One of my favorite quotes is from psychologist Carl Rogers, who said, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I can change.”
That statement has always had a sort of zen quality to me. It also continues to be a piece of the puzzle in my mind relating to things I hear or read about making peace with where I am. A while back someone wrote to me, wondering if I really buy into this business about the best way to improve a bad situation being to let go of needing things to be different in order to feel better.

Always a sucker for a good paradox, I asked the Shower Team for neither the first nor likely the last time, “How do we let go of needing a bad situation to get better? How are we supposed to make peace with where we are when where we are sucks?”

Making peace with where you are doesn’t mean what you often assume that it means. You hear that and you interpret it to mean that you’re just supposed to be resigned to whatever fate you feel is being thrust upon you or that you are just supposed to grin like an idiot and babble affirmations no matter how miserable you are. A much better way to say it is, “Make peace with YOU—wherever you are.” Because the point is, that YOU are truly fine . . . truly okay . . . truly blessed . . . truly loved and supported . . . no matter where you are. No matter what you’ve created. No matter what kind of mess you feel you or someone else has made. No matter how long or hard you’ve been struggling. No matter how beaten up or abandoned you feel. No matter how worthless or stupid or inept or foolish you feel—or believe others feel that you are.
Too often what most of you try to do is to improve how you feel from the outside in. You observe the conditions or circumstances that you are experiencing and your knee jerk reaction is to say, “I’ll feel better when that’s different.” Or “I’ll feel better when this is no longer the case.” So you change your hair style or your wardrobe. You go on a diet. You buy a new house. You quit your job. You leave your mate. You try to extract what you think is the source of your discomfort. You move to another neighborhood or city or state or country. Some of you would head for another planet if you could—always trusting in the same illusion: that it’s where you are that makes the difference. “If I can just be over there, not here—everything will be fine. I’LL be fine as soon as I’m over there.”
It is very hard for you to hear us say, “It doesn’t matter where you are” and understand it much less believe it. You hear words like “wherever you go, there are you are,” and you laugh and you recognize some truth in it but then you go right back to shopping for your new clothes or your new partner or your new career or a better doctor or accountant . . . What we want so much for you to understand is that, while these externals may distract you from how bad you feel or in some cases, even allow you to take the much longer route to feeling better about yourself—there is a much simpler, swifter way for you to get your bearings and to feel the power that you always have to feel better no matter what’s going on in your life.
The simple truth that you have such a hard time hearing and believing is that YOU are never really a mess. YOU never need a makeover. YOU never need to be anything other than who YOU really are. And until you allow yourself to be at peace with YOU—apart from any circumstance or condition or situation . . . until you understand that YOU are blessed and adored and supported and perfect as YOU are, then you will be constantly striving for some other way to be. You will be constantly trying to remodel your life based on the mistaken belief that how your house looks to passers by has anything to do with how it feels as a home. You can create a showplace that anyone looking at from the outside in will admire and applaud. And it will still feel like an empty, hollow, cold, lonely space until you understand that YOU are the life in it. You are the warmth in it. You are the spirit that inhabits your life and makes it livable.
What you must understand is that YOU are your home, that peace is a choice you make . . . . . it is a recognition that what matters is how you feel in your skin and in your heart . . . and that everything you really want is right there where you are.
We understand that peace is typically not the first prayer you pray when you are in pain. You want relief. You want improvement. You want to feel better. What we keep trying to help you see is that you can begin to feel better from the inside out. A step as simple as deciding that you’re going to focus on feeling better rather than on how bad you feel is a powerful step in that direction. In the midst of your dissatisfaction or distress, take a minute. Take a breath, or two, or three . . . And let yourself feel the subtle but distinct shift in how you feel when you even slightly move your attention from how bad you’re feeling to how much better you’d like to feel . . . when you change the object of your attention from the source of your stress to the desire for relief.
When you understand that you don’t need anything to change in order to be at peace, that there are no renovations needed, no permits to apply for, no sins to confess and atone for, no sentences to serve or fines to pay, then you are free to change anything you want, simply because you enjoy the changing of it. It becomes a game you’re free to play because it’s fun to play it . . . not an act of desperation or a deception that anything going on around you in any way determines who you really are or a driving need to match your life to something you’ve seen in a catalog or a movie or an infomercial or a sacred text or a self-help book–or for that matter, a blog. Make peace with YOU, wherever you are because if you don’t, you’ll have no real peace, no matter where you are.

I’ve certainly learned the long and hard way that I can’t move far enough away from anything that’s holding me back from feeling the way I want to feel about my life. It doesn’t prevent occasional speculation about how much happiness money might buy or the difference any number of improved conditions might make in my overall outlook. But regardless, it seems worth the effort to see how much I can like the me in the middle of whatever it is I’m not liking.

http://firstadream.com/2010/02/03/making-peace-with-where-you-are

Glory to Me in the Highest! You have long sought the Highest when it is you who are the Glory all along! Yours is the Glory forever.

If you could only recognize and accept a little of the Glory you are. If you had even a glimpse, a mere trace, of how Glory-filled you are, how happy you would be. The whole of the world rests in your palm, and yet you hold your hand out begging for a tuppence of peace in your life.

You want Me, you want love, and another name for what you want is peace. How you crave peace in your own home and in the marketplace. Think of a world in which peace reigns. Think of your home without an inch of friction. But the existence of non-peace arises not from the world or from your home. Non-peace as well as peace arise from your heart. Peace or lack of peace exists in your heart. You know this is so.

The enemy is within. This is a poor quavering enemy within. He is hardly worth the time of the day, and yet you bow down to him many times during the day. He has another name, this culprit, and his other name is fear. He is really a wimp, or he would not exist always in the shadows. True, he has a loud voice, and he assumes great ambiance.

Trade in fear for trust. Trust is quite another matter. Oh, if you would trade in fear for trust, beloveds, how happy you would be. What dancing there would be in your heart. Your heart would sing: “The wolf at the door is gone. The wolf of fear is dead. Hurray. The wolf and witch of fear are dead. Hurray. Hurray for me, and hurray for the world. The wolf and witch of fear are dead.”

When fear leaves, negativity of any kind has no place to hide. Everything untrue tiptoes out of your heart when fear slinks its way out. All the other tentacles of negativity in your heart are but the fingers of fear. Look at all that gunk leave your heart. Fear’s departure is long overdue. It has overstayed its welcome. You could have kicked it out long ago, only you thought you had to keep it, that fear somehow was part of survival.

Now that fear has gone, what is left? What can cohabit in your heart when negativity has made its exit? You and I, beloveds.. We can be known as the Oneness of Love and the Oneness of Peace. We are what is left in a heart where fear has vacated the premises.

Fear was an arrogant ogre all along. It made a lot of noise, yet fear was a lot of to-do over nothing. Fear was a muscle-man pumped up with steroids. Beloveds, stand up to the hollowness of fear. Fear doesn’t begin to be a worthy adversary for you. Fear is a shadow, beloveds, and one that chases you. Shadows are only shadows. No matter how big they may appear, shadows are phantoms. Like a phantom lover, fear has hung around you, eating off you, stealing your warmth in order to bolster itself. Fear has done a pretty good job of it. It has been twisting your arm right along, and all along, fear has been nothing but bluster. Now that We have gotten fear to size, he can fit through a keyhole. He can leave as you will. Fear is no bigger than a cowardly thought. .

Say: “Adieu, fear. Adieu.”

Say: “Welcome, God, love and peace. Put your feet up, and stay a while.”

http://www.heavenletters.org/the-glory-that-you-are.html

Are you knowing what you are wanting? An evolving thing? Are you enjoying the expansion of your desire? And are you noticing that it is expanding?

As you begin to recognize that you get to decide all of it, and as you begin to appreciate the contrast that makes deciding or concluding, or preferring, more obvious, then you begin to sincerely enjoy the contrast.

We always begin by asking: Those manifestations that have not yet come about are still pleasing to you, yes? And some lie and say yes, others say no, but we want you to come to the place where you say yes and really mean it. “Yes, there are things that I want that have not come into manifestation yet. There are things I want that I can’t even see any way of them happening—but they are still refreshing and delightful to me. I still feel anticipation. I still feel encouraged. They still feel fresh and good to me.” And we want that for you.

We want your unfulfilled desires to feel good to you, because, well, there are two reasons: If you cannot make peace with where you are, then the unfulfilled desires are very slow in becoming fulfilled because that angst you feel about things not yet happening, is an indication of a vibration that’s literally holding it apart, from you.

So, when you’re sick and you want to be well, and you’ve been sick for a long time and it doesn’t seem like you’re getting better, or when you have one of those diagnoses that says you’re probably not going to get better, and so, instead of feeling hopeful, you feel fearful— improvement is very hard to come. In fact, it cannot come under those conditions.

The vibrational difference between feeling hopeful and feeling fearful is the difference between getting well and not getting well. It’s the difference between holding this condition on and on and on, or letting it go.

So, in the same way, we say, your current financial affairs could be not good. You could have more bills than you have income. You could have people hounding you on the telephone or beating on your door every day… And we say, so that’s what-is; that’s the action journey that you are upon. But you could have that financial condition percolating along and you could feel hopeful, or, you could have that condition percolating along and you could feel fearful. And the difference between fearful and hopeful is the difference between things improving for you.

This is a Vibrational Universe and you are Vibrational Beings. You don’t set your radio dial on 630 AM and expect to hear what’s being broadcast on 98.6 FM. You understand you’ve got to line those frequencies up, and so you do. You don’t stubbornly set it on the station that you don’t want to hear and then demand that the laws of physics change so that you can hear it anyway, without you doing anything about it… You can’t be beating the drum of things gone wrong—and offering a vibration about things going wrong—and be in the vibrational place of receiving what you are wanting.

Make peace with wherever you stand. And here’s the most important part: When you feel despair, or anything that doesn’t feel good, and you reach for a thought that feels better, what comes right along with that is a conscious awareness that you do have some control of your experience. And friends, we cannot emphasize enough the importance of that conscious awareness that you can do something about the way you feel… to read the rest of this UPlifting article, click here

Excerpted from the original article at http://www.abraham-hicks.com
©Abraham-Hicks Publications.