Self Acceptance is The Key - A Blog by Kendal Aitken

The land that time forgot. Here in the crease of a mountain’s edge lies a community in the deepest heart of Wales. A place where internet and phones all but disappear and with them the social construction of what is normal “out there”, in the everyday world. Phone addiction and the addiction to screens on walls that light up are turned off. Natural light is remembered as the normal experience.

I dream to feel deeply connected, deeply loved and loving, deeply contributing to people and life and rich with connection to all. I recognise the desire, yet my journey is more often than not a solitary one, I own that, I have chosen it, I am aiming to change.

In this place I’m ankle deep in mud, rain spinning around as the wind howls, a block of wood to rest on, a warm cup of tea, honest connection around open fire.

This is Spirit Horse - an off grid community thirty three years in the making. A collection of semi permanent buildings largely made of wood and canvas, connected by worn trails like connections of the mind through the trees and over streams in a Hobbit feeling world. Around the fire are fellow travellers, most have come here alone, to experience themselves, to get away, to learn how to live and be in an off grid community.

Perhaps in search of something unspoken, perhaps a truth much deeper?

My intrigue in communities all around the world has been practical and with it utopian. Oh to live in harmony with all, to feel the connection of nature, to commune in simplicity.

We left our vehicles at the top of the valley and were driven down the sharp bends into the nook of the hillside. And here we commune, a simple life, with nature as our guide, a place where magic is allowed to happen.

In my “out there” life, I work as a therapist and run groups. The aim of which I sometimes think is to encourage breakthroughs, liberation of an internal kind. Yet also to find our edges, move past our comfort zones and in large part to learn to accept who we are.

Acceptance I see as key. The key to mental well-being, the key to respecting out body and keeping it in good shape, the key to our contentment. Like a light that is shone on a subject, so nothing is left in the shade.

In the world of screens and social media, the world of fashion and make up and the flush of job status and outward signs of success there is plenty of hiding going on. Our ego can be fragile, it puts on certain clothes as a deception, puts on a face, puts on an attitude hiding vulnerability. Online we’re curating a sense of self, projected out into who knows where and to who knows who, the me we hope to be seen as. The game that cripples our flexibility and with it our freedom is wilfully played. The game is known as comparison yet is rarely named.

It’s brutal, a competition where in time no one wins and always with ever diminishing returns. They make the game on line and off we willingly play.

Yet here in this far flung corner of a British field, in this holding curve of earth is the antidote to all that. For here it matters hardly a jot what face you wear, or your hair or your clothes. Here you are hardly any of what you have done before or what you do out there. Here you are who you are right now.

I noticed something, it sunk in deep. Something so simple, so elegant in a way. Here you don't have to be someone understood, constructed as whole, complete.

And you don’t have to be who you’ve been. Something slow happens, something easy, something that’s always there beneath and in that cool air and the long hours of time it is let in. Self acceptance and accepting another as they are.

There was something I had not fully noticed before. When away from screens, away from responsibilities and the portrayed image and gossip and comparison, then there in that simple place grows something deeply healthy. For there you can learn to let go of trying to be something. Ease in to the warm bath of yourself.

And that, that is worth more than many an expensive training, worth more than money can name, more than a thousand likes, more than a prize you can gain.

In my therapy room along with breakthrough moments I provide this same safe space. Yet it’s shorter. In this place, during this good stretch of time something I see seeps in. Something that can change the whole course of a life, something naked, something natural, the essence of ourselves is slowly trusted and allowed in.