Hello and welcome back to another episode of the secular Buddhism podcast. This is episode number 172.

I am your host Noah Roshada and today I'm going to talk about acceptance. What is it? How do we practice it?

But in general this notion of acceptance.

As always keep in mind you don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist.

You can use what you learn to simply be a better whatever you already are.

So let's jump right in. To understand what acceptance means in the Buddhist context,

we need to remember that we're working on the assumption that suffering is what arises not from pain,

but from the feeling we have about pain. In other words, our attachment to pain.

So how does that work? Well let me give you an example of the correlation using the teaching of the

aggregates in a specific scenario. And this is a real life scenario that happened to me a few weeks ago.

In the last podcast episode, I talked about the teaching of the five aggregates or at least I

mentioned it in the context of the topic of that podcast episode. And those five aggregates are

form, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness. In the Buddhist teachings, these

are the five heaps or the five aggregates that make up you as a person. So a few weeks ago,

I was working on a project that required me to have light. And I have a little light lamp. It's

like a headband with a light on it. And I went to get it. I normally keep it in my nightstand.

And it wasn't there. So I needed to go outside to see if if I could find it there. And ultimately,

I needed to go to the shed to grab a tool. So that's what I was after a specific tool. I knew that I

needed it. And I wasn't sure where it was. So I had to go out and get it. I wanted the light to be

able to go see to be able to see inside the shed. Long story short, my head lamp wasn't there. So

and just as another background to that, I have a bad habit of not putting things back where they

belong. I'm really good at taking something and then saying, Oh, I'm going to put it here in

...