“I like you just the way you are.”
—Fred Rogers
 

 monk at the Zen monastery once asked our teacher how she can know if what she was experiencing was the right thing to be experiencing.

My teacher’s reply was, “You can know that what you are experiencing is the right thing to be experiencing because it is what you are experiencing. There is no alternate universe in which you are experiencing something different.”

Her response perfectly exemplifies acceptance to me.

Acceptance is not agreeing, condoning, tolerating, resigning, or putting up with what’s happening in the moment, which is how I hear a lot of people interpret “acceptance.” They “accept” when what they really want is the opposite of what they’re getting. They’ll sigh, “I guess I just need to accept that life will always be this way.” There is nothing about acceptance that suggests you need to be a passive doormat floating around through life saying “yes” to whatever comes along your way.

Acceptance is not something reserved for losers. In fact, acceptance is the most powerful starting point there is. When you see how Life actually is, it gives you an opportunity to make it anyway you want. The same is true with yourself.

But we don’t know or see ourselves, so, therefore, we keep making superficial alterations and adjustments that are metaphorically either bandaids or makeup.

We don’t see the root cause or all the karmic patterns, so we settle for tweaks instead of broad strokes from the inside out.

When you can see HOW you do what you do with 100% acceptance and unconditional love, it then frees you to help yourself become anyway you want to be.

Until you can acknowledge that your point in space and time right now is perfect, there is no sense to continue. Because the very force that operates in “something wrong/not enough” will be in charge of “helping” you to change. And I can tell you that this is a self-improvement program forged in hell.

You see, when you like yourself just the way you are, the shift has already happened. Like magic, the eyes you see yourself through in this way belong to your compassionate Inner Mentor. And this is the being you want holding your hand through transformation.

Until that happens, any change you make will be made by the same brutal force that shaped your suffering a long time ago.

And it’s time to stop that.