Daily Positive Thoughts: August 22, 2013: Learning Self Acceptance

Daily Positive Thoughts: August 22, 2013: Learning Self Acceptance

Pablo Picasso-Girl Before a Mirror, c.1932

Learning Self Acceptance

Self Acceptance is an agreement with yourself to appreciate, validate, accept and support who you are right now, even those parts you’d like to change. Self Acceptance is when you look at yourself in the mirror and love and accept the person you see looking back.

For most of us this isn’t as easy as it should be! Mostly because we don’t feel satisfied with who we are until we’ve achieved or become certain things. So when, exactly, are we supposed to feel good about ourselves?

Lack of self acceptance makes us uncomfortable and inhibits our happiness, as well as our sense of well-being.

How can we accept all our warts, mistakes, failures and ugly spots? Can we experience self acceptance while working on the parts of ourselves that we’d like to change? How can we stop self rejection?

Learning self acceptance is about:

Knowing yourself and your beliefs

Knowing you are doing the best you can
Relaxing your value judgements
Examining guilt
Refusing to measure yourself to people’s expectations

 

Gentleness

To be of real help without taking root in someone else's mind
requires great gentleness. See and understand without either willfully
interfering or creating dependence. Gentleness is not lack of strength
but a quality which doesn't disturb, doesn't push, yet knows its
own power.

Understanding the Birth Rebirth Cycle (cont.)

We subconsciously know that we are souls. Birth, life and death are just stages in existence. In fact all natural processes can be found to have a beginning, a middle, an end and a new beginning to continue the cycle. The soul takes a bodily form, gives life to it and after a period of time, long or short, leaves it and takes another suited to the continuation of its role. As long as the soul is in the body, the body grows like a plant from baby to child, youth to maturity. It then begins to decay and finally becomes unusable. The moment the soul leaves the body, the body becomes like a dead log of a tree. It immediately starts to decompose and eventually goes back to dust.

Again the soul moves into a foetus inside the womb of a mother. After time it emerges as a newborn baby and immediately begins to show the sanskars it had developed in its previous life. It is the same soul but in a new physical situation. Thus death is merely the means by which a complete change of circumstances and environment for the soul takes place. Time never kills the soul, but the body, being a part of nature or matter, obeys the law of decay that everything new becomes old and eventually finishes. The molecular components of this body disintegrate only to re-integrate as another form (body) some time later.

The process of birth-life-death-rebirth is also eternal (without a beginning or an end). It has always been going on and will continue. The soul comes into the body, expresses a role and experiences the results of that for a certain time, then leaves it, and the process starts again. Similarly, souls come into this world, remain here as actors for a number of births and then return to the region from which they come, for rest. This process also starts again. The pattern is a cyclic one. This is called the eternal world cycle.

Soul Sustenance

Benefits Of Realizing The Law Of Action

Suppose a person from India goes to America for the first time and rents a car over there. He then parks his rented car on the wrong side of the road. He will be charged a fine because parking laws are different in both countries. He cannot simply say ‘I didn’t know, I am ignorant’. It should have been his responsibility, if driving, to find out the laws of the new country but he didn’t take enough care.

In ignorance, we have done many things against the universal laws of creation –especially the Law of Karma. We did not have the complete knowledge of what are good/bad karmas, what are right/wrong karmas; what different types of effects different karmas would have on me, others and nature. But we cannot just say 'I didn't know'. It was our responsibility to know. If we look at the state of the world now, there may be a few sparks of light or spiritual enlightenment but, generally, there is a great amount of darkness. That gives us an indication of the sorts of karmas the vast majority of us have been performing, due to ignorance, to have produced the situations or circumstances in the world.

The complete knowledge of the karmic process, which we learn when we are introduced to spirituality, helps us:

• reduce the burden of the past
• remove any type of suffering or sorrow in our present life
• change our future as well as that of the world, to make it better and more positive
• experience a positive return from our spiritual efforts
understand all the why’s, how’s, what’s and when’s which surround our life

Message for the day

Humility helps us maintain good relationships with others.

Projection: When involved in something that we are doing, we naturally come into contact with a lot of people. We sometimes find that we are not able to get along with certain people. We find it very difficult to maintain a good relationship with them and finally avoid dealing with them all together.

Solution: The first thing to do is to avoid thinking that we cannot get along with someone because of their personality. When we remove this first block in our mind we will be able to see the good in all. We will no longer think that we are here to teach them but will humbly learn whatever we can from them.