The art of radical self acceptance

Anyone up for a little light life coaching?

Here’s something to ponder.

What parts of yourself do you dislike or find difficult to accept?

This could relate to your health, physical body, career, habits, life circumstances etc.

Perhaps you’ve been striving towards a goal for some time and it’s just not working. You find yourself beating your head against a brick wall.

A critical part of your mind is contributing opinions such as:
You should be there already
Why can’t you make this work
What’s wrong with you?
Everyone else has it together, why not you?

It can be difficult for our ego to accept where we are in the present moment, warts and all.

Our ego always has it sights set on some future utopia, some time in the future when everything will be perfect, when we can finally relax and enjoy life.

This is an illusion that keeps our ego in charge and has us racing around like headless chickens dancing the jig of life.

How often are we satisfied with where we are in our life in the present moment?

This type of thinking is ingrained in us i.e. we need to be more productive.

It also comes from advertising with its message of we are not enough (hence that’s the reason you need to buy x product).

How do we cultivate more self acceptance in our daily life and what are the benefits?

For starters, we can take time out to just be. This is highly counter-intuitive. It could look like setting a timer for 20 minutes and sitting in quiet contemplation, taking a walk in nature alone and listening to the birds sing or it could mean sitting on your sofa with a cup of tea and no distractions apart from perhaps some soothing, calming music.

Our mind will tell us we are not being productive and this is a waste of time.

The benefits of this is that we give our thinking minds a bit of a rest. When we do this, we can allow for deeper wisdom and inspiration to arise naturally, like a spring in the ground.
It ends up being very productive.

We can write out a list of the things we find difficult to accept about ourselves.

We can go through this list and say: Even though I’m [so lazy] I deeply and completely accept myself.

Even though I [still haven’t figured this out] I deeply and completely accept myself.

Rather than being fully immersed in our lack of self acceptance, this exercise gives us a bit of space between the part lurking in the back of our mind that dislikes and is judgemental about us or our behaviour AND gives us access to a part of us that has compassion, patience and kindness - like having the best mentor in the world.

We can probably all do with giving ourselves a bit of a break every now and then.
Do you agree?

[image credits: thinkific]