The biggest hang-up for people on the spiritual path is trying to make themselves better, more fit, more true, more enlightened. On the path, people become like rabbits chasing carrots. They go in circles on the merry-go-round of samsara. After years of thinking you have to be perfect, you finally come to the art of acceptance. You realize that the practice is really about being more as you are and who you are. I like to think of this as embracing your “signature self.” Your signature self is totally unique and full of all kinds of quirks and idiosyncrasies. Each of us is a patchwork, hodgepodge, polymorphous thing. No one is normal. In today’s parlance we are each “neurodivergent.” Your signature personality is full of oddities just as your body is full of twists and torques. It is never straight and far from perfect. The writer Ann Lamott put it this way, “We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.” The “becoming who you were born to be” has a nice ring to it. But what about the wonky and messy side? It takes years to give yourself the green light to accept your own failings and foibles. How many years have you spent trying to get the gold star, trying to fit in, be liked and be good? How many sessions on the mat, trying to perfectly balance your hips or be the Buddha? As Mary Oliver put it, each of us has traveled 100 miles through the desert on our hands and knees trying in vain to become someone other than ourselves.
Now when you grow up with someone or have been married a long time your original self becomes all too obvious. In family, you get to know the signature self of your sister, your brother, your spouse and your cat and they come to know yours. And if it is a loving relationship, then you feel at ease. You don’t have to try to be anyone special. But when you sit down to meditate, you may tear into yourself, critiquing, blaming, condemning. As strange as it may sound, it takes a long to be as you are with no embellishments, no airs. This is the practice of Radical Acceptance. I like to think of this as “namaste practice.” Try this. Whatever arises in your meditation, whether it be sorrow or delight, attraction or aversion, greet it by bringing your two hands together. Immediately. Admit, acknowledge and affirm neither rejecting nor clinging. This is the practice of loving kindness, the very source of empathy and compassion. And it starts at home, inside of you. In this way you can learn, as W.H. Auden once said, to “love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart.”
