Always Love and Accept Yourself

I have found this wonderful poem about loving and accepting oneself and I wanted to share it with you:

I accept myself completely.
I accept my strengths and my weaknesses,
my gifts and my shortcomings,
my good points and my faults.

I accept myself completely as a human being.

I accept that I am here to learn and grow,
and I accept that I am learning and growing.

I accept the personality I've developed,
and I accept my power to heal and change.

I accept myself without condition or reservation.

I accept that the core of my being is goodness
and that my essence is love,
and I accept that I sometimes forget that.

I accept myself completely, and in this acceptance
I find an ever-deepening inner strength.

From this place of strength, I accept my life fully
and I am open to the lessons it offers me today.

I accept that within my mind are both fear and love,
and I accept my power to choose
which I will experience as real.

I recognize that I experience only the results
of my own choices.

I accept the times that I choose fear
as part of my learning and healing process,
and I accept that I have the potential and power
in any moment to choose love instead.

I accept mistakes as a part of growth,
so I am always willing to forgive myself
and give myself another chance.

I accept that my life is the expression of my thought,
and I commit myself to aligning my thoughts
more and more each day with the Thought of Love.

I accept that I am an expression of this Love.

Love's hands and voice and heart on earth.

I accept my own life as a blessing and a gift.
My heart is open to receive, and I am deeply grateful.

May I always share the gifts that I receive
fully, freely, and with joy.

~~ Author Unknown ~~

Loving and accepting yourself is powerful, isn't it?

Some ways we can develop self-acceptance

As Nathaniel Branden says: “If we are to grow and change, we must begin by learning self-acceptance”.

For me it was really hard to understand the concept of self-acceptance. In fact, I was afraid of this word because I thought that if I accepted myself nothing was going to change for me. So I kept resisting.

I now finally understand that to be self-accepting it means not to be in war within myself. To be self-accepting makes the concepts of approval or disapproval irrelevant and makes me be more aware of myself.

For example, if I say:

“ I don’t like to be afraid of what people think of me. I like to get rid of it”.

With this statement I am denying the fact that I am afraid, I do not want to feel this way. This is not self-acceptance. But, if on the other hand, I say:

“ I don’t like to be afraid of what people think of me. I have this fear. I accept the fact that I am afraid and I accept it”.

Saying these statements puts me in a different position. First, I am aware of this fear, second I am taking responsibility for my feelings and not denying them, and third because I am aware, and I am taking responsibility I am more open to accept this fact. Now, I am ready to do something about it and change my attitude.

When I can accept myself, I have put myself on the side of reality rather than attempting to fight reality. I am more conscious and I am not living on denial of my present condition. This way I am a position to have a healthier self-esteem

How to Have a Healthy Self ESteem

There are many circumstances in our lives that can lower our self-esteem. We can loose our jobs, fight with somebody, or no achieve a goal. However, we have to be aware that even if your self-esteem gets low because of an event, it does not mean that you lost your self-esteem.

Having a healthy self-esteem means that you know that once in a while you are going to go through difficult times. If you are willing to accept this events, learn from them and move on , you will be able to build a healthy self-esteem.

Whenever I go through a difficult time I always try to remember good times in the past. I also keep saying to myself ” hang in there, this shall pass too”. But the most important thing that I do is doing something to feel good about myself. Instead of sitting at home complaining for example, I go out, exercise, and take a walk, read something. I understand that this is an event and have nothing to do with my self-worth. It does not matter how bad is the situation I am going through, how bad do I look to others, how bad do I feel about it, I can learn to keep a healthy self-esteem instead of loosing it through self-pity and victimization.

Doing small things each day to feel good about yourself will help you to have a healthy self-esteem. Doing small things when you are going through a difficult situation will help you to have a healthy self-esteem and overcome your difficulties more easily.



"To establish true self-esteem we must concentrate on our successes and forget about the failures and the negatives in our lives". ~ Denis Waitley

Boost your self-esteem with exercise

I exercise regularly and this helps me a lot in enhancing my self-esteem. After I exercise I really feel good, energetic and proud of myself. Exercising for me enhances self-esteem because I became conscious that I am taking care of myself. I am taking time to be with myself.

Any kind of physical exercise will help you to enhance your self-esteem. According to Robert D. Rice (Mental health matters):



"Exercising greatly enhances a person's self-esteem and mental outlook while reducing stress. Self-esteem is a critical component of any program aimed at self-improvement program. It offers hope to correcting these problems. A close relationship has been documented between low self-esteem and such problems as violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, eating disorders, shcool dropouts, teenage pregnancy, suicide, and low academic achievement. It is never too late to start a work out program as a way to best guild towared the goal of improved self-image, and always too early to stop exercising. Early on in the attitutde adjustment process periodic exercise is necessary for good physical and mental health".

There are a lot of things you can do to exercies. You can walk 20 minutes daily, you can run 2 or 3 times a week, you can go to the gym and lift weights or just take areobic classes. . Even doing yoga , ayurvedic exercises, martial arts will help you to feel good about yourself and therfore, enhance your self esteem. Even you can practice any sport. Next time you are sitting at your home like a coach potato , complaining about your life, feeling down and miserable, just think for a second : Would you rather feel great about yourself or you prefer to be sitting there feeling really bad about yourself?.





"Take care of your body. It's the only place you have to live." -- Jim Rohn

Meditation

Meditation is a great tool we can use to improve our self-esteem. It is a great way to be with ourselves. In order to have a healthy self-esteem, we have to allow ourselves to spend time with us. One of the ways to do this is through the practice of meditation.

Dr. Borysenko says: "Meditation may lead to a breakdown of screen memories so that early childhood abuse episodes and other traumas suddenly flood the mind, making the patient temporarily more anxious until these traumas are healed. Many so-called meditation exercises are actually forms of imagery and visualization that are extraordinarily useful in healing old traumas, confronting death anxieties, finishing 'old business', learning to forgive, and enhancing self-esteem."

There are many types of meditations we can practice. I personally started with mindfulness, and then I used hoponopono. I am actually practicing the called So Ham meditation that is recommended by Deepak Chopra in his book
Journey to the Boundless: Exploring the Intimate Connection Between Your Mind, Body and Spirit


I do not think that there is a meditation technique that is better than the other; any meditation will help us to be in contact with ourselves.


"We are so addicted to looking outside ourselves,
that we have lost access to our inner being almost completely.
We are terrified to look inward, because our culture has given us no idea of what to find.
We may even think that if we meditate, we will be in danger of madness.
This is one of the last and most resourceful ploys of the ego
to prevent us from discovering our real nature.
So, we make our lives so hectic that we eliminate the slightest risk of looking into ourselves...
In a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify us." Sogyal Rinpoche's book
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying .