Acceptance Begets Change

Your responsibility to become ok with right now, starts right now.

As soon as you accept yourself as you are, Carl Rogers said famously, then you can change.

I have, for the last decade, been a self-development junkie. If you’ve been here for virtually any length of time, you know this. My adolescent history with anorexia nervosa has predisposed me to be incredibly good at being incredibly disciplined, for better and worse. In the past couple of years, however, as my recovery has progressed, I have more or less broken up with “wellness” and self-development culture. (For more on this, read my previous posts: What the Wellness World Teaches Us About Control, Self Surveillance is Not Empowerment, and The Cessation of Self-Improvement.) My inner work is no longer to discipline myself into becoming a “better” version of self and drown my life in wellness practices, but to soften. It is to become less rigid, and to live from a place of intuition rather than mental compulsions.

What has changed most profoundly in my recovery is my perception of what I need to live a satisfying life: it is not to fix myself, as I believed for so many years, but to allow myself to be as I am.

All that said—I remain a self-development enthusiast. I live for growth and evolution of self, for possibility and opportunity. Growth’s opposite, stagnation, is high up on the list of what I fear most.

So how, then, do I balance my longing for growth with what life has been teaching me—that the present moment is all there is, that to surrender to right now is the key to inner peace and freedom? How do I both strive for change and allow what is?

We return to Carl Rogers’ quote: As soon as you accept yourself exactly as you are, then you can change.

Acceptance begets change: When you meet this moment exactly as it is without trying to manipulate it, you allow it to become what it is meant to become. You allow it to change organically without getting in its way.

You as the individual also change when you totally surrender to this present moment. In allowing yourself to be as you are, and allowing this moment to be as it is, you change in that moment. The resistance and judgment—which come from the mind—fades. If you accept the way you are right now, warts and all, you change your relationship to the warts. The warts may not immediately vanish, but they suddenly become okay. Then, you go about life without being so worried, so uptight, about everything that is wrong or the ways you need to be fixed. The warts may go or not, but it doesn’t even matter: You’ve learned that you can be ok right now, warts and all.

Accepting yourself before you can change is about meeting yourself and life with an attitude of love and appreciation, right now. It is about the awareness that all you really seek is more available to you right now than it may be in the future.

When you think about you truly want, it is far less often about the material thing you say you want, but the underlying feelings, which are usually very similar for everyone. We want to be healthy and feel good in our bodies. We want good relationships, enriching conversations, satisfying work. We want peace, love, harmony. We want adventure and stability. Often, what we really want is to feel okay with reality: and luckily for all of us, that is always an option. It is, as Carl Rogers reminds us, the prerequisite for change.

Accepting what is doesn’t mean you have to like or approve of reality, but it means that you don’t mentally fight reality. Fighting it is what creates more problems, and therefore means you are less capable of serving our communities in the way they really need.

Put it like this: it is your responsibility to become ok with right now. It is better for the world if you do not deny reality but meet it and yourself with a sense of acceptance.

Then, you can move from a place of appreciation, a place of enough, a place of being okay.

And things will change.

So will you.

Go ahead—you can start right now.

Maggie