sarahsaturday

I am responsible for the achievement of my desires.

I am responsible for my choices and actions.

I am responsible for the level of consciousness I bring to my work.

I am responsible for the level of consciousness I bring to my relationships.

I am responsible for my behavior with other people -- coworkers, associates, customers, spouse, children, friends.

I am responsible for how I prioritize my time.

I am responsible for the quality of my communications.

I am responsible for my personal happiness.

I am responsible for accepting or choosing the values by which I live.

No one owes me the fulfillment of my wishes.

It's not that I want to have a hard time being vulnerable...

It's not that I want to have a fear of getting hurt...

It's not that I want to put up a wall around my heart...

It's not that I want to assume the worst...

It's not that I want to feel totally alone in the universe...

It's not that I want to think the pattern will always repeat itself...

It's just that, sometimes, I do.

So now what?

By way of introducing clients to the idea of self-acceptance, I often like to begin with a simple exercise. It can offer a profound learning experience.

Stand in front of a full-length mirror and look at your face and body. Notice your feelings as you do so. I am asking you to focus not on your clothes or your makeup but on you. Notice if this is difficult or makes you uncomfortable. It is good to do this exercise naked.

You will probably like some parts of what you see more than others. If you are like most people, you will find some parts difficult to look at for long because they agitate or displease you. In your eyes there may be a pain that you do not want to confront. Perhaps you are too fat or too thin. Perhaps there is some aspect of your body you so dislike that you can hardly bear to keep looking at it. Perhaps you see signs of age and cannot bear to stay connected with the thoughts and emotions these signs evoke. So the impulse is to escape, to flee from awareness, to reject, deny, disown aspects of your self.

Still, as an experiment, I ask you to stay focused on your image in the mirror a few moments longer, and say to yourself, "Whatever my defects or imperfections, I accept myself unreservedly and completely." Stay focused, breathe deeply, and say this over and over again for a minute or two without rushing the process. Allow yourself to experience fully the meaning of your words.

You may find yourself protesting, "But I don't like certain things about my body, so how can I accept them unreservedly and completely?" But remember: "Accepting" does not necessarily mean "liking." "Accepting" does not mean we cannot imagine or wish for changes or improvements. It means experiencing, without denial or avoidance, that a fact is a fact. In this case, it means accepting that the face and body in the mirror are your face and body and that they are what they are.

If you persist, if you surrender to the reality of what is, if you surrender to awareness (which is what "accepting" ultimately means), you may notice that you have begun to relax a bit and perhaps feel more comfortable with yourself, and more real.

Even though you may not like or enjoy everything you see when you look in the mirror, you are still able to say, "Right now, that's me. And I don't deny the fact. I accept it." That is respect for reality.

When clients commit to do this exercise for two minutes every morning and again every night for two weeks, they soon begin to experience the relationship between self-acceptance and self-esteem: a mind that honors sight honors itself. But more than that: How can self-esteem not suffer if we are in a rejecting relationship to our own physical being? Is it realistic to imagine we can love ourselves while despising what we see in the mirror?

They make another important discovery. Not only do they enter a more harmonious relationship with themselves, not only do they begin to grow in self-efficacy and self-respect, but if aspects of the self they do not like are within their power to change, they are more motivated to make the changes once they have accepted the facts as they are now.

We are not moved to change those things whose reality we deny.

And for those things we cannot change, when we accept them we grow stronger and more centered; when we curse and protest them, we disempower ourselves.

I feel like I'm at some kind of turning point. For the last year, one negative thing after another has seemed to pile up in my world like dirty laundry -- at home, in my work, in my relationships, and in my mind. None of the stuff was intimidating when examined by itself, but collectively it has grown out of control, and in the last few months has begun to really clog up my existence.

But recently it's as if someone has taken a plunger to my life, forcing out all the gunk. At first I didn't know what was happening and I got upset that things were shifting around so suddenly and so intensely, but then this distant ray of light came slicing through the murkiness, nearly blinding me. And as each dark cloud has been lifted out of my life, this ray of light has turned into a sunrise, and I am excited now for what I will be capable of when all that soot and soil and gunk and garbage is gone for good. Finding that glimmer of hope has helped me face each painful experience head-on, standing tall, willfully ready to accept the blow just to get it over with and take one step closer to a new beginning.

It's as if I am paying my Karmic dues to the universe for all the mistakes I've made in the last few years, and once I've paid in full, I will not only be a new and better person, but I'll also have an amazing reward waiting for me.

In fact, I think my reward is already here.

Oh sure, someday I'll just be walking through the woods, singing (in harmony) with an owl and some green birds, when all of a sudden some hot dude on a horse is just going to sneak up behind me and start dancing and singing with me -- and he'll already know the words.

And then, when I've totally fallen in love with him, my three aunts will tell me that I'm the princess and I have to marry the prince, and I'll be like, "No, aunts, I want to marry that dude I met in the woods." And they'll be like, "Too bad." But then it will turn out that by some freak impossible chance, the dude from the woods is actually the prince, and totally perfect, and he'll be so obsessively in love with me that he'll fight his way to me through a forest with his shield of virtue and sword of truth, and he'll destroy Evil just to kiss me for the first time.

And then we'll rule the kingdom together forever and have beautiful babies and a joint bank account and maybe a timeshare somewhere sweet, like New Zealand.

Sure, totally, that's completely based on reality and I should spend my whole life subconsciously waiting for that crap to happen to me, all because it was burned into my still-developing five-year-old brain when I saw that movie for the first time.

AWESOME.

THANKS, WALT.

...but only for those who will seek them.