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acceptance Archives - Self-Help, Spirituality & Self-Esteem

acceptance

Surrendering To The Truth Of The Way ‘It’ Is

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The Truth Will Set You Free

What do we mean by Truth? Are we talking about they way you think you and the world are in each moment?

Are we talking about judgments such as it was bad to fly a plane into a building?

When we talk about Truth it is wise to begin by forgetting about everything you know and ask yourself what would be still here if I had a different life story.

It is true that you have an identity and a concept of who you are. You believe you are a certain type of person such as a good boy, or a bad, mean girl.

However, your self-image is not the truth. It is a mental construct and a whole lot of ideas that are held firmly by you.

It is quite conceivable that you could have a different life story and self-image. What would be the same between now and that alternative self image?

It would still be you right?

Doing the above exercise you might come to the conclusion that your existence and your being is a common amongst all beings or all humans.

No matter what construct of ideas you have about yourself, what remains true and certain is the awareness that you exist.

We find ourselves here with no knowing of what it is about. There is something about being here which demands surrendering to that which has us here, whatever that may be.

You only have to look out at the stars and moon and contemplate the planets and be brutally honest that you have no idea what the heck it is all about.

It will be the ego, your personality-mind, which won’t be comfortable with admitting you don’t know. You can listen to the ego and let it play its little game of ‘don’t ignore me’, ‘you need me’ or whatever else but don’t let it convince you that

1. you do know

2. you should know

3. this is not important

4. you are special

5. whatever other defense or resistance your ego will creatively come
up with

Learn to surrender to that which ‘is’.

I like to surrender in wonder and awe.

When you let go of everything you know and let the realization that you don’t know anything about existence, being, how you got here, where you go after you leave, why you are here, how the sun and moon and tides work or anything of this nature, you touch a more authentic part of you.

There is a calmness, intelligence and joy when you surrender to what is.

As I sit here and look around and watch my mind make sense of the world we have created, I can see that my mind is necessary to operate in this world as a separate self.

However, I can also see that anything I can distinguish will not exist in the fullness of time and it will exist now as it is irrespective of whether I distinguish it or not.

I can see that thoughts come and go and feelings do also. Ideas about what is important to me come and go. I let them all come and go but never attach myself emotionally to them.

What is the truth of the nature of being, of you, of what you experience or of what allows you to experience?

Spiritual Surrender

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Spiritual Surrender To Feel Better

What is spiritual surrender?

Often we think we need to plan and think out each moment.

Learn to give up trying to control and amazing things begin to happen. Bring awareness to how often you wish to control this moment.

Are you comfortable surrendering to the intelligence that is not the intelligence people refer to when they talk of IQ?

In the world of apparent reality – the world you observe – conditions and circumstances will be either.

  • to your liking
  • not to your liking or
  • you will be indifferent



Firstly, given how little you know of

  • what is going on
  • how you got here
  • why you are here…



don’t you think it is a little presumptuous to believe that you are completely in control of every experience of your life?

Sure you have an apparent self that includes your thoughts, beliefs, self-image and values but you also have an aspect that is far greater in real-ness. This aspect I am referring to is the commonality between all human beings. Maybe it is the commonality between all beings; all life?

Lowest Common Denominator

If you step aside from your sense of “I am my story” and move to identify with a little more awareness of the ever present lowest common denominator (or should I say highest) between all of us, you are experiencing a state of being that is more liberating.

In this state of identifying as something other than your story (for example whilst sitting meditating or in a hypnotic trance) you realize that when any human being does this we all experience the same alive-ness, life force, awareness, call it what you will.

It is an experience that doesn’t permanently remove the sense of being a separate self, but what it does do is bring more awareness to that which is greater than your-self. It is this aspect which is greater than my-self which I don’t understand with my mind, that is the focus of your spiritual surrender.

Breathing

Sit here and notice for a moment that breathing happens. Really watch and admit and acknowledge to your-self that breathing happens without ‘you’; without your story or sense of self-image doing breathing. You can choose to speed it up or make it shallower or hold it for a while but there is an intelligence or process which happens without your wishes or desires.

Something will move or change despite your desire to control; this is spiritual surrender. You might also want to include faith. Faith in the ever-present condition that you are, or appear to be a part of.

How much else that goes on is really under your control? You can, and probably do

  • manipulate others
  • emotionally blackmail others
  • choose to be aggressive
  • choose what you eat etc…



but I would encourage you to spend more time in conscious awareness of not-knowing and letting go of things needing to be a certain way for you.

Practice feeling your body and feelings the way it is and surrender. Be open and let go of wanting to define what it is or should be, just experience. Surrender to the fact that it is not even a body. We just call it a body to communicate with others. It is what it is and it will be what it is irrespective of what you call it and the interpretations and assumptions you have about a body or your body.

To change your life you need to get this in your own experience. Understanding the words and creating an idea in your mind of what it might be like to notice these things is not going to bring transformation.

Sometimes it is easy to practice spiritual surrender and comes naturally in this moment. Sometimes you will find you are strongly identified with being a separate self with your own desires and need to plan an aspect of your life. Sometimes you will sit and wonder at all you can’t control and all you don’t know.

Eventually you will move beyond identifying with either and simply abide in a place where whatever is most appropriate in each situation will arise for you and whatever will arise you will accept, have faith in and surrender.

I have found forgiveness and compassion for myself a huge help. No matter the thought or action I forgive myself and accept myself. Sometimes operating in the dualistic mind – the mind of separateness. Sometimes being still and wondering and contemplating. Whatever is there is there.

It makes a whole lot of difference to your self esteem and experience of life to practice and experience spiritual surrender to what is.

Trust

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Trust That Everything Is OK Will

Bring Miraculous Results

When you trust that there is some path you are on or some unforeseen unfolding to your life, you can live with more peace and purpose.

Ok so I am not so sure Billy Joel below is talking about anything more than the struggles of learning to trust in a romantic relationship, but I like the words in the context of aligning yourself with the way that brings more inner peace.

You can’t go the distance

With too much resistance

I know you have doubts

But for God’s sake don’t shut me out (Billy Joel)

It might strike you as strange if you were to become aware how often you deny this moment. It is as if you are constantly trying to improve the situation by getting somewhere other than right here and now.

I say strange because as you grow in awareness it not only seems fruitless to wish things were different, but it seems ridiculous to ever think that there is somewhere else to get or something to change.

Sure you may desire some change but that will happen when and if the circumstances are aligned with that change. You can’t make the change happen but you can sure accept and trust this moment, wherever you are.

That is what I like about the video of Jason and his story. He comes across as aligning himself with the principle that he can hold a dream or a desire but he is going to accept his life as he finds it in each moment. Not only accept it but also excel and be enthusiastic at it like he was as the team manager.

That is to say he seems to not create suffering for himself. If he desperately wanted things to be different and wanted to be a starting member of the team every week then is life would be misery wouldn’t it? He would constantly be wishing things were different than the way they were.

That doesn’t stop him from dreaming of things being different but he comes across on the video as making the distinction between what is now and what is just his wishing.

Wherever you find yourself is the place you need to fully fill before life will move you on.  By that I mean completely accepting your reality and acknowledging it is that way now.  Jump into your fate with both feet.

Anything else will keep you suffering and stuck.

When you let go of wanting to be somewhere else or wanting to be someone else you will experience a shift. The days of spending every waking moment wishing things were different will be replaced by peace
and appropriate action.

Who are you to say what is right and wrong or should not be happening? You don’t even know why you are here, who you are, how you got here, where you go after this life but still you try and control the way things are.

To sit back and trust that everything is as it is and to trust that which is bigger than you, which you are obviously a part of, is to align with a peaceful, humble way of life.

It is very humbling to give up control and to stop trying to change this moment with effort.

You can acknowledge this moment, identify what you would like to experience differently and then seek to change the circumstances that will allow you to experience the difference.

Seek without strain, without effort, with trust and with faith.

Even as you strive to improve some area of your life, still there remains trust and faith that all is in order.

Who are you to say things are not as they should be?

Chuck Spezzano in his book If it Hurts it isn’t Love says, “The highest level of success is something we flow with, not something that is planned. We do not control the wave when we are surfing…we go with the flow of it and to the extent we do, we become successful”.

Spiritual Fitness Training, Developing Self-Esteem, Finding Inner Strength, Self-Confidence

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Spiritual Fitness Training Empowers You

What Is Spiritual Fitness Training?

If you have ever reached a reasonable level of physical fitness you know that you can do more activity in your life without feeling overwhelmed and beyond your threshold.

Likewise with spiritual fitness, when you have trained your attitude and way of thinking and relating to the world, you are able to stay calm, relaxed and at inner peace no matter what may come.

Is It About Doing Weird Practices?

No not at all.  This is about finding inner strength.  It is about realising that within you there is the ability to be calm and forgiving and loving and compassionate no matter what the circumstances.

It is within you already but it is obscured by the way you think of yourself and the world.

What Are The Benefits?

Apart from developing self-esteem and feeling that you are connected and meaningful it is about rediscovering the truth of who you really are.  The way you feel about yourself and life, and how effective you are at living a meaningful life is determined by they way you think about yourself and life.

How Do I Develop It?

  • Be honest.  Stop pretending.  When you speak let the breath that starts from your abdomen arise up through your centre and push the words out.  The breath carries the words like a surfer on a wave, except the words and the breath are one.  When you do this you are speaking from your truth, your gut, your experience.
  • Realise that you are not in control and trust that it is OK.  Have faith, let go of trying to understand because you never will.  Turn it all over to a higher power.
  • Pray, or at least ask for what you feel in your gut.  Discern between what you imagine you want and what you actually want.  The ego will tell you what to want based on greed and fear, your gut will tell you what you really want deeply to feel fulfilled.

When Should I Do This?

This is about being real and therefore being empowered to live a life without overwhelm.  It is to be done as much as you can.  It is about living your life this way.  The alternative is to stay stuck feeling alone and isolated and unworthy.  

Spiritual fitness training is really about living aligned with the truth of your true nature.  Integrity, truth and trust.

Raising Self Esteem, Overcoming Low Self Esteem, Ways To Improve Self Esteem, Raise Your Self Esteem, Boosting Self Esteem

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The Process of Raising Self-Esteem

The process of raising self esteem is simple but not necessarily easy.  Simple in the fact that all it requires is a transformation in consciousness from denial and fear to acceptance and love.

It is not necessarily easy because the belief that you are a separate, completely independent thing is strong and convincing.

One way of raising self esteem is to take your belief that you are a thing and pump up the beliefs about what that thing is like.  In short you change your self image for a better one.

You can attempt to focus on something that you believe to be true about yourself that makes you feel a bit more worthy and acceptable.  By the way, in doing this the parts that you don’t like about yourself don’t actually disappear they just get ignored.

This might seem like a result however it will likely cause greater problems for you at a later date in some way.

Just as if you are repairing or cleaning something and you try and do just enough so that what is immediately visible looks OK, deep down you feel a nagging that you haven’t quite done a proper job.  You know it will have to be faced at a later date.  Or you feel a false sense of achievement that you have got a way with it.  It is like you feel clever for taking the easy way out and achieving your task.

How does it feel when you know you have really done a thorough job and you know your repair will last?  Just like rust in a car or a hole in a sock the section needs to be completely rebuilt and reintegrated into the whole.

So it is with the ego and the Self.  The ego is who and what you think you are.  You might think you are kind and polite and this and that.  Or you might think you are stupid and pathetic and mean and cruel.  Whatever self image you have is your ego.

Your ego is just your idea and becomes the focus of your life.  It is what you then interpret life’s events through.

Just as the rust in the car would attract the eye and the attention and make you miss seeing the car as a whole so to we end up focusing on the self image and miss seeing and feeling the whole experience.  By the whole experience I mean the experience of being part of the whole, connected to all that there is, divine, Self.

The process of raising self esteem is to bit by bit transform your awareness from the ego to the whole.  When you meditate the ego takes a back seat.  When you sit across from another person and feel their energy and really get what they are communicating the ego takes a back seat.  There are many many ways of accomplishing this task of deidentifying with the ego and reidentifying with the whole.

Why does this raise your self esteem?  Because genuine self esteem is a product of your awareness, acceptance and love of the truth.  It is not something you build up and pump up, it is something that comes because you see how futile it is to continue trying to be something or not trying to be something.

Some people try to always be right, some people try never to be rude.  Some people try and be cool, other people try and never be wrong.  This is all ego and genuine self-esteem can never come
through rearranging, pumping up or resisting the ego.

Human Shadow, Shadow Work, Shadow Self, Shadow Projection, Healing The Shadow

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What Is The Human Shadow?

Who You Think You Are

Every human being has an idea of what sort of person they are.  The human shadow is everything that does not exist within your accepted self-image.

Who You Think You Are Not

In reality a human being seems to be a potential to be anything at any time rather than one fixed way.  Therefore your self-image keeps you trapped in one way of being.  You feel stuck.  Anything that comes into your awareness that doesn’t fit with your accepted self-image makes you feel bad.

When you feel bad your mind continues to focus on all the parts of your life that seem to not be working.  Then you feel even worse.

This all continues until you wake up to the fact that your self-image is just a mental idea.  It is just a concept; a creation of the mind.  It is not actually you but rather it is how you think you are.

Who Are You Really?

I nor anyone can’t tell you who you are because we would just be exchanging information.  You can’t use the mind and its functions such as intelligence and reasoning to discover the truth of your existence.

The task is to release attachment to being one particular way and instead be willing to experience and be everything.  This is closer to who you are in reality, rather than your self-image.  Even if this way you think you are was full of neat sounding traits like intelligent, sexy, funny, lively, loving you still have the potential as a human being to experience all the opposites.  If you do experience one of these opposite traits one day you would feel terrible because you were attached to being the positive trait.

It is all the opposites that lie outside of your accepted self-image that we call the human shadow.

When you accept that you can and do experience EVERY potential human trait you transform your experience of life.  Life begins to flow effortlessly.

How Do You Discover Your Shadow?

You discover your shadow self not through your mind but via awareness.  Just by watching and observing each moment and what you feel and believe to be true about yourself and the world.

The quickest way is to watch and observe your shadow projection onto other people.  This is when you have some negative feeling towards another person because you judge them to be a certain way.  It is extremely subtle and is why so many people go around feeling annoyed and irritated with others.  Anything that does not fit within your accepted self-image gets projected by your mind onto someone else in your life.

If you are sure you are never rude then rude people will show up in your awareness.  If you believe that you are stupid but don’t accept that about yourself as a potential human experience then you will dislike someone else because you think they are stupid.  Whatever is in your shadow shows up in the outside world.

What Can You Do About This?

Healing the shadow is about reclaiming these traits that you project onto others.  A human is potential not fixed.  You are not one way so work to not care about being a certain way.  If you were to get in with a bad crowd who did drugs and crime and joined a gang you would change.

What you need to do is what they call shadow work.  Healing the shadow means finding all the traits that are outside of your accepted self-image and welcoming them back like long lost children.  The human shadow has within it huge potential for growth and getting your life back on track.

How To Find Your Passion

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How To Find Your Passion Finally

Is It Important To Find My Passion?

If you are wondering how to find your passion and whether it is important, you will get along just fine without it, well maybe not fine, you will dread every day of your boring existence.  There are no rules about what you should do with your life, apart from the rules society and peer pressure apply.

You have free will and that means you have free will do follow what your heart tells you in each moment, or you can follow the thoughts inside your head that stem from society’s programming or your parent’s wishes or your best friends idea of what is right.

How Do I Know What My Passion Is?

It is easy, have a look at your life right now and answer to yourself

  • where do I spend my free time?
  • or if you don’t get much free time, take some moments
    to feel what you would do.
  • where do you get a little buzz of excitement just
    before you do something?
  • what do you surround yourself with (what type of
    books, music etc)

People think that their passion has to be something massive and obvious and like some big revelation.  It is not like that.  It will be in your environment already.

If it doesn’t seem a big deal to you, remember not everyone has a passion that takes them out into the world.  You must fill the space you are in now before anything else will show up.  That means don’t deny what is obvious right now in favour of waiting and hoping for something else.

What Is Passion Anyway?

You can think of passion as simply enthusiasm.  What are you enthusiastic about?  If your mind immediately says ‘nothing’ then take a moment, slow down, centre yourself and make a decision to watch yourself and your thinking over the next 48 hours.  What gives you a little kick of energy and emotion?  Where do you get a little buzz?

  • It might be when you think about putting together a
    menu and going shopping for food for a dinner party for friends.
  • It might be separating yourself from others and
    spending a couple of hours on your own making crafts.
  • It might be just before you are going to look after
    children you get a little excited.
  • It might be when you first sit at your computer and
    click on the internet button you feel freedom and power.
  • It might be being alone with something mechanical
    like cars.

Keep looking no matter how small or insignificant it used to seem, this is how to find your passion.  You passion is in your life now.

Remember that what you find exciting now might not be the same in two years time.  Maybe at a certain age you will be ready to discover your talent and excitement for snooker or dancing or a musical instrument.

That is why I say you must fill the space you are in now.  Follow what is true for you now.  You cannot manufacture passion for something so don’t go looking for what your passion might be.  How to find your passion? Look for what happens already within.

Healing the Shadow, Shadow Work, Human Shadow, Healing The Shadow, The Shadow Effect

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Healing The Shadow

Improves Your Life

Healing the shadow is probably the quickest, easiest and most powerful way to increase self-esteem, self-acceptance and self-love.

What is the Shadow?

The shadow is a term coined by famous Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.  Jung coined the term ‘shadow-self’ to make a distinction between

1. the traits you are unhappy to identify with (shadow)

2. what traits you are happy to hold
within your self-image (ego)

In other words, as you go about your life you have an image of…

  • what you are like
  • ways in which you behave
  • what others think of you

Let us call this your self-image. It is an idea or a creation within your mind that you identify as ‘you’.

We might even go so far as to say you think this is you in reality.

Your shadow is whatever is left out of your idea of you plus anything about this idea of you that you don’t like, accept, or want to be there.

You might not readily hold your hand up and say “I am selfish”, but you might readily hold your hand up and say “I am kind” for example.  We would then say that ‘kind’ would be in your self-image but ‘selfish’ would be in your shadow-self.

Now here comes the powerful piece, which allows you to feel better and have a life that works a little bit better…

…in reality there is no one particular, absolute, undeniable, concrete, indisputable way that you are.

The way you think you are is a creation of your mind based on teachings and experiences and an absence of awareness of the truth.

This is why you feel stuck and yuck! It is OK that you are no particular way.  You are everything in reality, every possible experience and interpretation.

Healing the Shadow

To heal the shadow means to welcome back these traits you previously excluded from your self-image. Have a good, honest look at every area of your life and find two times in your past where you were selfish.

Without judgment accept that as a human being this interpretation called selfish will come up from time to time.  Accept that as the way it is, then accept ‘selfish’ as being part of your experience of living.

The power comes when you do this because for each trait you move from the shadow back to the self-image, you become a little bit more whole and content and you will notice self-acceptance and an increase in self-esteem and self-confidence.

While the shadow is full of traits it runs your life. When it is less full you run your life as a conscious being.  Each time you re-own a trait you have experienced a little more of healing the shadow.