I came to the conclusion some years ago that we all share a common life purpose. I believe life purpose for all of us is to come to self-acceptance.  Individually, we have a different plan or mission or life work, but our most important task and our most difficult one is to accept our self.

I wonder if it’s because we fear the consequences of self-acceptance. We seem to be most afraid of being in charge of our own lives. We are afraid we won’t fit in, won’t be acceptable to others.

Very early in life we head into a path of self-doubt and self-rejection. It happens so easily, so much of the time. Perhaps we said: “I feel this, I want that,” and someone said: “no you don’t feel that, you don’t really want that; this is what your feel; what you really want is something else.” And we gave up.

We started to deny what we want and what we feel. What we soon gave up is our own authority, just to fit in and please.

Our parents did it to us. Their parents did it to them. This is the original sin of self-doubt, passed down, or caught, from generation to generation. Self-doubt then infects all of our choices.

By now we’re all familiar with the quote from Shakespeare: "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." Oh, and we practised to deceive ourselves so that we can weave this tangled web of false beliefs about our selves. We needed this tangled web of beliefs to fit in and be acceptable.

Of course self acceptance is impossible to the extent we deceive ourselves about who we are.

There’s no point in blaming anyone for that original sin of self-doubt. There is no point in blaming our self for the tangled web of self-deceptions.  That’s the way human life is, that’s the way we learned to survive.

Blaming anyone, including ourselves, is just a way not be responsible for living our own life right now.

We look at the right side of the Barometer and say that the really mature thing to do is to stop blaming others for our problems. So we think, consciously or unconsciously: I’m the one to blame for my problems. Have you heard it: “Stop blaming others; you’re responsible for your own problems.”  And “responsible” here means: “to blame”. If that’s what responsible means, we are stuck in blaming. As long as we blame ourselves, we can’t be response-able to what’s happening now.

The really responsible thing to do is to untangle the web of false beliefs about ourselves.

To some extent we wrote the story of our life before we had a chance to live it. It’s made up of lots of beliefs we were told we should believe about ourselves and others. We added lots of beliefs that we made up when we were unhappy with ourselves.

We learned, in so many ways, to believe that we can’t have what we want. The Barometer’s left side helps us identify this. We have only the feelings we don’t like. When we believe we can’t have what we want, the feelings we don’t want become too painful. We have to stop feeling them. The emotions are still available, but we won’t let ourselves feel them. This is where we really get in trouble. Emotion is energy to move us to what we want or away from what is harmful in some way. When we deny the feeling of the emotion, that energy is no longer available as motivation. It is just painful feeling and we react. The way we react confirms our beliefs about ourselves and the story we’ve been living.

I suggested that self-acceptance and taking charge of our lives is what we most fear. I suggested that they are the most important tasks we all have. And isn’t doing these really the essence of what we do when we use Clear Circuit Muscle Testing the way we do, with the Behavioral Barometer and Structure/Function insights. The most difficult task in life we make so easy and gentle.

Daniel came around, some years ago, saying that we are “story tellers”. There are still some Facilitators upset with him. They’re being told that they’re not “real kinesiologists”, they’re only story tellers.

The story telling that we do goes to the core of what causes all of humanity’s troubles–the self-doubt and self-rejection that lead to all the accumulation of stress and denial that makes people sick and keeps them sick, until they change their story. What we doubt and reject in our self, we doubt and reject in others, of course.  We blame others for our self-doubt and self-rejection.Of course we do.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the concept of “Absolute Responsibility”. It’s possible when we end self-doubt and self-rejection, and self blaming.

It requires acknowledging all that we have denied. It means acknowledging what we really believe, and what we have been told to believe. It means acknowledging the feelings we found painful and pushed out of awareness. It means acknowledging what we fear, what we avoid, what we really want. We can’t accept what we won’t acknowledge.

Our story telling is a brilliant method for acknowledging the truth of our life. Then it’s a choice to accept our self.  And then there are choices we can make to create what we want.

Remember what it is that we are defusing. I hear people say: I’ve done all these defusions, and still get unhappy, or afraid, or resentful, or whatever. They focus on these feelings and blame themselves and they are still not acknowledging and accepting the feelings.

As we defuse self-doubt, we allow ourselves awareness of the feelings, so we allow ourselves the energy of emotions. And we allow ourselves awareness of what we want, and now can have.

Our feelings, our beliefs, are not the problems. It’s the self-doubt of the feelings and beliefs that creates our problems, and that brings self-denial and self-rejection.  Self-doubt makes us blame others and ourselves for our problems.

Blaming locks us up. That’s the trap that self-doubt and self-rejection put us in.

You want to know what my definitions of Heaven and Hell are?

Hell is a life of endless blaming, because the one we blame the most is our self, and that makes life miserable.

Heaven is a life of absolute response-ability.  The ability to respond with self-trust and self-acceptance, to what is happening now, really is the way of eternal happiness.