Acceptance & Fluency!! - I

I don't really remember how I got introduced to the concept of acceptance but what I do remember is that I looked at it for a LONG time as another technique to achieve 100 % FLUENCY! I thought that once I accept it, I will be fluent. So I did accept! Said to myself one night - Ok I accept my stammer! (I never had any problem with the English word - stammer or stutter, It was Hakla or Haklana that I used to fear :-) and I thought may be when I will getup the next morning I will be fluent! But alas, I reached my office and I was still stuttering. I repeated it again and again and again...- I ACCEPT MY STAMMER, but it was not working. I may not be doing it sincerely, is what I thought! So I tried for almost a month trying to repeat it to myself and even giving lecture to other stammerers to accept it :-)

So even after repeating - "I ACCEPT MY STAMMER" so many times, nothing changed. I was quite surprised. I thought at least it should have helped me partially but nothing changed! It took me a few months to figure out why it was not working. For me it was a concept in head nothing more. I never acted in any way that showed even remotely that I am comfortable with my stammer! So finally when I was forced to start a SHG as there was no active SHG in Pune which I could join, I was made to talk about stuttering and hence started my REAL journey on this path of acceptance! I started posting on the bulletin board of Infosys (the company that I used to work for), inviting other colleagues who stammer to join the SHG that I was starting. And I could FEEL that FINALLY there was a decrease in the heaviness around my life! Finally I felt somewhere deep inside me that it was OK to talk about stammering!

Keep checking out to read more about me and my experiments with acceptance in the next post!