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For a long time, I unknowingly believed that the goal was to fix all the aspects of myself I deemed less than acceptable. (This is what the whole self-improvement market rests on.)
In short, I tried to perfect myself.
I was convinced I could only truly accept myself after I had improved myself enough.
This behavior placed the key to accepting myself outside myself feeding a sense of helplessness, powerlessness, and incompleteness. And no matter how much I tried, it was never enough, of course.
Imagine the shock (which you might have experienced yourself) when I saw that the persona/character/self I was trying to improve wasn’t really there in the first place.
This is what happens to all of us. We imagine ourselves to be separate individual selves with specific attributes and characteristics based on a few select experiences and then try to improve these imagined selves. This is not only a fruitless task but the crux of the whole problem.
My compulsion for endless improvement came to an end when I realized that I am not a person having an experience but the experience of the person.
Afterward, my faults didn’t all disappear. I didn’t become a better human.
Instead, acceptance happened. Finally, I could accept myself as I am including the habitual emotions that are an echo of misidentification.
Acceptance Is All We Want
Acceptance of who we are right now (not in the future) is what we want.
No matter if we chase wealth, fame, sex, or enlightenment, we’re doing it because we think we need this to accept ourselves, to be whole, complete, fulfilled, or whatever.
Living an awake life means accepting what is as it is, including this seemingly imperfect you. Or as Anthony De Mello said, “Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable.”
When you can accept what is even a little bit more, everything becomes much easier.
Notice how much of our problems are based on the premise that something about us is not okay. Now imagine removing that premise.
How much lighter would you feel?
An elephant-sized burden would be lifted off your poor back.
Yes, healing yourself from emotional wounds is all fine and dandy but guess what is at the core of our never-ending healing endeavor?
The idea that who we are as humans is not-okay, unlovable, unworthy, unacceptable.
If we discard that idea then it’s no longer a matter of healing ourselves to reach some better persona. Then it’s simply a matter of welcoming all facets of our experience.
And that is the healing.
You don’t need to endlessly improve yourself to accept yourself. You can accept yourself right now exactly as you are. If you think you can’t then that’s a belief to examine.
Step out of the paradigm of something being wrong with you.
I know this is not easy for most of us. But the moment we accept ourselves, so much of this frantic activity we do because we believe we are unworthy falls away.
If all your habits and goals were an expression of self-rejection, it might be possible that all of them drop away.
Whatever habits you build afterward will then be an expression of acceptance not of rejection. You might still go to the gym but now you no longer do it because you think you must. You do it because you enjoy it.
Nothing Is Wrong With You
If we become fixated on healing an imagined character we not only tend to identify more with this never-good-enough character we also create more problems. We start imagining problems where there were none before.
Suddenly you’re convinced your shyness is a problem and try hard to fix it. All the while this shyness was part of your mysterious charm that attracted the right people into your life.
You might know this already but it’s still useful to remind yourself of this: This life you’re living has nothing to do with living up to some kind of behavioral ideal. It has nothing to do with being “perfect” whatever that means.
No one acts perfectly (by whose standard?) all the time. At least no one I’ve ever heard of. Not even the all-so-equanimous-seeming spiritual gurus.
You might have a time when nothing outrageous happens in your life. You’re mostly peaceful and everything unfolds smoothly.
You might think that this means something great. You start to perceive yourself as a super spiritual success.
But then something happens that triggers some deep-seated conditioning. Emotions you have almost forgotten flood to the surface.
Perhaps shame, perhaps anger, perhaps fear.
Happens to us all.
Then what?
Then you do the only thing that you can do.
You open the door and give it all your unconditional attention. And you can only really do that when you understand that nothing is wrong with any of the content of your experience.
There is quite literally nothing wrong with your experience. Not even thoughts saying, “There’s something wrong with my experience,” are wrong.
Let this into your heart.
There is nothing wrong with my experience. Nothing can ever be wrong. Wrongness is an absolute impossibility.
This is not a moral statement. This is a plain observation.
Wrong means something along the lines of, “This shouldn’t be.” But there is no “shouldn’t be.” There is only that what is.
Accept yourself and “shouldn’t be” will disappear.
Luka
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