Self Acceptance Training (SAT) is the work of my mentor, Dick Olney. Dick defined SAT as the practice of experiencing yourself in any given moment without the inhibition of self criticism, self evaluation and self judgment. 

The heart of SAT is to practice experiencing your life as it is unfolding without resistance to what is. There’s a freedom in this acceptance that is both alluring and familiar. The more you experience it, the more you want to learn to cultivate the peace that comes with self acceptance.

Through our values and cultural expectations, we create ideas (both conscious and unconscious) about who we should be and how we should be.  We form ideal images of ourselves.  When our “ideal image” bumps up against our experience, most people experience some form of pain.  This happens countless times every day – outside of our awareness.

In these times, our personality shows up distorted, it’s not really coming from our essence, our real self, the part of us that is pure expression of Consciousness, it is our attempt to show the world who we are and who we think we should be. 

We go through this same process with others and LIFE. We have ideas about how others should be and how life should be and when our ideas don’t match our experience, there is tension and sometimes pain.

With SAT as a grounding principle of AAIT, we aim to release pain at its source AND shift identification from the self image to the essence of being that is the real self. SAT provides a crucible for this transformation from the conditioned self to the real self.