Self-Acceptance and the Insidious Error of Comparing Ourselves to an Invented Ideal

"Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment."

― Eckhart Tolle

Often, we make the mistake of judging where we are at as wrong or bad. "I should already have _________ by now." "I am over 40 (or 50, or whatever age) and by now I thought I would have ___________ " or "I am still __________ ing! What's wrong with me?"

Nothing. Nothing is wrong. You know where you "should" be at this point in your life or in your development and personal evolution? That's right: exactly where you are. Do you know why? Because you can't be any other place. To think that you can be is to engage in a particular kind of self-invented torture.

Most of us know that comparing ourselves to others is not very useful. There will always be someone better than us and there will always be someone we are better than at any particular thing or in any area of development or in a chosen context.

It is a meaningless comparison.

But we often compare ourselves to another "other". That other is an ideal self. One we invented and then compare ourselves to, and shame ourselves for not being. Which is really pretty silly--because we made it up! We invented this "other" to torture ourselves.

This creates misery for us. And yet, how do we balance the reality of the gap between who we are and who we envision ourselves to be/come without doing so? If we truly accepted ourselves as "perfect as we are" wouldn't we simply stop developing and evolving ourselves?

The short answer is "no". The longer answer is that the very question points to a lack of understanding of what true self-acceptance is and what kind of experience it creates.

Self-acceptance leads to facing reality--good, bad, dark, light, ugly, beautiful as the reality as it is. In doing so--in building the capacity to stare into the mirror and gaze at ourselves with an objective and clear eye-we build the capacity to dance ...

It is a very delicate dance--seeing where we are and accepting that, and knowing where we want to be and having attention on closing that gap and doing so without moral judgment. But once that dance is engaged in, it allows for even more rapid evolution because we are no longer delusional or in avoidance, nor are we resisting nor are we driven by a compulsion to be a "better person".

Instead, we accept the reality as it is, allowing us to more rapidly see what needs to be done, and because we care about results, we do it--we step into the gap and the gap begins to get smaller and smaller.

We stop evolving to get something and we begin to evolve for the sake of evolution--to be engaged in the unfolding, creating a better world for all.

And it all begins with self-acceptance.


Details for the next Introduction to Advanced Personal Evolution can be found »here«