeply conditioned to judge the waves as good, bad, ugly, beautiful, safe, dangerous, positive, or negative that we end up missing the inherent completeness of every single wave of experience—of every thought, every sensation, every feeling.

We stand in judgment of the waves. On the most basic level, we judge that some waves are okay and some waves are not okay. Some waves are allowed in what we are, and some waves are not allowed. And that’s where what we call resistance begins.

We find very complicated ways to do it, but essentially what we are trying to do is very simple: get rid of the waves we don’t like. We want to control the ocean by managing the waves, so the waves that appear are only those we want to appear.

All human suffering is a variation on this theme—trying to control the waves, trying to control our present-moment experience so it conforms to our ideas and concepts of how it should be. If you want to suffer, compare this moment with your image of how it should be!