Self-Acceptance

Self Acceptance

Make a list of all the negative judgments you have towards yourself and clear them.

This stuff robs you of true enjoyment of being YOU. Now take each item on your list and resolve to release it and to let it go. You can do this through journalling.

For instance: “I release and let go of all the suffering and guilt relating to....... (fill in the blank). I am willing to forgive myself for what happened. I did the best I could. I forgive myself and everyone else involved. I am not going to beat myself up any longer about this."

Learn to validate your emotional reality.

we refrain from dissociating, daydreaming, suppressing or numbing our emotions. This is not about having a dialogue with yourself about who’s right or wrong - it’s not about rehashing a drama, but about acknowledging how you feel and what it’s like being you in the moment. It’s about being there for yourself and affirming that you are valuable and that you matter to yourself.

Cultivate a great relationship with failure.

Cultivate the courage to show up and be real. Risk being vulnerable. So many of us get trapped in a spiral of shame where failure feeds into the ‘not good enough’ story we’ve been carrying for so long. Disconnect the experience of failing from feelings of shame and lack of self-worth, and connect it to the wise knowledge that failure is a perfect teacher. Don’t spend your life sitting on the fence – take the risks which will make you feel alive. Don’t hold back from true intimacy with others or from showing your affectionate or playful side.

Don’t compare yourself to anyone else.

We evaluate ourselves on the basis of looks, money, success, possessions – it’s almost impossible not to. We are all incredibly vulnerable to anxiety about how others see us and how they rate us, so stop playing the rating game!

learn to accept that your best is good enough. Comparison with others is a no-win situation.

Learn to accept your imperfections

Begin to see that we’re not unworthy because we have imperfections. The more we can accept the parts of ourselves that we don’t like much, the more personal freedom we create.

You don’t need to do all of these techniques all the time.

Practice relaxed awareness.

As opposed to constant distraction, or concentrated focus, relaxed awareness is a soft consciousness of our thoughts, feelings, pain, self-rating and judgment, etc.

To practice: close your eyes for a minute, and instead of pushing thoughts away or trying to focus on your breath, just softly notice your thoughts and feelings and body. You might see negative thoughts or emotions — that’s OK. Just notice them, watch them. Don’t try to turn them into positive thoughts or push them away.

Welcome what you notice. When you practice relaxed awareness, you’ll notice things — negative thoughts, fears, happy thoughts, self-judgments, etc. We tend to want to stop the negative thoughts and feelings, but this is just a suppression, an avoidance, a negating of the negative. Instead, welcome these phenomena, invite them in for a cup of tea, give them a hug. They are a part of your life, and they are OK.

Hug the bad feeling, comfort it, let it hang around for awhile. They are not bad, but are opportunities to learn things about ourselves.

Let go of rating yourself. Another thing you’ll notice, once you start to pay attention, is self-rating. We rate ourselves compared to others, or rate ourselves as “good” or “bad” at different things, or rate ourselves as flabby or too skinny or ugly.

Gratitude sessions.

Compassion & forgiveness for yourself.

If you judge yourself for not doing well at something, or not being good enough at something, can you forgive yourself for this, just as you might forgive someone else?

Learn from all parts. We tend to try to see our successes as good, and the failures as bad, but what if we see that everything is something to learn from? Even the dark parts — they are parts of us, and we can find interesting and useful things in them too.

Don’t take it personally.

If something offends you, stop and ask yourself why you’re offended. Make a conscious effort to stop assuming you know what people mean. Don’t get defensive about something you’ve internalized. Chances are people don’t want to hurt you to begin with, but they might not know how to communicate effectively either.

Forgive.

You can’t grow without forgiveness. But know that it’s a process, and it will always take time. Forgive others for things they didn’t mean to do. Forgive others for things they didn’t know they did. Forgive yourself for mistakes you think you’ve made. And forgive yourself if things don’t change quickly enough.