How to accept yourself for unconditional peace & fulfillment

In today’s world it’s easy to get caught up thinking that we are not enough. 

Look everywhere on social media 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 all about evolution and growth, in the spirit of finding the truth of who we are.

But to a lot of women, transformation is done out of the spirit of not accepting ourselves. We think that if we just change this one annoying thing about ourselves, then we can be happy and fulfilled. And then we find more (and more) things to fix, ending up with a checklist of things that we need to “work on.”

We think that if we accept ourselves, the alternative is that we would no longer “progress” like vegetables rotting overtime. We fear that we would be at the same place 10 years from now or worse, being further behind. 

The truth is, either of those scenarios are forms of self-denial. One is the type of denial where we are not accepting who we are right now. And the latter is the type of denial where you are not accepting what we 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. Buddha called 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. I wrote more on the benefits of accepting ourselves in this article here.

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. With self-acceptance, we exude an ever-present compassion, a radiance of divine love, not only toward ourselves but also to others. 

So in this blog post I want to share with you how you can accept more of yourself. It’s for the woman who is wanting to discover the gift of who she is, and letting life show you the infinite expression of who you are.  

Accept your true soul

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. That 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.

Questions you can deepen into:

Who were you right when you were born? Who were you BEFORE other people imposed rules, expectations, and “shoulds” on you? This is your true soul essence.

Where do you feel the restrictor living in your body, preventing you this true essence from shining through? Where is the part that is restricted living in? If you were to express the one who is restricted, what would she say? What are her deepest desires that want to be fulfilled?

Me rediscovering the artistic side of my inner child who was lost and pushed to the backseat when I had to “excel” at school

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. With that, you experience unconditional fullness, richness, and abundance of life, no matter what emotions you’re experiencing.

Questions you can deepen into:

What is an emotion that you don’t like experiencing? If that emotion was a character/ an animation, what would it look like?

Can you ask her what he/she wants from you? What is the message that he/she is telling you and the gift behind it? How would the gift of the emotion look like? 

Accept the Universe

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 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 the world around you. 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. 

That is because when you are accepting life as it is, you are no longer “fighting” with life and instead are open to what life wants to show you/ teach you/ guide you. That means, you are letting yourself be taken care of by life, instead of being the one who needs to take care (and control) life. It’s you giving permission for the limited ego “doer” to finally relax and rest, and instead are letting the Divine energy/ current of love to lead the way. 

Questions you can deepen into:

What does the little girl that doesn’t trust life look like? Is she wearing vested armor to “fight” against life or is she hunched up with a heavy backpack or something else? Notice how not accepting life feels so exhausting and tiring on her. 

If she was to let go of that armor or backpack or whatever “device” she is using to control life, and give it to You (the Higher Self you/ the Divine you) what would happen to her little world? Can you give the safety and warmth of acceptance to her? If so, how would that look like?

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. And I don’t mean that just in terms of productivity, but in terms of my spirit where I feel unsatisfied and unfulfilled. I feel like I’m directing my energy toward things I can’t control and there was wasting my creative + spiritual energy. 

On the other hand, whenever I accept things for what they are (and accept all that I am + all that I feel), life then shows me how I have access to all the miracles and opportunities that I need. It was only the judgement (that can’t accept life for what it is) that couldn’t see life for what it is. 

Just like what A Course in Miracles says “Miracles are normal.” In fact, if we don’t see them, it’s only because we are not tapping into the truth of who we are. And I bet that to you right now, a miracle is waiting for you. The only question is, if you would accept it, by first beginning to accept “what is.”