Awareness and Acceptance

Awareness and Acceptance

The following arrived in an email from the Winners Circle list last week. The timing was, I thought, impeccable, especially bearing in mind the post I wrote as my reflection on Sunday’s Collect. In this post, Lou Tice talks about how self-awareness and self-acceptance can help you develop a less adversarial relationship with yourself, and so help with your self-esteem.

High self-esteem is a desirable quality, but you can’t have it without self-acceptance.

Self-acceptance is an absolutely essential component of having high self-esteem, but what does self-acceptance mean? Some people think accepting yourself just as you are means that you condone or are proud of your faults – but that is a mistaken idea. You see, to “accept” means to experience the full reality of, without denial or avoidance. I can accept the reality of things about myself that I don’t like or condone at all.

For example, suppose I’m feeling envious of my friend who has a better job. If I accept myself, I can allow myself to acknowledge this envious feeling and take the time to examine and think about it. As I do this, I’m not concerned with judging it as bad or weak, but I am concerned with being aware. Perhaps my awareness will show me that I’ve wanted something more than I knew, and I’ll need to think about that too.

You see, you can’t grow out of your unwanted feelings if you’re not aware that you have them, and if you judge your feelings as bad or weak you’ll be inclined to push them down into your subconscious where they’ll express themselves in ways you can’t control.

So the next time you find yourself thinking something you feel guilty about, try practising awareness and self-acceptance. This means refusing to be in an adversarial relationship with yourself. It’s one of the basic building blocks of self-esteem.

Lou Tice
The Pacific Institute

I really feel as though I’m about to take a big step forwards in the ongoing battle with myself. Sunday’s post, as tough as it was to write and to publish, almost feels like it was some sort of watershed moment. I think I needed to really focus in on the issues I have with myself before I could start to put them behind me — the self-awareness and the self-acceptance that Lou talks about. I hope that’s the case anyway. And I’m sure that with God’s help I really can become more of the person he would want me to be.

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