Tolerating = Enduring Negativity

Understanding Toleration

Tolerating is not acceptance. Tolerating means enduring something that you do not like or agree with. You are a preference seeker. How might you meet your preference while tolerating? Do you think you can change a preference—something that emerged from emotion and expanded to a desired outcome? Does it make any sense to continue tolerating things that are not your preference? Do you think you will ever feel good doing this?

The Purpose of Choice

You have come to choose. You have come to align with what you choose. Anything else will be dissatisfying to you. In essence, the feeling of intolerance signifies you are not in alignment with what you are living.

Aligning with Feelings

You must live your lives feeling yourselves in them—not trying to change what is felt, but aligning with what is felt. If you are feeling uncomfortable for any reason, you have chosen to deny your preference and follow your fear.

Honoring Your Feelings

Feel the feelings, allow the feelings, honor the feelings, and guide yourself to what is preferred. Sometimes this will be difficult, especially when it comes to tolerating. Fear will cause you to be misguided and hold you in experiences that are not preferred. Because tolerating isn’t quite as uncomfortable as fear, often times fear wins out for a while.

The Impact of Fear

The problem with fear is that it matches many experiences and has many opportunities to reveal itself to you. As you hold the fear, the mirrored experiences that come will build in intensity and become more and more intolerable. This will drive you to recognize that what you’ve tolerated has grown to the degree that it can no longer be ignored.

The Inevitability of Alignment

You cannot remove the preference created by what you have felt in your life. Alignment will come one way or another—in suffering or in surrender to what is preferred. The choice is yours.

-Athena