Accepting Ourselves and Others
By Robert Elias Najemy
 Part 2 of a 5 part series on creating a Positive Life Outlook

Love is the ultimate healing energy. We lack giving and receiving love.

Our feelings of isolation and loneliness breed mistrust,  misunderstandings, competition, antagonism and the whole series  of health destroying emotions such as fear, anger, hatred,  jealousy, bitterness, resentment etc. These negative emotions  build up a personality complex of their own, and grow out of the  control destroying our health and relationships.

Learning to accept and love ourselves and others despite our  faults, weaknesses, habits and mistakes is a powerful means for  healing ourselves and others.

By developing more deeply rooted feelings of security and  self-worth, we enable ourselves to understand, forgive and love  others and ourselves in more and more situations.

The following thoughts may help us in that process.

• We are all souls in a process of evolution.
  
• We are all controlled by our ignorance and fear, which cause us  to function in less than perfect ways. Thus, it is logical to  accept and love ourselves and others even though we are not  perfect and make mistakes.

This can be understood more clearly through some examples.

Two broken legs

If we know someone who has two broken legs and for this reason  is unable to carry out his or her responsibilities or be very  productive or creative, we automatically understand that they  cannot do any more, because they have two broken legs.

What we fail to understand is that many of people who we  perceive as lazy, irresponsible or negative and even immoral  have in fact two of their "emotional legs" broken. They have  seriously impaired emotional legs of "inner security" and  feelings of "self-worth".

Their insecurity and feelings of self-doubt cause them to behave  in negative ways. We, too, might be such persons who have had  our inner strength handicapped by negative childhood  experiences. Thus we would do well to understand and love  ourselves and others even when we are not able to be who we  would like to be.

Accepting ourselves does not mean that we do not recognize and  admit our mistakes and weakness and seek to improve ourselves  and free ourselves from those obstacles so that we can manifest  our inner potential on all levels.

Also, accepting others does not mean that we do not assertively  explain to them the types of behavior that we need from them.

Half-finished Paintings

An incomplete painting is not yet in its perfected form. It is  in the process of being perfected, of being completed. We know  that it is not completed because consciously or subconsciously  we know that it can be much more than it presently is. But we do  not reject the painting because it is not yet what it will be.  We do not say that it is wrong or unacceptable. We simply  perceive it as incomplete and we attend to the process of  completing it.

Let us then imagine that ours and others' personalities are  half-finished paintings. Let us perceive the general state of  the society and world around as a painting in progress.

Yes, there are many weaknesses, faults and aspects to be  improved in those paintings. But they are what they can and  should be for their incomplete stage. A painting must pass  through a series of stages until it is finally completed. Each  of these stages is a perfect part of that process of completion.  No stage could be skipped or avoided.

Thus, we and those around us are "perfect" at every stage of  that process of completion. We and everything around us is at a  stage in the process of perfection. Even our imperfections are a  perfect temporary part of our movement towards perfection.

When we perceive ourselves and others as unfinished paintings,  we will have patience and understanding for our mutual  weaknesses and faults. We will perceive them as parts of our  being which need to be worked on in the process of manifesting  our perfect being, which is lying latent within us to become a  reality.

The same, of course, holds for those around us who are in a  process of perfecting their unfinished paintings.

The Bud and the Flower

A flower bud does not yet manifest its latent beauty. Yet we do  not reject, criticize or condemn it. We realize that it is in a  process and that it is what it needs to be now in order to  become the flower which it is destined to be. We accept it as  it is and wait patiently for its blossoming.

In the same way we need to perceive ourselves and others as:

1. Paintings in the process of completing ourselves.

2. Buds becoming flowers

3. Souls in the process of evolution.

We all deserve love and respect exactly as we are.

Our life purpose, however, is to attend to the process of  evolution and self-perfection until we blossom into the  magnificent and totally conscientious and loving beings that we  are destined to be.

Robert Elias Najemy is the Founder and director of the Center for Harmonious  Living in Greece with 3700 members. His book The Psychology of Happiness is available at www.amazon.com