Have you ever noticed how the mind refuses to accept rejection?

I am familiar with this feeling since childhood. I had to deal with it because I didn’t know who I was. About how I coped with rejection is the story today.

It is not uncommon at all to perceive a certain life situation through the rejection lens. It can be something as simple as someone saying „no” to one of your inquiries or requests, or just another kid telling you he or she does not like you.

I can tell you certainly that the feeling of rejection goes straight to the heart and settles into the soul. And it hurts badly.

While the soul catches the pain and tries to deal with it, it spreads the whole suffering to the entire body to make it bearable. For a while, the body remains paralyzed, crawls, and screams because of the intensity of that torment of emotions. When it surrenders to the pain, accepts it, and starts to integrate it, the wounds start to heal. Later, they transform themselves into an everlasting scar as a seal of „that” confrontation.

Meanwhile, the mind denies everything. It is too much to bear, the pain, the sorrow, the rejection. Mind’s primary job is to convince us that we are right, that we are OK, that we deserve good things, and most importantly, keep us alive. When the grief from the soul reaches the mind, the dark reality shows up on the screen. That moment is the mind’s crossroad. It chooses either to deny everything, sinking then in an excuse generator pond throwing the blame on people, events, karma, lack of resources, or to accept rejection and to start looking deep inside on what needs to be changed.

Until the hope – that it was all a lie and things will turn 180 degrees – dies, the mind twists scenarios and characters, adjusts scripts, directs, and plays scenes with story-lines of superhero vs. villain confrontations where the hero-self wins the battle. The mind can finally accept the rejection and win the game living with the idea that just one battle was lost, one level was compromised, and the scar on the soul forever marks that fact.

From the core of the rejection, there is always two sparks of hope: one is the hope that I, as an individual, will survive and will get better, the other is its shadow: the hope that the rejection will pay its revenge, will turn back to approval, embrace or love. First, the mind dreams about how things could have been different. It stays in a blended state of denial and acceptance, raising and lowering the self’s vibration like a sea wave moving under the moon’s influence. In the fantasy evoked by the mind, the villain(always the other person) loses in front of the superhero-self, the debt gets paid, the revenge strikes to correct the mistake, or love wins like in the fairy tales everyone lives happily ever after. All of it, to keep that shadow of hope alive.

Until that shadow of hope dies, the mind becomes the most wanted director of the life itself. Only when it finally accepts the rejection and heals it, the shadow fades. The shadow’s evanescence is making room for the newly reborn superhero-self. A superhero hoping for new, unshaded hopes, dreaming new dreams, believing new beliefs, valuing new values, proving new strength, and having new ways of making itself seen, heard, accepted. Self needs to receive embracement from the inside. Then, after this last integration, and only then, both the mind and the soul become healed.

Then is when the story really changes.

I am curious how often do you allow yourself to really change the story? And do you do it deliberately?

Stay safe.

Photo credit:  Cristian Newman on Unsplash