“Accept who you are” is advice you’re likely to have heard at some point if you’ve done any therapy or have read any self-help material. But it’s not easy advice to take, and is a subtle and difficult problem. We must first learn who we actually are, behind walls and layers of stories that we’ve spun up for others and for ourselves, stories that we believe and that we hope others will believe about who we are. Sometimes those stories are about how wonderful we are, and sometimes they’re set up as evidence that we’re horrible people (the reasons we’d want to think we’re horrible are many, and not always obvious).
Building skills to allow us to see more of the world (and more of ourselves) stripped of pretense… that sort of skill building is very difficult. I believe that, for me, one of the best schools for learning these skills may be meditation, of the sort taught by Larry Rosenberg (see: ‘Breath by Breath’), Claude AnShin Thomas (see: ‘At Hell’s Gate: A Soldier’s Journey’), Jack Kornfield (see: ‘Meditation for Beginners’) and Stephen Batchelor (see: ‘Buddhism without Beliefs’).
These teachers (and many others), teach that, to see the world clearly, we must see ourselves clearly, and that an unflinching love is the only way to see ourselves clearly.
It seems likely that the acceptance has to come first. Acceptance meaning love. That love enables clarity, which in turn allows us to move forward. Every time I think I’ve made progress in this, I find myself back at the start of the process.
