All of this is a challenge, having been raised as we have been and living in an environment which is often hostile, with our egos being constantly challenged. In order to have a reasonable chance to experience acceptance, being present, and faith in the future it is clear to me now that several other spiritual practices are critical.
The first is gratefulness. It's relatively easy for someone to list the things that he's grateful for; I did it for years. But to feel grateful is something else altogether. To have the feeling of gratefulness rise up within you, unasked, means that you are truly grateful.
The second spiritual practice is feeling abundance. One reason why gratefulness is so critical is that if you are not grateful, you cannot experience, feel the abundance that is part of your life and exists all around you. Believe me, if you are in a state of being ungrateful, about anything, you will not be able to experience any abundance in your life.
Without being grateful and experiencing abundance, you stand little chance of truly being accepting and present in the moment, nor have faith that you'll be ok in the future regardless what happens.
Let's say you're working on a new project, or a job, and it just isn't going well; it's causing you lots of stress. We are raised to say keep at it, don't admit failure. Yet from a spiritual perspective, taking that route is bound to just perpetuate your suffering.
Spiritually, if something is causing you suffering, it either isn't right for you and you need to let it go, or you need to find a different way of approaching it. As the Buddha said, "If it causes you suffering, it is not you, it is not yours, it is not your self for your self would never cause you suffering. " But if you aren't otherwise filled with gratefulness and aware of your abundance, you will not be able to accept that fact and let it go.
Another example is people are always talking about what they don't want, something they have but they don't want. That doesn't get you anywhere, does not move you forward. It just mires you in frustration.
What we must do instead is talk (but not obsess) about the things we want. Throw positive thoughts out to your Buddha nature and the universe. Remember, any time you voice a negative, you are in fact affirming that negative! But again, the only way to stop focusing on what we don't want, is to be grateful for what we have, feel the abundance, and accept our life as it is at this moment.
The third critical spiritual practice is to be in constant contact with your Buddha nature, your divinity. Given the environment we live in and the way most of us have been raised, these spiritual states I've noted are a real challenge to experience with some consistency. To experience them with consistency requires that we are in constant contact with our Buddha nature, with our divinity. And so this is the third critical spiritual practice.
This is relatively easy when you are sitting on your cushion, or are out in nature, or are doing something that is not part of your role in the world. But when you are trying to do something, achieve something, being in contact with our Buddha nature while in the process rather than with our mind is a great challenge. There are times when the mind must be engaged, it is an essential part of moving through life, but frequently that balance is all wrong between the weight of our mind and the weight of our contact with our Buddha nature and so we go down the wrong path.
I truthfully have no foolproof answer to maintaining that contact. All I can do (I am not enlightened) is to put myself in contact with my Buddha nature throughout the day, literally asking it to be with me, while rejecting the input of my mind.