The key to opening the human heart is acceptance. That recently hit me like an epiphany. If you’ll just take a minute and imagine how it affects you when you feel truly accepted by another, I suspect you will sense a softening, an easing, a relaxing of your heart. I suspect you will realize how essential acceptance is to friendship, to love and life satisfaction.
The opposite happens when you imagine how it affects you not to feel accepted by another. Non-acceptance closes the human heart; and you sense the need to guard yourself. Unfortunately, there are many closed-hearted people walking around, who do not have a sense of affirming acceptance from significant others in their lives. Without it, they will tend to protect rather than share their hearts; they will neither enter into nor know the satisfying intimacy possible only through mutual acceptance.
A world of dishonesty is built around the foundation of unacceptability. We do not share because we do not accept what we feel, or what another might feel. How often have you had this exchange: “How are you doing?” “Fine, thank you; how are you?”
Do we ask expecting the truth, ready to accept the other’s actual state? Do we answer by sharing our hearts, or just say the expected, “I’m fine,” because that’s what we think the other really wants to hear?
Recent research on why people join a church is instructive. In a poll of several thousand persons between the ages of 18 and 40, the number one reason proffered for joining a church was the sense of being accepted for who they are. And from acceptance grew a sense of belonging.
To accept others means to affirm their intrinsic value. It does not mean or require that you agree with everything about them. Rather, you permit them to be who they are, whether similar to or different from you. Regardless of which, you esteem them as they are. Acceptance gives permission to be spontaneous and un-self-conscious; it frees for authentic self-expression. Acceptance includes the absence of judgment, criticism and negativity.
The essence of friendship is mutual acceptance. Without feeling heard, welcomed, appreciated and cared for as your true self, there can be no true friendship. The one who knows, accepts and cares for you as you, is your friend. You will find only a few in a lifetime. Since it takes a friend to make a friend, in the relationship you must be just as understanding, accepting and caring toward the other as you seek the other to be toward you.
The key to opening your heart to yourself, which is also the path to self-understanding, is likewise, self-acceptance. I once wrote:
“Accepting yourself is the most difficult act of faith. Yet until you have, you will not find yourself. For self comes out from its cloister only in the light of affirmation. And you will never comprehend yourself. You may but choose whether or not to become who you already are.
You will know when you are truly you, for a question you don’t remember asking will be answered, and a calmed sense of self will fill you.”
Self-acceptance is truly an act of faith: you grant yourself the intrinsic value, importance and capacity to be a full, useful human being. And if you do not accept yourself, you will not let anyone else accept you either. Self-acceptance remains forever your choice, as does being open to or guarded from, the accepting love of others.
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