Why radical self-acceptance leads to a life you love + How to fully accept yourself
In today’s world it’s easy to get caught up thinking that you are not enough.
Look everywhere around and you will find messages focused on “fixing yourself”– from cosmetic procedures to becoming the IT girl with washboard abs in order to be cooler, more acceptable, more likable.
It’s not that transforming yourself is wrong. I’m a huge proponent of personal development and a firm believer that you can create the reality you want.
But to a lot of women, transformation is done out of the spirit of not accepting oneself. We think that if we just change this one annoying thing about ourselves, then you can be happy and fulfilled. And then you find more (and more) things to fix, ending up with a checklist of things that you need to “work on.”
We think that if we don’t change ourselves, the alternative is that we would become vegetables rotting overtime. We fear that we would be at the same place 10 years from now or worse, further behind.
The truth is, either of those scenarios are forms of self-denial. One is the type of denial where you are not accepting who you are right now. And the latter is the type of denial where you are not accepting what you are desiring right now.
And what I want to tell you, my love, is that as long as we are not accepting ourselves (and our desires), we will continue to experience suffering. Buddhists call this dukkha– that is dissatisfaction or unsatisfactoriness. What we do not accept will continue to bother us, no matter how rich, successful, or further ahead you are.
The truth also is, when you finally accept yourself (and all that you are), it is the easiest path to calling in what you most desire. It’s like a sailor learning to accept the winds and the tides– when she accepts them instead of fighting against them, she gets to her destination in the smoothest way possible.
Accepting yourself is the key to letting yourself fully receive what life wants to give to you.
Through radical self-acceptance you are able to see opportunities, insights, and ideas that are present now, which you wouldn’t see otherwise.
And despite the challenges that life may throw at you, you are able to maintain your steady ground—I.e. the confidence that you can handle anything life gives unto you.
You see reality as it is and act accordingly, without aversion and resistance blocking you from what you want to be/do.
That is what I call unconditional peace. It is a state of being that unfolds when you radically accept yourself in all the ways that you are. And such unwavering acceptance is necessary not only for your spiritual transformation but also fulfilling the deepest heart desires.
So in this blog post I want to share with you how you can accept more of yourself. For it is through radical self acceptance that you will discover more of your wholeness, while also letting life reflect that back to you too.
Go back to your roots.
Right when we are born, we are accepted for who we are. We are loved for both our chubby-cheeked giggles and our monstrous wails.
But this usually doesn’t last long for most of us.
Soon enough, we are told who to be and what to do. “Be a good girl. Be quiet. Earn good grades” they say.
So we could only be some of us but not all of us.
We become shoved into a “box” of who we should be and how we have to present to the world. We become afraid that if we are different from what’s commonly acceptable, we’re going to be ostracized, looked down upon, made fun of etc.
I grew up being bullied for several reasons, including being tan in a fair-skinned obsessed Asian culture so I totally get that.
And although this way of striving to fit into a box makes society easier to manage (because the more we are uniform, the easier it is to be controlled), deep down in our psyches we end up fighting against ourselves.
We feel as though there is something wrong with us, flawed about us, and can’t help but feel some sort of shame or guilt about ourselves.
This is what Carl Jung spoke about our psyches— that if we repress/disavow a part of ourselves, we end up becoming neurotic. That looks like being overly stressed about achievements and/or being frustrated about day-to-day things in life.
I remember being neurotic myself when I couldn’t help feel ashamed with self-loathing thoughts early on in my entrepreneurial journey. I would have thoughts like “nobody cares about me” and I was “pathetic a piece of nothing” and “a failure”-- especially when my things didn’t go as well as I expected in my business.
And now I realized that it was because I haven’t accepted parts of myself. The side of me who was unafraid of trying new things, experimenting, failing, and getting back up to play again was not allowed back in my childhood. I had to be the perfect kid as much as I could. And so, in adult life, the repressed side of me (i.e. the imperfect, messy girl) had to come out because she was repressed and pushed down all along.
And that’s what I want you to know about, my love. We all have two sides of our personalities. The good and the bad. The funny and the boring. The achiever and the player.
Every side of us has its own strengths and gifts. This is what makes us whole. However, when we are only trying to present only one side of the coin, the other side end up haunting us.
And so the first step to radical self acceptance is to reclaim all the parts that you may have been afraid to own. Accept the parts of you that were never accepted or allowed by others. Own the fact that ALL of you is loved, perfect, and beautiful.
2. Make friends with your feelings.
Just like how we have both sides of every personality in us, we are receptive to a spectrum of every emotion.
We all have happy and sad days. We all experience positive and negative feelings. Nature thrives on balance and we are also a part of her. Inner peace is the ability to maintain your stability despite the fluxes.
However, when we are only attached to the “high” and are avoiding the “low”, we begin to tip over.
We begin to harbor thoughts of judgements against ourselves. We begin to label who we are based on how we are feeling. And when an emotional storm is present, we end up wrecking even more havoc on ourselves.
This is what I see to be the common misconception around New Age manifestation/ law of attraction teachings. Because we are taught that we need to have a high vibe if we want to attract positive outcomes, we can end up running away from negative feelings and so end up with anxiety and overwhelm piling up inside.
The same thing goes with marketing on social media. When we are taught to only present the authoritative, I-have-figured-everything side of us in order to attract clients, we begin to feel like we have to put on a mask in order to have people buy from us. Having been there before, I understand the inner turmoil that comes with being inauthentic.
And relieving yourself from this internal discomfort comes down to accepting every emotion you feel.
When you do that, you will finally see the beauty and the gift of every emotion. To me, sadness is like a silky-white swan and anger is like a dark woman in a leather jacket. To you, that may be different because every emotion has their own signature style in a unique way.
And when you finally make friends with them, you will discover that you are actually not your emotions but an infinite awareness that can hold all of them– just like how the sky can hold any weather cloud.
This is when you no longer become a victim of your emotions and instead you are creating with them– for example, letting your emotions assist you in your creative endeavors and your entrepreneurial pursuits.
3). Accept what is around you.
Once you have begun more accepting of your inward self, life will begin to feel really good.
That’s because what’s within is what’s without. What you see in the external world is a mirror reflection of how you perceive of your own self.
For instance, if you see beauty within you (i.e. your thoughts, your feelings, your ideas etc.), you will also begin to see more beauty in your world. Likewise, if you are bothered by something (let’s say a self-sabotaging habit) inside of you, you may find similar faults in others.
That’s what projection is. We are always projecting our inner world onto the outerworld, regardless of what reality presents to us. This is also the reason why no matter how we express ourselves to the world, people may see different things about us, based on their own projection.
Our outer worlds are always reflecting back the inner landscape inside of us.
So when you are more accepting of your outer world, you find acceptance toward yourself too. That includes accepting people, places, and things, and accepting where you are and how fast you are going.
The sooner you begin accepting your outer world, the sooner you will find peace in your inner world.
Your acceptance toward life is what will allow Grace to follow… and Grace is what creates miracles.
It’s like when you no longer try to control a friend and instead let them be the way they are. When you do that, you allow the person to be curious of what you initially wanted them to do by their own accord, or either fall away to make space for a more matching friend. Just like that, your acceptance allows something greater to work through you (as well as people in your life, places, and events).
Your acceptance is the most fundamental step to paving the path for miracles that are meant to head your way.
In my own life, I’ve seen that time and time again. When I am resisting a situation that I’m in and I’m fighting against it, very little gets done. I end up wondering where all my time and energy went at the end of each day. But when I am accepting (instead of rushing, forcing, and controlling), things get done as if a waterfall is taking me to where I want.
I want you to know that life wants you to fill you up with goodness so much… Just like how easy it is for us to know what we desire, the answers, insights, and inspirations on what to be/do want to also come to us.
We are meant to be receivers of life, and life wants to act through us. And the only question is… will you allow yourself to receive that, through first accepting all of life and your own self…
Love,
CM
