Self Acceptance Matters

Self acceptance begins from a place of love.

There’s such woundedness around our love-ability, our ok-ness. My heart is broken wide open again and again to hear people share their beliefs about themselves. Being seen and accepted in our vulnerability is one of the first steps in coming to accept ourselves as we are.

The process of self acceptance is not sexy.

Self acceptance asks an ongoing commitment of us throughout our lives. There’s no “once and for all”. There is a consistently gentle way of remembering who we are. Moving in that way, takes the heroics out of the process and provides us with the time and space to grow the skills needed to meet those edgy inner places in ourselves.

Rejecting ourselves is learned, self acceptance is learned. If we have learned how to keep ourselves at arms length we can also learn how to embrace our barriers to accepting ourselves.

We can gradually release the seductive idea that the “best version of ourselves” is yet to happen. Self acceptance is sublime medicine: it awakens our inner authority and the ability to trust ourselves.

Meditation teacher & psychologist Jack Kornfield says: “Much of spiritual life is self acceptance, maybe all of it.” I’d paraphrase that and say simply that most of our inner growth revolves around self acceptance.