Loving Ourselves: Accepting What Is

Do you deeply and completely love and accept yourself? Most people have a hard time saying yes to this.

They can accept parts of themselves, but other parts they just don’t like or they are ashamed of or they outright reject.

Here’s a short exercise:

(1) On a scale of zero to ten (0-10), how true is the following statement for you? (10 being most true):

“I completely love and accept all parts of myself.”  _____

(2) Now, take out a piece of paper and write down everything about yourself that you like. This can include physical aspects, talents and gifts you have, your strengths and abilities.

(3) On another sheet of paper (because you filled the first one, right?), write down all of the things that you don’t like about yourself. These are things that you hear inside your head that keep you from being your fabulous self (“I’m not smart enough”, “I’m too fat”, “I always say the wrong thing” etc.).

Which list is longer? Do you see a connection to the answer you gave for (1)?

So why should we care whether we love and accept ourselves or not? What difference does it make?

I believe it makes all the difference between our ability to heal versus staying stuck in dis-ease and pain.

If you are familiar with EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), you know that accepting or loving yourself is an important part of the process of releasing negative emotions and physical discomforts.

The more inner work I do with myself and with others, the more I believe that self acceptance is truly the critical element of healing.

I had an experience with a friend recently that illustrates this concept well.

While sledding with our kids, my friend fell and hurt her shoulder and thumb. She was really frustrated because she was planning to go skiing the next day and didn’t want to miss it. I offered to work on her a little after we got home.

I noticed that she was expressing a lot of frustration with herself, so I decided to focus on those feelings first. We did a few rounds of EFT focused only on her feelings of “doing something dumb” and “shouldn’t have done that.”

We were both surprised when she checked her thumb and shoulder and found that they were feeling significantly better. We had focused only on her feelings around judging herself for getting hurt, not on the actual injuries.

In other words, healing had begun (or at least her experience of pain had decreased) merely by clearing her self-judgments about the accident.

Our thoughts about ourselves are powerful. Negative thoughts can get in the way of healing.

“But,” you say, “I don’t want to accept the things I don’t like about myself–those are things I want to get rid of!”

This isn’t about accepting our faults and then keeping them. It’s about acknowledging them and loving ourselves anyway. Doing this opens the door to releasing the feelings that keep us stuck in our faults.

When we can release our self-judgments then we will be ready to heal, to move on to better things.

Healing is the process of accepting all, then choosing best. – Neal Donald Walsch