Is there anything you would like to change about yourself?
If yes, what would you change and why do you want it to be different?
What are your answers?
I come up with: I would feel better about myself; Life would be easier for me; I would like myself more; I would be a nicer person…
The thing about our answers is they show us what we worry about and what we think isn’t good enough about us right now as we are. Then we FIGHT to try to make what isn’t right about us go away somehow, to fix, it, change it so we don’t have to live with this thing we don’t want.
Depending on your style of being in the world, you may find this depressing and overwhelming and go eat some chocolate cake; or you may push yourself to do more, better, bigger, faster. Some of us flip-flop between those two. “Ok I’m going to make the changes I need! I’m gonna DO it! Oh wow this is actually really hard. It’s too much. I can’t do it. Let me see what’s in the fridge and then watch my TV series. I’ll start gym tomorrow, I really will.”
The problem is that this paradigm of thinking implies something is wrong with us that needs to be fixed. We apply this kind of thinking liberally to our children too. He doesn’t speak clearly, better send him to speech therapy. His ball skills aren’t so good, off to OT. He has few friends, that needs to be sorted out – but how? Wherever they do not fit the ‘mold’, we set off to change that. We want to protect them from being different, judged as less than. But who is doing the judging? We are.
Why is anything less than?
Carl Jung said, you can only let something go if you first accept it.
When I first read that my mind did a little boggle dance. What? But you want it to go away so why would you bring it closer to you? The more I thought about it though, the more it made sense to me.
When we try to fix or vanquish something about ourselves – or anyone else – we are actually
- strengthening the very thing we want different or gone and
- disempowering ourselves by standing not where we actually are
If I want something to be different because I am afraid of it then I am, in fact, attached to it. It can’t leave while I’m busy railing at it – it’s not so rude. The only way something can change or leave us is if we let it go. REALLY let it go. As long as we have judgement of it, or we actively don’t want it, or it makes us angry or feel bad about ourselves, we are actually hanging onto it. We are in relationship with it so it will stay.
If I judge something and long for something else, I am avoiding my present moment. Our point of power is only and always in our present moment. If you deny or reject what is here and now, your main focus is on that so you feed it, it grows and you feel disempowered. To focus on how dissatisfied I am with what I have now is to trip myself up (because if I am not present to the situation, I can’t see the steps I need to take to start making it the way I prefer). When we focus on how we don’t like what we have we can’t see our point of power.
So if I avoid it or anger at it, I give away my power to the very thing I don’t want? Yup.
We only judge things we are scared of. If you judge something it means you are scared of it. I know that’s not always a very comfortable thought but ask yourself what you judge and then ask, “Why am I scared of this?” and be as honest with yourself as you can.
It’s useful to know this answer because when we are scared of something we give away our power to it. We feel it can do something bad to us so we spend energy avoiding it, judging it, feel fear… in your head you make it bigger than you. That’s never true. You are bigger than everything in your life. You are the one who gets to decide, to react, to feel, to think. Nothing else can do that for you.
So let’s review:
If you are judging something it means you are afraid of it.
If you are afraid of something it means you think it is more powerful than you somehow. (That’s never true).
If you believe it has more power than you, you have given your power to the very thing you wish wasn’t there.
If you realise you always have the power in your own life, you can look at that thing and know that it is just another thing in life.
If it is just a thing in your life you can allow it nearer to you.
If you can allow it nearer because you are not afraid of it you have accepted it somehow.
If you accept something you can see it more clearly. You can see good things and not good things about it.
When you can see and assess something clearly without fear or attachment, you can decide if you want it around you or not. If it is something you cannot change – a child’s disability for example – then you can decide how you choose to think and feel about it.
If you take fear and judgement out of the equation, how do the things you don’t want look?
When you don’t accept something you give it your power.
What are you not accepting about yourself or your child or your life?
“Acceptance” has been washing over me in waves in the last few weeks. It is as calming as being at the beach. I love the way you framed this crucial topic. It seems counter-intuitive that acceptance would allow us to keep our power, until we try it.
And I love the idea of it washing over me in waves like at the beach. Thanks Rachel! Love your comments. 🙂