Unconditional Self-Acceptance
Unconditionally accepting yourself means allowing yourself to be as you are. It means allowing and embracing your inner state (your thoughts, feelings, pictures, bodily sensations…), your image of yourself and your body.
To have self-acceptance, one must first have self-awareness. Since you cannot accept what you aren’t aware of, it’s important to first become conscious of what’s happening inside you, on a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual level.
It is easier to become more an
d more conscious of yourself if you practice embracing anything that comes up into your awareness.Indeed, one of the main reasons many people can’t feel their emotions, feel cut of from
their body or any other part of their experience is a lack of acceptance and with it an innate resistance and urge to repress every part of themselves that they feel is wrong, bad, or just doesn’t fit into their idea of who they think they are.
As long as you reject a part of you, your awareness can never grow – in fact it shrinks. Since you cannot bear to look at this particular part of yourself, you will only remain conscious of that which you can accept and allow to be as it is.
To resist yourself and your inner world, is to suffer – and since your relationship to others is very often a direct reflection of the relationship you have with yourself, it also usually means to unconsciously inflict suffering on the world.
The more of yourself you resist, the more you feel blank and empty inside, until finally you can’t feel anything anymore – this is often where most people turn to outer stimulation to keep the feeling of aliveness they’ve lost inside.
Food, drugs, alcohol, violence or constant outer stimulation (like watching TV for hours every day), become your escape, your means to avoiding your internal world and yourself. This often leads to more resistance, self-hatred and the feeling of »deadness« inside, which can then further manifest as physical problems (i.e. a disease) or as an unfavorable external event that you would usually perceive as negative.
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outside world or in your internal experience, your inner peace, joy and happiness can remain, unperturbed.
ciate or make use of one of the simplest things in life – the bodily process for oxygenating and sustaining the life in every cell of their body. Though this biological process (although far more than that in reality) seems so deceptively simple, it is one of the most powerful tools for healing, relaxation, bridging the gap and connecting the mind and body, as well as coming in contact with the deep sense of peace, well-being and joy that comes with clearing your mind and abiding in the now. Thus acting as a portal into the ever present Now, a portal into the present moment.