Living Your Real Life

Lately I've been thinking a lot about how much trouble we get into with our own hearts as we get all wrapped up with ideas about how our life should be rather than how it really is and who we should be rather than being who we really are. EMC E20-616 Hanging on tight to all this fear seems to create a kind of holo-self rather than REAL self. Much like the velveteen rabbit, perhaps by the time I've become fully REAL, my body will be well-worn, with a really lived in look - a look that conveys how deeply I want to really live as the fullest expression of who I am. I don't know if we can really do that without getting a little bumped and bruised in the process.
Part of what this means to me is learning to be with the truth of our experience, pains and all. It also means releasing the pretending - pretending to be something or someone other than who we truly are. It's like how we get more attached to the experience of perception rather than the reality of our connection. In committing to getting free of pretending, EMC E20-001 I think it is ultimately about getting free of fear. Imagine, just for a tiny moment, what if you weren't afraid or if you stopped pretending?
I think that this is at the heart of Self Acceptance Training, over and over again being really REAL - free from the fears of criticism, evaluation and judgment. If you've been reading for a while, you understand that Self Acceptance is not a steady state - well, not until full SELF realization. It's something that we are in training for in this human life. Over and again, we practice fully inhabiting ourselves as we really are without the inhibition of self judgment, self criticism or self evaluation.
More recently, I've been playing with extending this to noticing and releasing my fears about how others perceive me along with my fears of the judgment, criticism and evaluation of others. It's likely that folks will continue with these very human 050-RSAENVSL2-01 tendencies and I will undoubtedly be the recipient of their judgments, evaluations and criticisms. But this does not have to influence my state or my choices any more than the various waves really influence the ocean.
Who would you be if you stopped pretending to be someone who is influenced by the very human tendency to judge, evaluate and criticism?