How To Live With Radical Self-Acceptance
And Why This is So Hard in America
What would it be like to radically accept yourself right this moment? To accept yourself today, no matter what you have or haven’t achieved, no matter what you wish was the case, no matter what mistake or humiliation you just experienced. What would it feel like to stumble one minute, and the next minute have enough compassion for yourself to say- so what?
In a culture obsessed with “doing” and “achieving,” it can be very difficult to learn to accept yourself today. There is a palpable peace when you can accept you, the good and the bad, regardless of circumstance.
I say this from a very personal place. One of my heavily ingrained life patterns was to achieve in order to feel validated and worthwhile. If I could achieve, I could pull energy externally from the world of validation, and translate that directly into feeling good about myself. It’s still a dangerous pattern I can slip back into if not careful.
The problem is, when you’re plugging into “things” on the outside to sustain your sense of self, things can be very unpleasant on the inside. It’s a rollercoaster ride. That is a very slippery slope. So, when things were good, I felt great about myself. But when things were bad, heavy insecurities loomed on the inside and I constantly felt I wasn’t good enough.
This pattern may sound all too familiar. We have learned these behaviors in America from a very young age. In America, we are doers — problem solvers and achievers. We are rewarded for good grades, heralded for being a top-ranked athlete, and praised for making money.
These are all fantastic things, don’t get me wrong, but what happens when you attach too much of your self worth to achieving them? Even parents are pushing children to excel, often to the point, a child feels unworthy if unable to achieve success.
What happens when who you are on the inside gets mixed up with what you’re able to achieve in the world? Have you ever felt like less of a person, or that you deserved less because you didn’t meet someone’s expectations? Or maybe you felt great about yourself for the very same reasons.
Perhaps you became “noteworthy” because of talent, be it a sport or a particular school subject — and that became part of the fabric of who you were. The danger lies in the very fabric of our self-image, and how we choose to weave it. When the fabric of achievement literally becomes the foundation of who we think we truly are, we are at risk.
We are in danger of not recognizing that we are already perfect as is, without those things. We run the risk of forgetting our spirit, who doesn’t need to externally prove itself to the world.
The problem of validating the self purely externally is, what happens when those things are gone, and we lose the ability to accept who we are without them? Can there be radical self-acceptance whether we succeed or fail?
For me, I had to learn how to be okay without the noteworthy achievements of my past. I had to figure out who I was without the worldly status and the corporate job. This isn’t to say those things are inherently bad, it’s just how I was attaching myself to them.
Could I still accept myself fully without those things? Could I still love myself completely no matter what occurred in the world or what the world thought of it? Maybe you’ve had to re-define yourself recently, or change your life dramatically and are grappling with those new life circumstances.
Who are you without the master’s degree, the good job, or the athleticism?Isn’t that what we’re always doing? Trying to find a way to define ourselves, to make sense of ourselves in the world, to achieve something the American way, so we can feel proud, be validated, and feel worthy. What if those things don’t turn out as expected?
What I want to share is that who we essentially are is a glorious, one-of-a-kind being who is perfect as is. Inside there is a spirit that is uniquely you, who never judges, who is always at peace, and doesn’t have chains or expectations around what should or shouldn’t be the case in order to feel okay. I am. You are.
So let’s drop the achievement psyche, the self-judgment, and pull the lens back enough to see that the only important thing is to follow your true self’s heart and accept yourself fully as you are. No external validation, specific income or approval from anyone else required. This is such a hard lesson I come back to again, again, and again. The universe has steadily kept teaching me this, and I am grateful.
So no matter how many times you beat yourself up for not doing it right or feeling like you should have accomplished “more’” by now- none of it serves you. What matters is self-acceptance. That is the true self-serum. If you can accept yourself and all your wounds and sense of loss or hurt and roll it up into a ball and say, “I love me in all of it.”
To accept your ugly spots with the pretty ones, that is RADICAL self-acceptance. To see where you can improve yourself is fantastic, but to be able to accept yourself fully today in spite of it is even better.
To accept wherever you are at today as okay is a immensely freeing concept, and a healing one. Forgive yourself, accept yourself. It takes work and vigilance, but man does it feel good! Let’s here it for “I am,” and that is enough.
