Accepting Oneself, Yet Changing

[Empty]

During 8 months of following Leo's channel, and mainly meditation and enlightment, I overcome my Judgmental attutides ( religiously judgmental) 
I started meditating for 20 mins. I kept on and on everyday till I reached 1 hour and sometimes I do 2 or 3 hours. I have to reckon that it has been a bless. In the next following 6 months, I will be focusing on accepting others; accepting reality exactly as it is.  

I need to know your thoughts on acceptance. How can I accept others and reality, yet change myself. 

Muhammad! 

Best regard!

[ElvisN]

At first it seems like self acceptance and self improvement are mutually exclusive and contradict each other.

This is not the case.

Only once you accept yourself as you are right now can genuine motivation for self improvement occur.

Edited June 13, 2016 by Vishal

[aurum]

The first step to solving any problem is admitting you have a problem. As long as you deny its existance, no progress can be made.

You don't have to like it. You don't have to live with it. But let's not kid ourselves, a fact is a fact. 

 

[FindingPeace]

There is only one choice in life - to accept or to deny. To 'deny' means to 'refuse to admit the truth or existance of'. To 'accept' means to 'come to recognise as valid or correct'.

Reality is what it is and you are who and what you are. You deny the truth and spend your life running from it, or you can accept it. Fundamentally, acceptance is the only option. Denial of reality is just a mind game that takes a huge amount of effort to sustain. And it inevitably fails.

The point is, that in order to generate genuine motivation you first have to accept all the facts. If you don't, then the best you can ever hope for is 'fake growth' - see Leo's video on that one. If you deny those things within you that might be better worked on, then all you will do is run and run and hide from those things, taking actions and making decisions that keep the illusion that they aren't real and don't exist. But in the backgorund they will always be there, just over your shoulder, causing that ever present sense of dissonance.

Accepting those apects within you, and within everything and everyone around you, gives you a less neurotic and objective starting point to work from. Acceptance of reality, and of yourself, gives you an honest platform to base any improvement on. Acceptance is the first stage that comes before healthy, genuine growth.

As has been said, you don't have to like, or live with the things that you accept. That's not what acceptance means. But it does mean noticing, admitting, and not criticising or judging them. It means being honest to yourself that they exist. Whether or not you like them, or whether or not they are healthy things. Once you've done this you can start the process of changing things that you think may benefit you to do so.
Think of 'acceptance' as another word for 'being honest' or 'stop hiding from'. People mistake it for meaning 'it exists, therefore let it be and never take any action'. No. it means 'be honest and admit that it exists, face up to it, then decide what constructive action needs to be taken'.

[charlie2dogs]

these ideas are fine for human beings working on self improvement.   did you ever consider that personal growth may never lead you to enlightenment?  a self realized being does not have to address all these issues of personal growth, do you know why?

[vizual]

The most easy thing for people to relate to is to think back of when you were a kid, like pre-teens. Before you had any issues with "acceptance" and before all the image and ego-problems came in. Did you just sat still and did nothing in this time? When you really look at it, those years are probably the most "productive" years you ever had in your life. You learned at least one whole language, you learned how everything in your environment worked, you were constantly exploring, constantly playing, creating, adventuring. And at this moment you are still creating, every moment of everyday. You just keep creating the same things over and over in your head, that's called an ego.

When you fully accept reality you can't help but realize that all you are, can only be defined as change or energy or consciousness. Nothing ever stops changing, even if it seems it does.

[Venus]

I've recently been focusing on self acceptance and how beneficial this is to personal development. 

I came up with an analogy (or I heard it somewhere, I can't remember):

If you want to control a child and get them to behave, telling them off and shouting at them all the time won't work. They will become your enemy and rebel and always do the things you don't want them to do, causing constant battle and conflict.

However, if you are chill with them and become their friend; if you talk to them and calm and are kind and accepting of their current behaviour; if you are slow with them and understand why they behave these ways, then they will listen to you. They will want to do as you tell them, they will be calm and open and not frantic and they will be under your control. They will be willing to change their behaviour and won't be stuck in themselves with the label "I always do wrong", because that's not what you're telling them.

You are you and your brain is the child. 

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I find after I've become best friends with myself, I stop actually being stuck inside my head and automatically become more mindful of everything outside of my head because I'm not worrying about all this internal conflict, so all the energy is free to focus outside. It's pretty fab.

When this happens, so much peace towards the outside world is actually created. It's like I'm so in love with myself (not in an arrogant way) that the outside world doesn't matter and can be whatever it wants to be. A sense of no worry is created inside me when I fall in love with myself like this.

I think this happens because any unacceptance I'm having of the outside world is because of how I'm taking it in, so actually it's always an inside problem when you have a problem with the outside world (as Leo often makes clear). And now it's inside the head, I have control over it and whether it's actually a "good" or "bad" situation, since it's only my perception. Usually it becomes a matter of "it doesn't really matter. Everything's cool and wonderful and amazing. What's wrong if this thing happens? It's quite finny actually" type attitude towards the world.

This is how I manage to obtain massive amounts of acceptance of reality, so I hope you follow me bud.

 

[Empty]

@charlie2dogs  I am a newbie to the concept of enlightment and so on. However, I think it is hard to balance self-development with enlightment work. 

 

[charlie2dogs]

7 minutes ago, An actualizer said:

@charlie2dogs  I am a newbie to the concept of enlightment and so on. However, I think it is hard to balance self-development with enlightment work. 

 

human beings need self development, a few achieve enlightenment. 

[Gabriel David Gomez]

Happiness comes when you end the search for it. Suffering is a distraction where you are tempted to think you should search for happiness. Be indifferent towards your own suffering. Suffering does not increase the value of action and tactic, it is how things slow down and die.