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Posts tagged with “acceptance”

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 fibromyalgia, 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 aides and adaptations.

Rather than starting a new career as a newly …

Life Is Far Less Painful When We Drop the Story in Our Head

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“You will never be free until you free yourself from the prison of your own false thoughts.” ~Philip Arnold

Every meditator knows the dilemma of trying to find that perfectly quiet place to meditate, where silence is the golden rule and voices hush to a whisper.

Oh how perfect our meditation would be if only everyone would be quiet.

As wonderful as it sounds, we know it just doesn’t always work out that way.

And that’s what made this particular meditation experience so insightful. It gave me an opportunity to see how my judgmental thoughts can make life far more …

How Body-Obsession Made Me Sick and How I Got Better

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“You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won’t discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself.” ~Geneen Roth

I’ve spent so much time on the dieting hamster wheel that I am almost too ashamed to admit it. Throughout my teen years I went from one crash diet to the next. When this proved more than unfruitful and disappointing, I changed strategies.

The next twelve years I spent searching for the “right lifestyle” for me, which would allow me …

How to Rebuild a Relationship with Someone Who’s Hurt You

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“Holding a grudge doesn’t make you strong; it makes you bitter. Forgiving doesn’t make you weak; it sets you free.” ~Unknown

My situation is probably not unlike that a lot of people reading this.

I grew up in a single-parent home. Don’t get me wrong, I had a pretty happy childhood, and my mom did an unbelievable job raising me. She worked four jobs to make sure I always had the best of everything. But I could never shake the feeling that I always wanted a father figure in my life.

My parents had separated when I was very young. …

Everyone’s Doing The Best That They Can

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“All I know is that my life is better when I assume that people are doing their best. It keeps me out of judgment and lets me focus on what is, and not what should or could be.” ~Brené Brown

My favorite principle is this simple truth: Everyone is doing the best that they can with the resources they have. Adopting this belief has radically changed my relationship to myself and to others.

This idea has been explored by a constellation of religious, spiritual, and wellness practitioners. As Deepak Chopra said, “People are doing the best that they can from …

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 …

A Simple Practice to Help You Appreciate How Wonderful You Are

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“Stop criticizing yourself for everything you aren’t and start appreciating yourself for everything you are.” ~Unknown

Are you your own best friend, your own worst critic, or somewhere in between? Do you tend to focus on what you see as your flaws, mistakes, and imperfections, comparing yourself to others you think are better than you? Sometimes, do you even wish you were someone else?

It’s easy to get trapped in that way of thinking, especially in today’s consumer culture. From magazine ads to TV commercials, we are trained to compare ourselves to others and are subtly told we are not …

What Helped Me Love and Accept My Imperfect Body

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“You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.” ~Amy Bloom

“Just look at yourself!”

“That chubby face, those massive hips and thighs. The stumpy legs.”

“No wonder he doesn’t love you anymore. No wonder he left you for her! She is so much prettier than you are.”

I stood in front of the mirror. Tears streamed down my face. My body was shaking uncontrollably as I stared at it in disgust.

Resentment and anger accumulated in my chest. Heavy, dark, and painful, the all-consuming emotions tried to crush me. My throat felt tight, I couldn’t breathe, my …

What My Dog Taught Me About Self-Acceptance

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“Because one accepts oneself, the whole world accepts him or her.” ~Lao Tzu

We all have recorded messages playing in our heads, from long ago.

Listen to parents talking to young children. Often the message is less than approving.

“Don’t put that in your mouth!”

“Go wash your face right now.”

“If you keep acting like that nobody will like you.”

“Look at Cindy, how well she’s doing. If you worked harder you could do as well as her.”

Those examples are kind compared to what many people will have heard growing up.

Many of these messages enter our brains …

The Antidote to Shame: I Know I Am Enough

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“You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody.” ~Maya Angelou

I grew up with a father who was an addict. When I was fourteen my dad hit rock bottom and lost a job with a six-figure salary, my parents separated, my dad went to rehab for alcoholism and sex addiction, and I learned my dad had been cheating on my mom.

My dad’s immense shame for his actions led to him being on suicide watch in the rehab hospital where he was staying. Even though I knew the word “shame” at the age of fourteen, I was …

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 …

The One Realization That Helped Me Forgive Myself and My Father

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“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
~Maya Angelou

Sunlight shone through the living room window. A lazy Sunday afternoon. I lounged on the couch reading a book with my dog cuddled at my feet. My love had just set out to purchase a new set of acoustic guitar strings. Soon he would return, and music would fill our home, adding to my sense of blissful peace.

The telephone rang. I could see from the caller ID it was my father. “Good,” I thought. “It’s been a few weeks. I wonder …

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 …

Accept Yourself Unconditionally (Even When You’re Struggling)

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“Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship with myself.” ~Nathaniel Branden

Have you ever thought that you accepted yourself fully, only to realize there were conditions placed upon that acceptance?

There was a point in my life when I realized I had stopped making tangible progress with my emotions, self-esteem, and habits. I’d made some profoundly positive shifts that remained with me, like eating healthier, practicing yoga, and phasing out negative friends. You could say I was “cleaning house” in a sense—getting clear on what I wanted my life to look like and discarding the rest.

I …

What It Means to Be Loyal to Yourself and Why We All Need to Do It

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“This above all: to thine own self be true. And it must follow, as night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” ~William Shakespeare

A little while ago, a friend gave me a compliment that stopped me in my tracks. “I really admire how loyal you are to yourself.”

In time-honored self-questioning mode, I immediately thought, “Oh my gosh, what does that mean? Does she think I’m selfish?” But once I decided not to go down that road, I started pondering what it might mean to be loyal to one’s self, and how it truly is …

Patience Is the Calm Acceptance That…

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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 …