Table of Contents
Accept yourself.
It’s the simplest and most profound, yet the most difficult and trickiest suggestion anyone can ever give you.
It doesn’t need much to realize that it makes sense. Nothing makes more sense.
But the moment you try to do it, you lose the plot.
Because in that moment you’ve already judged what you consider to be bad/inadequate/not good enough and then attempt to accept it. In other words, you’re back to improvement.
And that doesn’t work.
Accepting yourself seems confusing. That’s no surprise. We’ve never been taught (by example) and encouraged to do so.
How many of us, as kids, have regularly heard words like, “You’re perfect the way you are.” Or “You’re good enough.” Or “You’re an amazing human being and good damn! are you lovable and worthy.”
Not many I assume.
Instead, we’ve known a constant pressure to become someone else. We’ve been taught to improve ourselves until the wolves come out. It’s pushed on us every way we turn.
Even a lot of spiritual teachings, whose essence IMO is acceptance, subtly nudge you toward becoming instead of being.
Improvement, Understanding, and Acceptance
But the issue is even more basic than that. It’s a linguistic problem. Whenever we talk about change (i.e. something being different from what we’re used to) our minds automatically imagine it as a future achievement.
Acceptance implies a change by no longer needing to change. And our minds start glitching at this suggestion.
So what is needed here is not a technique or practice but understanding. And understanding always follows looking/observing.
What is it we think we do when we “improve ourselves?”
What we think we do is improve an actual entity. But that entity we try to improve is only a concept. The one we think we are improving is the proverbial bird in the empty cage.
We are trying to improve air by teaching it new tricks.
Now that we know what we think we are doing, what are we actually doing?
We’re improving skills. Skills are not what we are.
Everything you’re trying to get better at, because you assume it’s part of who you are, is skills. And any pain associated with it is because you are identified with those skills.
Even practices that work on a more meta-level such as mindfulness are skills and have nothing to do with you.
That applies to acceptance as a practice as well. Which is why real acceptance seems so tricky to pull off.
The problem or rather the solution is that it’s not pull-offable.
Acceptance Is
You don’t need to accept yourself. Instead, you recognize that acceptance is.
Trying to accept things is unnecessary for the simple reason that things have already been accepted. If there is awareness of anything, that anything has been accepted.
It’s like trying to figure out how to let someone in through the front door while that someone has already let himself in through the back.
The problem you’re trying to accept? It’s old news. It has come and gone already.
By working on accepting it you hope to make it go away. But all you’re doing is re-conjuring it. So in a sense, all “trying” is adding to the problem.
Now might be a good time to ask who the one doing the accepting and who the one being accepted is. We could’ve asked that right at the beginning but I had to amuse myself by leading up to this.
The one who is doing the accepting is no one and the one who is being accepted is his sister.
In other words, what you are is acceptance.
Being acceptance means there is no choice in what to accept or reject. Everything is accepted by design.
Even the sense of wanting to reject or accept something has been accepted.
Can you see the final point?
Recognizing what you really are and acceptance go hand in hand.
If you’re stuck on the negative side of the nondual coin — focusing on the absence of a separate self — then there is only one thing to “do:” Be and know that you are.
Yes, the you you think you are is not you. But awareness (or any other word you prefer) is. You are that. You exist.
Don’t miss this obvious non-conceptual self-evident fact. Get clear on that. And then acceptance follows on its own as one of the implications of knowing what you are.
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P.S. If that hasn’t struck a chord with you and you’re still being harder on yourself than a drill sergeant then let me say something human: I for one think you’re perfect the way you are. If I was one of God’s angels (aren’t we all) I would certainly weep at the perfection that is you. Even if we’ve never talked personally, you’re an awesome human being. There is only one like you and I’m glad that it’s you. <3
Luka
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