Uncovering the Joyful Person you were meant to be

SELF ACCEPTANCE

Imagine if you could accept yourself exactly as you are, if you no longer had to strive to be someone better, smarter, richer or more attractive? Imagine if you could uncover that original, sincere person you were meant to be? The person you were meant to be before you tried to fit into somebody else’s idea of how you ought to behave, what you ought to believe in and how you ought to live your life.

It’s hard for us to imagine being at peace with ourselves because most of us have been so conditioned to please somebody else, to measure up to another’s standards and to simply “fit in” that we’ve lost touch with who we truly are in the first place. Striving to keep up appearance, we waste a lot of time and energy trying to please or impress others. Why do we do this? - Because basically, we don’t accept ourselves as we are.

We live in a consumer society which keeps our attention and energy always tuned into the next thing we need to buy, earn or strive towards in order to become popular, successful - even loved. At the same time we keep our emotional pain and disappointments well out of sight – hidden and denied. In this way, we become strangers to ourselves – our inner world has become an emotional wilderness. So often we find it utterly boring to “be alone with myself” and seek distractions to feed our busy mind.

Then we suffer some great challenge in life – an illness, the death of a loved one, a divorce or bankruptcy and all these painful memories we thought we had pushed away come back to haunt us.
 
Maybe we’re carrying so much useless baggage that belongs to another that we’ve lost touch with ourselves “who am I ? “ As children we often take on the fears, limitations and prejudices of our parents or teachers and then believe them to be our own. We may have internalised a very critical adult during our formative years and now we’re the ones who berate ourselves. Instead of questioning and discarding this negative conditioning, we carry these self damaging burdens on into the rest of our adult life. These are beliefs that do not serve us in any way whatsoever.

So often people extend compassion and care for another’s pain, yet they have no mercy for their own suffering. We can only give from a place of plenty - what stops us from being compassionate to ourselves? I believe it’s a combination of the baggage we carry from others; our own unreleased emotional pain; and the continuous false promises from our consumer society constantly urging us to buy, get, and have, in order to be happy.

We’re burdened and divided against ourselves - what we really need is to overcome the resistance to feeling our pain. Then, in releasing it, we come home to ourselves. How do we recognise what doesn’t belong to us and let it go? - By taking responsibility for our own unwanted painful emotions. We don’t need to search very hard for these because they turn up regularly in our daily lives: jealousy at being passed over for another person, anger at being intimidated or manipulated, pain at not being seen or heard.
 
In the wild when a hunted animal reaches safety, it often shakes itself vigorously, having escaped a predator. In doing this the animal is shaking off the excessive adrenalin surging through its system from their flight to safety. With humans however the adrenalin that’s generated within us from stressful people and situations has nowhere to go. It remains trapped within our bodies. This not only makes us feel pretty awful - it can lead to stress related illnesses or emotional trauma later in life. When we find a neutral way of discharging this trapped energy that doesn’t engage the aggression of another, we can then release our backlog of emotional pain; our unshed tears; our unreleased anger.

Sometimes what may appear crazy on the surface - screaming into a pillow, punching a mattress, throwing stones in the sea - can actually be a great way to neutralise and release our anger, frustration and grief. How many people write down their painful feelings and then symbolically burn them afterwards as a means of releasing them? Going for a run or a workout at the gym, can also release much stress and tension from our system - if we do it deliberately and consciously.

So how are we to heal this inner division and find lasting peace and true self acceptance? Often it’s the really simple things that work - taking a few deep breaths and counting to 10 instead of exploding in anger, leaving the room to give ourselves more space to calm down. Just staying present with the chaos that’s within us instead of lashing out with the usual blame, "poor me" victim or denial "tennis match" we’ve always played in the past! How do we do this? By remaining focussed upon ourselves – on the very sensations erupting within our bodies. When I notice my pounding heart, or that I’m holding my breath or clenching my stomach, these sensations quieten down – they become soothed and soon become transformed into something much more peaceful.

Standing back in this way, we create choice - we can respond in a completely different way (if any response is even necessary) - we don’t lose the plot by becoming the victim of explosive reactions that only leave us feeling remorse, exhaustion and even more anger later on. When we take back what’s ours, what’s not ours falls away.

We all have a wonderful capacity to forgive and let go. If we could observe how much energy we lose in holding a grudge against another - how much WE suffer from withholding forgiveness, we would really strive to find ways to let go and move on.
Anything we do to become more present and conscious will always serve us – creating a much healthier relationship with ourselves – this inevitably then spreads out to positively affect others.

When we’ve made peace with ourselves, when we’ve faced all our long standing demons and resolved them, we find that our relationships with everybody else will inevitably change and improve. Not needing to relive the same old boring dramas anymore, our whole way of life becomes transformed – more positive, joyful and fulfilled. A whole new future opens out for us!

Eugenie Heraty, MICHP, MCHP (UK), Dip HP
Psychotherapist / Hypnotherapist / Healer