How Viktor Frankl survived the Nazi concentration camps

An observation:

So much of people's misery comes from resisting against "what is."

The circumstances in their lives that they can't control.

But the thing is, if you genuinely can't control something, then the smartest path forward is acceptance. Resisting it is just going to make you fearful, worried, frustrated, sad, angry, and a whole host of other lower energies on Hawkins' Scale of Consciousness.

If you aren't familiar with his work:

He popularized a scale of consciousness that categorizes humans' experience of consciousness from the lowest levels to the highest. Things like fear, regret, shame, and guilt are towards the bottom – while things like joy, peace, acceptance, and meaningfulness are towards the top. And his work is not applied through a moral or ethical lens, or one of judgement, but rather a more objective classification of the energetic properties of a given state of consciousness.

🧭 Finding Meaning
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It's interesting stuff.

It's pretty awesome how our experience can change through accepting the things we can't change.

It reminds me of Viktor Frankl's experiences that he shared in his book, "Man's Search For Meaning," where he talks about his time in the Nazi concentration camps. An extreme example, sure, but laced with an equally extremely powerful set of lessons.

He said,

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

While he was stripped naked, starving, physically abused, enduring freezing temperatures, and everyone was being worked to death or outright killed around him… these were some of his reflections, that allowed him to keep his sanity in some of the worst circumstances imaginable.

What I take from that is that there's wisdom is learning how to stop resisting circumstances we can't change — learning how to accept them, and make peace with them.

Yet, on the other side of the coin, you have circumstances that you can change.

And for those?

Sometimes I think people have this stuff backwards.

They mentally resist against things they can't change, and they accept things they could change but don't bother taking control over.

My recommendation:

With any situation, if you can't control it, accept that.

But if you can control it, then sit with your dissatisfaction and let it become a fuel that pushes you to change it and create a better future.

And recognize that you often have a lot more control than you might like to admit initially.

I see this often with guys, like my client J, who had simply accepted that porn would be a part of his lifestyle forever even though he knew it was hurting his intimacy and wanted to quit. He wasn't resisting it so much anymore… despite the ugly consequences within his previous marriage, even. Until one day he got fed up and decided to seize control, and we started working together.

I'm happy to report that he's been clean from porn for over a year, since the first day we met.

He never thought it would be possible, but thanks to what he learned and his admirable quality of applying himself to learning and adopting those strategies, he has an easy time controlling any urges that come up.

And they're frankly quite rare, because his brain has healed so much and he's built a lifestyle that's supportive to his goals.

If, like J, you're tired of accepting circumstances that you know you should be able to control but haven't been able to sort out on your own, I'm here to help.

Download the BeFree App today and start practicing acceptance of what you can't change and control of what you can.