This is a guest post by Lisa Shoreland. Lisa is currently a resident blogger at Go College, where recently she’s been researching nursing grants as well as Stafford loans. In her spare time, she enjoys creative writing, practicing martial arts, and taking weekend trips.
Individuals who have undergone radical acceptance describe the experience as being liberating, as if seeing clearly after drowning in a thick fog.

The term refers to a skill taught within dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), originally developed by Marsha M. Linehan to treat individuals with borderline personality disorder.

today it’s used to help sexual abuse survivors, disordered eaters, and individuals suffering from mood disorders, self-injury, chemical dependencies, and other ailments. DBT combines cognitive-behavioral techniques for emotion regulation with Buddhism-derived concepts such as tolerance, acceptance, and mindful awareness.

Radically Accepting Yourself

So, what does radical acceptance really mean to you?
Everyone has problems. Everyone has undergone some manner of suffering. No matter the incident, what is small to one may be life-changing for another, and everyone’s suffering is valid. This point alone may cause stumbling, but radical acceptance goes a step further.

By definition, radical acceptance means to let go of fighting reality and to accept one’s situation as it is. This situation can range from being overweight to having cancer, from having fought with one’s significant other or being abandoned by a parent. It takes into consideration the suffering we cause ourselves. Most of us fumble day after day in what-ifs and I-wishes, trying to dip our toes in waters that are real nowhere but in our heads and hearts. “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes,” Mark Twain said, “most of which never happened.”

Radical acceptance is not about washing away our cares and suffering by saying they don’t matter. There is no judgment, only that it is. Radical acceptance is saying, “Even though I have this problem, I deeply and completely accept myself.”
This is no easy feat, but try it yourself.

The Steps to Radical Acceptance

Combine radical acceptance with a piece of Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) involving nothing more than your hands. EFT is a form of alternative psychotherapy that, whether through energy manipulation as proponents claim or the placebo effect as skeptics dismiss, can bring you closer to radical acceptance.

1 Either aloud or silently to yourself, say the affirmation:
Even though I ____, I deeply and completely accept myself.
Fill the blank with a problem you are currently facing, such as a fear, a craving, anger, etc.

2 Say the affirmation three times while tapping the fleshy part of the outside of your dominant hand between your wrist and the base of the little finger. Use the tips of the index and middle fingers of your non-dominant hand to tap the point on your dominant hand. The action will bring your focus to what is current and real, taking you farther away from your perceived problems.

Follow these steps every day at least once, perhaps when you get out of bed or before you fall asleep, or each time you begin to feel a what-if or I-wish coming on.

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This is a guest post by Jon Rhodes. Jon is a very successful clinical hypnotherapist from the UK. If you are interested in self improvement, you can read the details of his very popular therapeutic hypnosis mp3 sessions. Charisma can help you in many aspects of life. It can help you win friends, be popular with the opposite sex, and even land that new exciting job. There is almost nothing that charisma can help you achieve.

For some, it is very natural to be charismatic. They just seem to have that ‘X-Factor’. However it is comforting to know that charisma can also be developed. Here are four top methods to help boost your charisma:

1 Have goals you are working towards. There are a lot more followers than leaders, so if you want to stand out then be a trailblazer. There is nothing wrong with being a follower, but people are naturally drawn to leaders.

Set yourself goals to work to. Have a sense of purpose and a vision – a big goal that you are working towards. You may or may not succeed to meet your goal, or it might change over time, but if you always have one, people will naturally feel drawn to you as you present the possibility of an exciting future. Don’t simply pretend to have a goal as people will quickly see through you and you will lose all credibility. In any case it is far more satisfying to spend life attempting to meet realistic goals.

2 Love yourself. If you don’t like yourself, how do you expect others to like you? Unknowingly you constantly give out thousands of small subconscious clues on how you should be treated, and it all begins with treating yourself right.

You need to learn to appreciate that you are a unique and valuable human being. Accept yourself as you are. It’s fine to have some flaws. You can work on improving them. However it must be remembered that the most charismatic people on earth are the ones with flaws. Someone who is perfect is not really all that interesting anyway. People are drawn to people, not robots. Be happy with who you are, wart and all. Love yourself and others will soon follow suit.

3 Be honestly interested in others. You must have met many people who talk incessantly about themselves? This may be OK at first, but after a while it becomes very tiresome and you just want to avoid them.

Charismatic people appreciate other people just as much as they appreciate themselves. Relax and listen properly to what other people are saying. Give them space to talk. You will learn new things, and they will notice and appreciate that you actually listen to them. The Chinese have a saying: “You have two ears and one mouth – use them in that proportion.”

Some people struggle concentrating on listening to others, and become anxious that they may forget what they are thinking next. This causes them to not listen properly to what the person was saying, as they struggle to remember what they want to say, then immediately respond to what they say with something totally irrelevant.

This will not win you too many fans, and is irritating to the recipient. Relax, allow that thought to disappear, and listen. This thought will return if it is still relevant. If it is so important, you will remember it again some time in the future. With a little practice listening becomes much easier, and you will enjoy far more productive two way conversations.

4 Model someone who you consider very charismatic. Hypnotherapists and NLP practitioners often utilize this technique very successfully. It could be a friend, a celebrity, or even a fictional character that you model. You may wish to be like James Bond for example. Don’t try and copy them exactly, just consider how they would act in the situations you face.

You have to sometimes be careful with this as it may not be appropriate to blow up the whole building up with your watch, or do a flying kick to the face a la Bruce Lee! Get a ‘feel’ of a certain character, and how they work on the inside. Try to catch their essence, rather than exactly cloning them. Done with thought and care this can significantly raise your charisma levels.

So remember you should have goals that you are working towards, love yourself, listen to others, and model other charismatic people. Try to be charismatic, but don’t try too hard. Watch other people and observe what they ‘get right’ and what they ‘get wrong’ in the charisma game.

This will greatly increase your awareness over time, and help hone your skills. Pretty soon you will notice huge strides in charisma levels, and your success and enjoyment of life will also soar. Now get out there and wow the world with your new charming charismatic self!

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Have you ever heard someone saying “he made me feel x” or “because of her I felt y” ? Maybe you even said it yourself. Stop for a moment and think about it, did they point a gun to your head and forced you to feel something? The truth is we and no one else are responsible for our emotions.

Have you ever felt great even though something you consider negative happened? For instance maybe it was raining and you were all soaked and you still smiled and enjoyed the moment, or maybe something you consider good happened and you still felt bad. These examples show us that we can choose our emotions and we don’t have to react to the situation or to the others.

Change your negative emotions into positive emotions

Usually our decision to feel a certain emotion is unconscious but it doesn’t have to be that way. At first you’ll notice your emotions only after you feel them. Start by accepting your emotions and take full responsibility for them, you can’t change something until you accept it.

Think about the positive intent of the feeling. E.g. Perhaps the fear helps saving your life or gives you a feeling of safety. If you don’t know what the intent is you can use the Six-Step Reframing technique to find the positive intentions and to find alternative ways to accomplish your positive function.

Permit yourself to feel sad, frightened, angry or any emotion you consider negative. Explain yourself that it’s ok to feel that way and distinguish between the emotion and yourself. If you feel angry it doesn’t mean that  you’re an angry person and if you feel scared it doesn’t mean you’re a coward.

Don’t try to block the emotion, instead let yourself feel it as much as you can. If you’ll stay with the emotion you’ll find peace. Notice if you’ve unpleasant feelings in the body every time you feel the emotion, if you do ask yourself what emotion lays underneath the first emotion and let yourself feel it. Keep doing it until you feel all the emotions.

After you felt the emotions, if you still feel a negative emotion in your body, you can breathe through your mouth and direct the breathing to the discomfort area in your body. If you don’t feel a discomfort in the body you can direct the breathing to your heart. All of our feelings are filtered through the heart. The breathing should be deep and slow. After a few minutes you’ll feel relieved.

Realize that you don’t feel that way all day long, there are times when you feel great. Think about all the instances when you felt bad, what do they all have in common? In most cases you’ll find that it’s related to a few areas in your life that require your attention. It can be areas like self acceptance and love, making independent decisions, loneliness and so on. These areas are related to limiting beliefs. Talk to someone about the things that bother you. It’s best to talk to a professional but your friends and family can help too.

Think about all the times you felt great. Remember what it was like to feel the emotions, remember the things you saw, heard, smelled and so on. Make a vivid image of the good times you had, make the colors of the image bright and sharp. Make the image bigger and bigger and notice how you feel about it. Play with it until you feel wonderful. Our thoughts influence our emotions, If you have a negative sentence that you keep repeating in your mind simply replace it with something short and positive.

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This is a guest post by Natheya. Natheya uses the Language of Light to heal.

Being a conscious human, I notice and am aware of what is happening in the world around me.

I am the world and I embrace all of it. Similarly, my internal condition — my moods, the running dialogue in my head, as well as the feelings I experience: like anger, joy, frustration etc. — is an observable state.

Our discernment of our external and internal world is not something that we actively have to manage. It does not require our vigilance. We do not have to make ‘selections’, we don’t have to shut down what our senses show us, and we don’t have to separate ourselves. We are every thing and every one. In freedom.

On the other hand, I believe that we can guide our judgment of our experiences. Let’s say a fly has entered the room. I notice it. This is discernment. If I criticize myself for having created the situation by leaving the window open that allowed the fly in, I have entered into judgment. Discernment is a natural act that we engage in without planning or conscious thought. It is part of life and our willingness to be the life that is moving in and out of us and every one and every thing around us, in oneness.

Judgment is optional. Because our behavior is influenced not only by our conscious awareness but also by our habits, releasing our judgment is a committed choice. In much the same way that it requires effort to not look up when someone says my name, if I am accustomed to cursing like a maniac when I see a fly, changing this pattern of behavior will be an active decision from the heart. That said, the first step of changing a habit is, of course, discernment — noticing that I am doing it.

Discernment — what I notice — awareness. Judgment — what I do with what I notice — a choice.To discern the world as it is — with me, my emotions, my feelings, and my mood as a part of that world — this is something I do automatically as part of being and allowing all of it.

On the other hand, judgment — something that I still do frequently enough, something that I occasionally get a little rush from doing, and something that I can sometimes discern that I am doing while I’m doing it (but yes, that ‘sometimes’ is changing now into ‘most of the time’) — is optional. Let’s gently show our mind this while we hold it in our heart. Heart is where the mind is to be, and it does listen! It is a time of action not re-action.

Here is a great video that makes you think more about discernment and life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHUVXhjOafo

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