Self Acceptance

What is your dominant attitude towards life? Do you love yourself? Feel worthy? The struggle with low self-esteem?
These are only questions rarely ponder before emotional trauma overwhelms us. So let us investigate self-acceptance and self compassion as two key components for optimal human living. Do we embrace our uniqueness, or do we suppress it? Can we grow to be a unique individual, or is it innate?

The first step to improving the quality of our lives is accepting our humanity, and the second is practicing compassion consistently. It is my belief that both are possible with conscious awareness and a daily practice of compassion. However, I also believe that developing and maintaining a personal spiritual practice will help us most in regards to self-acceptance, and self compassion.

Self-acceptance begins with recognizing and acknowledging our humanity. There is nothing inherently wrong with us, and we have the ability to heal ourselves and others through loving actions and words. When we allow our inner critics to attack us, we become blind to our true voice and true effectiveness.

When we are in the midst of an emotional trauma, our inner critic can hinder our ability to connect with our inner strength and power. As an instrument for loving actions and words, self-acceptance must begin with the understanding that loving oneself is an essential component to accepting and loving others.

To practice self-acceptance we must first cultivate self-compassion. I find that loving kindness and acceptance for all beings and circumstances are one of the most healing and soul-enhancing skills that we can adopt. When we embrace all that is good, we also cultivate a passion for the things that are bad or ugly, while holding onto our natural compassion and kindness for the good and bad.

When we are at peace with our inner critic and know that all life is interconnected and connected, it becomes easy to let go of the desire to control situations and people in general. We can instead decide to surrender to the flow of the energy of our connection with everything in existence.

https://miro.medium.com/max/1000/0*SlRj096NV7a1T2nx

The step in practicing self-acceptance is to feel inadequate. To feel inadequate is to place ourselves outside our comfort zone and we may experience feelings of sadness, rejection, fear, anxiety, stress, guilt, shame, anger, and more.

By learning and adopting the healthy practice of self-compassion, we can move away from these feelings and work instead towards feelings of oneness, on beingness, on feeling whole, on knowing and liking ourselves. When we choose this path, we are choosing not to feel inadequate, but to embrace our inner being as grounded and precious.