more on SELF-ACCEPTANCE

Warning - very philosophical posting ahead!

 

My older friends aren't shy about letting me know when they think I'm out in left field.  One had definite views on my posting about self-acceptance.  She agreed it's essential for strengthening our courage muscle.  She just thought I'd done an iffy job making the point.

In her experience, coming to genuine self-acceptance is TOUGH.  Which self are we accepting?  Try to figure out your genuine self, only to discover that not only do you have a number of "selves," some of them want the opposite thing.  The Self that wants to lose five pounds battles with the Self that wants an everything bagel with a generous smear of full-fat veggie cream cheese.  The Self that wants to get up at 5:15 a.m. battles the one that wants to watch Casablanca - that ends at 11:55 p.m.  The Self that wants to...  

I got the message.

One of the reasons we resist looking inward is because its so gosh darn confusing.  We have all these Selfs running around - which is the real one, the genuine I?

According to my friend, none of them.  She considers her "I" to be the still small voice that is silently taking in all that's happening, so low register even she can't hear it, only tune into its vibes.

Yikes!  That sounds like a lot of effort.  Here's where it got interesting.  It seems that she had neither the inclination nor the time when she was younger to pause & consider, "What is self?"  But the older she got, the more her day-to-day life slowed down, the more she thought about it.  

A woman of the '60s, she'd long heard about "monkey chatter," the noise in our heads that distracts us from what we really think.  But after she exited her own 60s, she found herself questioning what she'd come to think she really thought.  

Come again?

She realized that most of what she thought was only what she thought she thought.  (My head was whirling.)  She started looking at her thoughts as labels she'd put on events & experiences, rather than just letting the events & experiences be.  (She almost lost me there.)

The point she wanted to make is that coming to self-acceptance is a long, challenging, indescribably rewarding journey.  It is not as easy as she felt I made it out to be.  And it involves multiple steps & many levels, most of which we won't see coming.  And just when we finally think we've got it, we'll have reached a place where we can actually see that everything is something other than what we expected.  

I hope that is close to what she described.  At least my core point remains ~ self-acceptance is essential to developing a strong courage muscle.  Just remember that we have many Selfs inside, more often battling rather than forming alliances.  Do our best to come to figure out which will help us meet our heart goals & give the rest the old heave ho.  And just as we finally have a productive team of Selfs with our highest best interests at heart - realize that none of them really exist.  But that we can't push this, that we need to get our lives at a slower pace, a calmer place.  

As convoluted as it all sounds, I think I get it.  If it didn't sound convoluted, I'd be describing it wrong.  I think what bugged my friend was me sounding like life is a straight line, or at least makes a logical progression from Point A to Point B, and so on.  She wanted to say life isn't a straight like or a spiral - it's a hot mess. 
 

 

AND - if it truly matters to us, if we show great care & loving & self tenderness, we might come to the quiet center of it all & discover our true self.  Acceptance isn't an option then; we just are.