Start by accepting yourself
Do you accept yourself?
Probably not. Capitalist society promotes precisely the opposite: never settling for what we’ve got, always pushing and striving for more, showing off our strengths and hiding our weaknesses. Acceptance feels like giving up on a race that we’ve been running in since we can remember, like we’re going to lose something that everyone else must want.
But self-acceptance is crucial to getting what you really want — and more importantly, what you really need.
Like everyone else, you’ve been conditioned by your experience, the society you live in, and — most deeply — the ways your parents and other adults communicated (or didn’t communicate) with you when you were a kid.
Maybe your father often ignored your playfulness, so now as an adult you keep what you really want out of life locked away inside. Maybe the color of your skin marks you as a likely criminal in the eyes of those with power and property to protect.
This conditioning is nearly impossible to change. Therapy, intimacy, and community can go a long way to learning more about your particular habits and patterns, and what you require to feel safe and connected. And of course political change can produce massive shifts in the conditioning of many.
But, and this is the big takeaway, your patterns are not something to fight — not yet another thing to strive to overcome.
The Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa wrote:
“We should work with our neuroses, relate with them, and experience them properly. They are the only potential we have, and when we begin to work with them, we see that we can use them as stepping-stones.”
Where does meditation fit in? Meditation practice helps put self-acceptance into action. The mindfulness it produces helps you see thoughts for exactly what they are: bursts of energy in the mind. Thoughts aren’t necessarily yours — in fact, most of them are habitual patterns based on your conditioning.
You might always cringe inside when your lover leaves dirty dishes in the sink. But because you love this person, you might learn to simply notice your judgmental thoughts, let them pass, and then have a direct discussion with your lover about your desire for cleanliness.
Often, especially early in a meditation sit, it’s difficult not to believe your thoughts and jump on the train into more thinking. I shouldn’t have talked so much last night, now she thinks I’m weird. Am I really weird? I have trouble at parties…
The practice is to notice your thinking and come back to your anchor, whether it’s your breath, sounds in the room, or sensations in the body. Eventually, thoughts become like a computer screen, something to peer into but not necessarily take for reality.
This simple awareness — mindfulness — spills over into “real life” off the cushion. With more and more practice, you’re able to notice when you’re acting out of patterns and habits a little more. And since you’ve practiced not becoming attached to thoughts, you’ll be able to more easily express your deeper intentions to others, what you really want or need.
Now, because it focuses on the present moment and not the past or future, meditation is not therapy. It’s crucial to investigate the reasons you have the patterns that you do.
Yet, because the present moment is where everything happens, meditation offers occasional windows into your particular patterns. It can be one part of the care we — and the broader society — must provide as many people as we can to make life a little more just and fulfilling for all.
