there is no such thing as rejection — and how to deal with feelings of rejection

photo by Pia Oyarzun

never in my life has there been a person or thing that rejected me and I looked back on it and said “I missed out”. it was more like “omg I dodged a major bullet and now I see how rejection was my protection”. yes — rejection is protection.

let’s back up. my earliest and only memories in life are rejection. this is a blessing and curse. the curse is obvious. the blessing is, I was/am so used to it, that on a daily basis I not only feel but KNOW that I have nothing to lose. nothing. if you start at the bottom, where else is there to go that is worse? kids were pretty much nasty to me, mostly because I was carrying around this energy signature that was so loud that echoed abuse, criticism and rejection. this is how life works – we repeat what we have experienced over and over again before we can begin and then repeat what we ARE. two very different things. anyhow, there were some ok adolescent kid experiences sprinkled in between, but never once was I actually able to feel them. I was still stuck in a tangible system that told me the complete opposite every day. the ok adolescent kid experiences could have hit me in the face with acceptance and I wouldn’t have felt it anyway. I was pretty much fucked.

by the end of high school, I had been deemed attractive by society’s standards for like a few years. maybe starting at 15 or 16. I remember thinking, what a crock of shit that these people and boys are so nice to me because of how I am looking. but that’s human nature for you. on a superficial level, I obviously kind of fit in. but not fully. I hated that it took something so superficial to make people be nice (this, by the way, is why I hid my photo and full name from my healing practice for years! I was testing people perhaps! I wanted to be liked for ME — and the best way I knew to do that was through offering them my core/content ONLY, prior to meeting. then basically wearing nearly a burka and dumbing myself down as much as possible when meeting. at least in the earlier days of my healing work). by the time I got to college, however, I was away from all that was — and the doors of actual human acceptance seemed to open to me for the first time ever. I met a ton of people, mainly girls, who just accepted me for who I was. I will never forget my college roommate experience. there I was, in the middle of conservative Boston, and I looked like a bit of a wild child. I wore pink and blue wigs on random, I went clubbing a lot, and nearly all of my adventures included friends who were not from the US. my college roommates were all conservative, nice girls. mostly from the Boston area or places like upstate NY or upstate CT. but the biggest thing for me, that I had never experienced before, was their acceptance. these girls observed my individuality and perhaps many things about me that did not fit the norm in that city at that time, and they simply accepted me. they didn’t question me. they didn’t put me down. when I walked around with my wigs or nearly naked in our apartment or basically just was ME in a way that I know was foreign to them, they just…let me. perhaps my experiences were just SO opposite prior that I am overshooting the mark of gratitude to them. but I can’t help still reeling from the impact these young women had on me — by accepting me for me. that never faded during those years. I am forever grateful. those were formative and crucial years for me, because I got to see the way the world at large saw me: a nice, interesting person with something to offer others. in my mind, at that time, if these very “normal” people were not ostracizing me, maybe there was hope for me after all! I took that feeling, integrated it, and began to run with it…

now the above initial experience with acceptance in this lifetime did not immediately fix all of the inner deficits that I experienced. I am still working on the inner. whatever forms us is what we will work on for the rest of our lives. period. but the above initial experience with acceptance surely taught me about contrast and, generally, the fact that I could fit absolutely anywhere I went. even if all of the next places that I went gave me panic and anxiety at first. which they do, almost all of the time by the way. except my sessions…not even once have I felt that. I guess I know my home 🙂

as time went on, during my 20s, I did everything I could to reverse my brainwashing that had affected and crippled so much of my life. I moved to different cities alone, once again experimenting with how the world would see me. I was almost always greeted with open arms. such a different experience to my early life and the town that I had spent it in. there was also a very anchoring experience of bringing the past into each then-new situation so that I could work out the unconscious elements of it. that was and is always the worst. so, as the surface and conscious elements of me were really working themselves out, like I could visibly fit in, there was a lifetime of deeper and unconscious work that would always be the other side of the sword. fine. that’s the way it is for each of us, the particulars simply depending upon our particular luggage in life.

what I began to realize was, just how synchronistic each experience with rejection was for me in term of cleaning up ghosts of the past and the utter defunct programming of the unconscious mind. my unconscious mind was so over having to repeat things from a decade or two earlier, but it was surely working overtime to vomit out the trash. I began to see that nothing about these present unpleasant experiences was present! these present experiences were shades of the past, stuck in the wrong dimension, coming up for review and release. when people tell you “that’s in the past, get over it, move on”, they are full of shit. there is no such thing as just the past. everything is past with present-tense facades or masks. and, if things have not been released and processed from the past, they will stay present always. comments like “get over it, move on” always come from abusive people who want to once again erase your conscious awareness of what is/was. anyhow, I began to see that all I was dealing with in the present tense was not present at all in a tangible emotional sense; that the world did not still see me the way it did when I came into it. I was still looking through an old lens, because that lens was foggy and littered still with the debris from others. this understanding and awareness was a really nice thing for me, because each time the outer world “rejected” me, I was able to see specifically who and what from the past was leaving with that experience! it was not and will never be present tense at all. rather, the past masquerading through the present. so then, what really was this thing called rejection? this thing called rejection was a series of experiences of OTHERS that I had internalized and confused with my own. there was no such thing as rejection! what a novel concept…

I then began to find a system to this whole “rejection” thing. especially in romance. here was the system: anything that I had to make happen was bad for me. yes! anything I have to make happen for me is bad for me. if I am unwilling to see this, I will perceive it as rejection. but it is NOT that. it is the Universe working on my behalf to shuffle away ANYONE or ANYTHING that just does not serve me. it doesn’t make them the devil, it doesn’t even necessarily mean that they are toxic; it just means that there is something much greater for me greater good available and I am missing it because my ego is likely trying to work through yet another shard of the past.

I learned that I can still go after what I want, but that the moment it shows resistance or force versus power, I had better run. sometimes, those things that show resistance or force return as a new thing or person, but that has to be proven and proven hard. usually we are just dealing with an old cycle if we are allowing anything that has resisted us to be in our present life. for example: this one time, years ago, I had a HUGE crush on a guy. he seemed totally perfect for me. he also seemed totally interested. we hung out under mutual pretense and made out a few times. he had recently broken up with a girl he had been with for a long time. I figured perhaps he just needed time to acclimate to dating again so I wanted to give him space. but something was off. he wasn’t pursuing me the way that every other guy I dated pursued me. even if I had been the initial pursuer. I couldn’t put my finger on it, until one night we got super drunk. we had never slept together nor had he tried and I had attributed it to him needing time. lol, most men don’t need time for something like that. anyhow, in a mutually inebriated state, he confessed to me that he was gay. he told me that he was going to continue to date women though, while secretly sleeping with men (this happens a lot, by the way!). I immediately felt held by the Universe. I had stressed over what it was that I wasn’t enough of or xyz for months. none of that was the case. I am glad I didn’t force the issue or pull out a ton of tricks to make this thing work. sometimes, if we force things and don’t listen to the flow, we can end up getting seriously hurt.

another time, there was this job in TV that I really wanted. on paper, I “should have” gotten it. anyway, I was rejected. months later, the show became an utter disaster. other actors I knew on the show who were contracted were miserable beyond belief. the credits didn’t matter anymore. nothing mattered because it was a mess. I remember being at the east river and hearing the news and laughing out loud with thanks for not mixing me up with that “opportunity”. I had not been rejected, I had been protected.

all good things that come to us do so by way of attraction NOT PROMOTION. if we are in a state of force or promotion, we are going to be constantly confusing divine intervention with rejection. if we are in the flow of attraction, we are able to process feelings of rejection and acknowledge that the tangible experience is not actually that. if we are in the flow of attraction, we are able to identify the “current” feeling that is totally out of place with time and space, and tie it back to a VERY OLD experience. if we can even remember. some trauma is so repressed that we repeat the same pattern of perceived rejection over and over and over again. this happens a lot with rape and incest and molestation survivors. but no one is really able to thrive until they remember the incident. this is also known as people who consistently choose unavailable or abusive partners. they are battling unconscious amnesia no doubt.

with my business, it is 100% ATTRACTION versus promotion. like a 12 step program. I don’t need to promote ANYTHING. I live in my truth, I state that truth, and I state what I want. and it shows up. I don’t need to offer groupons or deals or specials. when I began, all I had was an ugly wordpress site in poop brown (not a tech savvy person) and people still called me. I don’t even know how they found me as it was before I had dabbled with ad words or yelp or anything at all. well, actually I do know how they found me — I was living in pure alignment with myself. that pure alignment is the loudest antenna we have to attract what we need/are. so many people don’t get this and they work so hard at surface endeavors to build their brand — when the content is totally missing. by the law of physics this just can never, ever work out.

I want to be clear in saying that I am a big believer in going after what we want in life. we can hunt down that guy or girl and express interest, we can color our business and put it live so that people know where to find it, we can be the loudest expressions of ourselves. but the moment that we feel the pushback — the resistance — the need to force, it’s a wrap. run. run from anything that even appears to run from you. THEN, the Universe will show you the proof of your protection. trust me. I’ve failed and succeeded at that concept hundreds of time.

there is no such thing as rejection.