Yesterday, I spoke to a client about acceptance that doesn’t only encompass our accomplished, ambitious, achieving, positive selves but also embraces our shadow sides, the ones we desperately don’t want others to know about–the unproductive, the lazy, the unkind, the unmotivated.
Acceptance means admitting that…
Sometimes I’m excellent, sometimes I’m just average.
Sometimes I’m productive, sometimes I’m lazy.
Most times I’m kind, sometimes I’m not.
Sometimes I’m brilliant, sometimes I do stupid things.
Acceptance means knowing that it’s okay. Acceptance means giving yourself love and compassion, no matter what.
In the book, There is Nothing Wrong with You, Cheri Huber says:
“Non-acceptance is always suffering, no matter what you’re not accepting. Accepting is always freedom, no matter what you’re accepting.”
She follows it up with:
“Suffering cannot be healed through self-hate. Only through compassionate acceptance can suffering be healed. If we accept, if we open ourselves, life will transform us. If we resist, if we try to run away, the pain and the suffering are reinforced and we deepen the conditioning that causes us to suffer.”
What if today you accept yourself just as you are, wrinkles, flaws, cellulite, imperfection rather than just the filtered, the exfoliated, the perfect?
(This art piece by Bea Valdes beautifully shows the beauty and tenderness of both light and shadow.)
