Most people have tremendous difficulty cultivating and practicing self-acceptance and acceptance of others. Like an epidemic, it’s something almost all of us struggle with. For some of us it’s chronic, happening day and night, even if we notice and don’t want it. For others, it only happens sporadically – sparked by certain situations or life areas. Regardless, it’s something we all need to notice more, work on, and improve. Let’s now explore how we can do that.
Accept that you’ll never be perfect
Sages say living beings can’t be perfect because it would mean there is no more room for improvement. That is just not possible given how consciousness continuously evolves, there’s always more growth and change. Soil changes, trees change, animals change, so why should people stop changing? There’s no end to change – not now, not tomorrow, not centuries later.
If you’re thinking animals don’t change, just watch videos of how wild animals adapt to domestic life – such as tiger growing up among a family of humans, or videos of how dogs even learn to detect cancer through smell. Every species has an amazing capacity to adapt, and through this adaptation, the species learn. Did you know that some elephants are now born without tusks because they’ve realized people hunt them for it?
So, as a human being, there’ll never be a time when you’ll be perfect. Because perfect is dead. And we are alive. Like elephants, we’ve evolved to have shorter fingers, for example. And even within our lifetimes, we grow so much, change so much, even experience characterological transformation.
We don’t need to be perfect. If we can be good enough – a good enough friend, a good enough employee or a boss, a good enough partner, a good enough parent etc. – then we’ve already unlocked an incredible achievement as a human being.
Notice your internalized judgments
The subconscious desire to be perfect tends to come from a wounded self-rejecting place inside of us. It happens frequently to those of us who had judgmental, critical, emotionally harsh parents. Instead of facing their own shortcomings, they took it out on us knowingly or unknowingly. Most of it was probably unconscious. The parents might be super well-meaning but if they have too much on their plate, or if they’re too young, or if they themselves didn’t have supportive parents, they are more likely to make mistakes towards their own children.
When we are raised by adults who aren’t comfortable in their own skin, it is highly likely that we will inherit this emotional ancestry, as well as actively learn it from them on a daily basis. By the time we’re ten years old, we have had 3,650 days of practice! By the time we’re twenty, it’s twice as much. Please don’t expect to reverse or change everything you’ve learned from your parents overnight. It will take some time.
One way to do so is to actively pay attention to your own thoughts. Don’t be ashamed of it if you find yourself judging yourself or people based on their looks, behavior, success or lack of success, sexual behavior, or whatever it is that seems to trigger you. On that note, whatever it is that triggers you is exactly where you’re lacking self-acceptance.
We all judge, so please don’t judge yourself for being judgmental. Instead, see your judgments or criticisms as a resource. You can learn about yourself from these judgments. If you’re judging someone for spending a lot of money for example – and you don’t even know what they have in the bank – realize that it’s your own relationship to money that you’re actually pining to examine. If you find yourself judging people for their sexual behavior, maybe it’s time you attend to your sexual needs more.
It all starts with Self-Acceptance
When you have a certain level of self-acceptance (there’s no perfect level, remember we can always grow further), then you care less about what others do. It ceases to bother you whether someone is doing a good job or not. You feel comfortable with people being on a path, not being perfect, not having made it to the destination. You see them as fellow travelers who sometimes fail and fall.
To cultivate self-acceptance, make a list of all the things you find imperfect about yourself. Then ask yourself, who said you had to be perfect in that life area? It’s probably the voice of your internalized parents who wrote that script for you – that you need to be successful, rich, or that you must be married with kids etc. – whatever the script is, it was written by someone else. The real questions is, how would you write your own script?
Sometimes things run really deep, even deeper than what happened during your childhood or how parents trained you emotionally or mentally. Sometimes, it has to do with many lifetimes of suffering, mistreatment, poverty or any other difficulty. If you have experienced several lifetimes of poverty, you might be feeling an inexplicably powerful desire to make money and be well off. It’s something that means something to your soul. The way out of it, however, isn’t making money. The way out of it, is accepting that poverty happens to people, it’s sometimes part of life.
Not sure about past lives? Don’t remember? Never gotten past life reading? You can simply get a top-rated online past life reading with an experienced past life psychic. It would certainly help to explore some of the things you might have experienced over centuries.
For example, some past life readers claim that gay men have had many consecutive lifetimes as a woman, and now in this lifetime their soul just doesn’t want to switch. If you find yourself judgmental of LBTQ people, entertain the idea that life happens over many lifetimes and that we have all ben men, women, and anything in between throughout our different lives. We have also all ben healthy and sick, rich and poor, royalty and peasant – deep down, the soul doesn’t see any one of these as better or worse – it just sees them as different experiences.
Remember, the soul is never judgmental. It’s our egos that cause all the problems. Our judgments, criticisms and lack of understanding all come from our egos. The bigger the ego, the worse the problem.
Getting Psychic Help
Sometimes, it can be very difficult to understand why a certain person is in your life or why you might be having such difficulty accepting them. You can always talk to a good, experienced psychic to get some spiritual insights into the situation. If you want a super detailed reading, pick a Tarot reader. If the person with whom you’re having difficulty with is a romantic partner, get your astrologic natal charts generated for a compatibility report. The insights might blow your mind!
Make sure to pick a highly rated psychic, and if you have a few minutes to spare, read the reviews people wrote about the psychic. Make sure your psychic offers what you’re lookin for – past life reading, tarot reading, or astrology. After your reading, rate and review your psychic, thereby forward-paying it to other wisdom seekers out there.