It’s Time to Stop Seeking Everyone Else’s Approval to Find Your Divine Essence

by PANACHE DESAI

From the moment you were born, throughout your childhood, early adolescence, and late teens, you have been conditioned out of your authenticity and away from your Divine Essence. You have been influenced and altered, so you could please others. You have conformed, learning to live from fear, inadequacy, and scarcity, because those are the energies that dominate the world you live in, where it is wrong to get angry, to feel sadness, to feel pain. You created a facade that was good enough.

Everywhere you looked, there it was—conditioning, an insidious control mechanism that makes you believe you must think, look, speak, and act a certain way to gain love and acceptance. You sought it from your parents, but that was conditional upon your behavior. You sought it from friends, but that was conditional upon how well you were able to navigate tricky social dynamics.

You sought it from religion, but that was conditional upon how closely you followed the rules and commandments. You sought it from work, but that was conditional upon your performance. You sought it from society, but that was conditional upon your degrees, salary bracket, and accomplishments.

And then you tried to find love and acceptance in your relationship, perhaps the most painful place of all. You needed someone else to see you, to recognize the beauty and depth that you had denied. But even when you found a boyfriend or girlfriend, you were not able to receive their love, because you believed you were unworthy. There was shame in your imperfection.

You became a master of camouflage, a chameleon. You became so good at adapting to what people expected from you that you started to forget your real colors. You never really let another person see who you were—your flaws, the “awful” things you had done, the mistakes you made. If others saw the real you, there is no way they could still feel love for you. Over and over, you found people who would dance your dance, but the final movements were always the same—some form of betrayal, abandonment, or rejection.

The software of this social programming, of conditioning, is language. It’s everything you were told, taught, pressured to believe, and instructed was right and acceptable. That engineering was married with heightened emotion. It was how you were controlled through the power of acceptance or rejection. You were the soft, gentle child who was molded to conform to a way of thinking, acting, and believing. You were pressured into creating that facade.

Let’s look at an example of how insidious these control mechanisms are. Society uses heightened language when talking about sex, which then creates a heightened emotional response—shame or guilt—which is then intended to create some form of sexual conformity within the child. This is what is acceptable. If you fall outside these parameters, then we are going to give you the human equivalent of what we give to lab rats. Instead of giving you an electric shock, we’ll bestow a visceral emotional response amplified through the language we have conditioned you with that makes you feel bad. If you follow what we are saying precisely, we will give you the blessing, the reward, the acceptance, the love.

That’s conditioning, social engineering, programming. And it is not just with sex; it’s with everything. It is the conditioning that creates a facade you live behind, masking your Essential Self.

There are very few people who can totally conform to this conditioning. The box is too narrow, too confining. In order to be totally acceptable, you have to suppress what is authentically you. You have to constantly reject yourself in order to belong in society. You are told what is right and wrong. Through a variety of mediums including TV, movies, magazines, and the internet, you are told what success means, what it means to be attractive, what it means to be successful, and what love is supposed to look like.

Buried deep underneath that facade and that pain is your Divine Essence. You have covered it up and forgotten your Essential Self in a vain outward search for something that no one and nothing in this world could give you. After all, how can you hold a planet full of people who don’t love or accept themselves responsible for loving and accepting you?

The time has come for you to stop seeking acceptance in places you will never find it and finally surrender to the peace that you are. Liberation from this created, conditioned self is the path to transcendent peace, love, health, abundance, and joy. It is the ultimate threshold to freedom.

Excerpted from YOU ARE ENOUGH by Panache Desai, copyright 2020. Reprinted with permission by HarperOne/HarperCollins

This excerpt was featured in the February 16th edition of The Sunday Paper. The Sunday Paper inspires hearts and minds to rise above the noise. To get The Sunday Paper delivered to your inbox each Sunday morning for free, click here to subscribe.

PANACHE DESAI

Panache Desai is an international bestselling author and renowned spiritual leader.

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