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Posts tagged with “accept”

Why I’m at Peace with My Weight Gain

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“Resistance keeps you stuck. Surrender immediately opens you to the greater intelligence that is vaster than the human mind, and it can then express itself through you. So through surrender often you find circumstances changing.” ~Eckhart Tolle

I took a deep breath, feeling the recent change in my belly. I pinched at my belly rolls. They were familiar, I’d had them before, but recently I had gone through a period of over a year where I was in a smaller body. Now I was gaining weight again.

I refuse to step on the scale, so I don’t actually know …

Blinded by Our Diet Culture? How to Stop Hating Your Body

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“Don’t change your body to get respect from society. Instead let’s change society to respect our bodies.” ~Golda Poretsky

Age thirteen—that was when my eating disorder kicked into full gear because our diet culture had its tentacles wrapped around me tightly. All I thought about all day was how I was going to control and restrict my food, then how I was going to burn it off.

I sought to burn off every calorie I ate. I couldn’t go to sleep at night unless I’d burned off most of what I’d consumed. I was obsessed with exercise and trying to …

Lessons from Infertility: What’s Helped Me Cope with Disappointment

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“When you find no solution to a problem, it’s probably not a problem to be solved, but a truth to be accepted.” ~Unknown

For the longest time, I swore I’d never get married or have kids.

Growing up with an alcoholic father, in a domestic violence situation, shattered my young spirit and left me putting the pieces back together for years.

Since I didn’t see healthy coping skills growing up, it’s no wonder I grappled with my own addictive behaviors. I struggled with self-worth, focusing solely on accomplishments to fill a void inside of myself.

Externally, people saw a well-adjusted, …

Accepting My Autistic Self: Why I’m Done Trying to Fit In

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“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” ~Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

A common misconception about autistic people is that we don’t care if we’re alone. Of course this varies with each person, but on the whole, it’s untrue. We want to feel included, it’s just not easy for us to fit in. There are other days when I feel autism has separated me so fully from other people that I am functioning on a different plane of existence, not just with a different …

The Key to Acceptance: Understand That Everything Changes With Time

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“If you argue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time.” ~Byron Katie

I love this quote. Ironic, really, because when I first read it I was furious—furious with my reality and anyone who encouraged me to accept it. In my mind to accept chronic illness was to accept defeat.

I had just been diagnosed with fibromyaglia, an incredibly painful condition that had me bedridden most days and unable to care for my then two-year-old daughter, never mind myself. My home became filled with carers and aids and adaptations.

Rather than starting a new career as a newly …

Let’s Get Real: Why I’m Done Pretending to Have It All Together

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“If you’re not really happy, don’t fake a smile on my behalf. I’d rather you spill your guts with tears every day until your smile is real. Because I don’t care about the show, the disguise, the politically correctness. If you’re in my life, I want you to be in your own skin.” ~Stephanie Bennet-Henry

This is the story of my inner child, the insecure part of myself that I am ready to respect and recognize.

My thoughts and views are as follows: I’m not a superior mom, probably just an average psychologist, and am way too sensitive about …

Why I’ve Decided to Accept Myself Instead of Trying to ‘Fix’ Myself

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“No amount of self-improvement can make up for any lack of self-acceptance.” ~Robert Holden

In our culture, we are constantly bombarded with the newest and best things to improve ourselves and/or our quality of life. Unfortunately, this leads to the belief that we need to obtain some sort of thing before we could accept ourselves as we are.

When I was a child, I constantly battled with my weight. By the age of fourteen, I was 225 pounds (mind you, I am 5’2,” on a good day).

Fortunately for me, a doctor pointed out the concern of childhood obesity. …

Accept, Let Go, Have Faith

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Accepting People You Dislike as They Are: How It Benefits You and How to Do It

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“We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.” ~Aesop, The Eagle and the Arrow

We can sometimes have difficulty accepting our friends, family, and loved ones as they are when their habits, quirks, or behavior annoy us. Our natural tendency is to try to change what we don’t like about them, which often leads to resentment. Nonetheless, given their importance and presence in our lives, we are usually willing to make an effort to accept them as they are.

But what about people we dislike—people who cause us grief? For example, an overbearing boss, a scheming …

Soften into Life and You Will be Strong

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“It’s the hard things that break; soft things don’t break…You can waste so many years of your life trying to become something hard in order not to break; but it’s the soft things that can’t break! The hard things are the ones that shatter into a million pieces!” ~C Joybell C

Language is a powerful thing. Though often dismissed as “semantics,” the imagery our words and terminology impart often adds unintended or even misguided connotations onto what we intend to say.

This is why it is so difficult to speak about spirituality. When we say “God” or “salvation” or even …

How to Accept Anxious Feelings So You Can Let Them Pass

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“Don’t try and save yourself. The self that is trying to be saved is not you.” ~Mooji

Three months ago I had a strange experience.

It wasn’t strange in that it had never happened before. It was strange in that it was unexpected. Unexpected in the way a hiccup comes up out of nowhere to interrupt a meal. No, actually, it was more unexpected in the way a sudden illness overtakes a period of health.

Just for a bit of context, over the last six months, I’ve generally been the calmest I’ve felt in years—maybe even my whole life. But …

Radical Acceptance with Tara Brach: If You’re Hard on Yourself, Read On

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Have you ever thought, “Something’s wrong with me”? I suspect we all have at one time or another.

We’ve thought we’re too quiet, too loud, too eager, too lazy, too sensitive, too dramatic, or generally not good enough.

And social media doesn’t help much. Every time we log on to Facebook or Instagram we’re bombarded with everyone else’s accomplishments, adventures, and best angles, which can easily lead us to conclude our life is somehow lacking—that we are somehow lacking.

From there, it’s just a quick leap to self-flagellation.

We can all be our own harshest critics. We can beat ourselves …

The 10 Most Important Things We Can Do for the People We Love

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People. Life is all about people.

We don’t have to have a ton of relationships, but we all need people in our lives who get us. Who’ve seen our freak flag countless times and love when it comes out.

People who tag us on memes that capture our spirit, or Tasty videos they know we’d drool over. People who text us with random pictures of bumper stickers or book covers or bath mats or beard accessories with a note that reads “Saw this and thought of you.”

We all need these kind of close connections to feel a sense of …

7 Things You Need to Know to Live Your Best Life and Make a Better World

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You know those “moments of truths”?

When what you hear, or come to realize, turns your world around. When one or several things turn out to be exactly what you needed to hear at the exact right time. Ba-boom.

For the past couple of years, I’ve had several ah-ha moments that have made my life better. Here are seven of those realizations. Some were harsh to come to terms with (like #1), while others brought me the greatest relief and hallelujah moment (like #7).

Read them, ponder them, and let them move in with you. See if they can alter …

Why We Need to Learn to Let Go and Adapt If We Want to Be Happy

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Charles Darwin is believed to have said that in nature, it’s not the strongest or most intelligent that survives but those who are most adaptable to change.

No matter what kind of life we live, we all need to learn to adapt, because everything changes. Good and bad come and go in everybody’s life. It’s one of the reasons resilience is so critical.

We plan our lives expecting good to come our way, to get what we want, and for things to work out how we planned. At the same time we’re chasing the good, we try to avoid …

Why Self-Compassion Is the Key to Living the Life You Want

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“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” ~Carl Rogers

When was the last time you stopped trying to improve something about yourself or your life?

I’ve spent a lot of my life chasing goals. I guess it goes with the territory as a cancer survivor who always felt like she had something to prove, even twenty years later.

For everything the doctors told me I could not do because of my Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (or as a result of the chemotherapy that healed me), I gave my all to accomplish and …

Why Letting Go of Your Tight Grip Actually Gives You More Control

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“Anything you can’t control in life is teaching you how to let go.” ~Unknown

I was growing impatient. I wanted an answer about something and it just wasn’t coming, no matter how hard I tried to prod it into happening. I was growing frustrated. And I was growing frustrated with my frustrations about it.

So I decided to take a walk. The act of breathing in fresh air and hearing birdsong is centering for me. Just putting one foot in front of the other in rapid succession for an hour or two always helps to clear my head. I receive …

Accept, Let Go, Have Faith

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There Are Three Solutions to Every Problem

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Accept and Value Yourself: 11 Ways to Embrace Who You Are

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“You’re imperfect, and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.” ~Brené Brown

I can’t remember exactly what it was my friend was trying to convince me I could do, but I had an argument to counter every bit of encouragement. There was no shortage to the ways I believed I wasn’t good enough.

She was trying to help me see myself the way she saw me—as someone smart, capable, and full of potential. I wasn’t buying it.

I’d been pretending for so long to be a better person than I really believed myself to …