Take a moment and see if you can tap into the feeling of self-kindness. Appreciating all the attributes that make you who you are. Just for a moment, take a deep breath feeling the love and acceptance.
Talking to my female clients for the past 20 years, today I want to talk about something that is often the root of many of our problems and challenges we face – Self-esteem.
Self-esteem falls into the positive or negative feelings we have about ourselves. When we believe we are good and worthy and are viewed this way from the others, our thoughts and feelings lead to high self-esteem. When we believe we are inadequate and less worthy than the others, those thoughts and feelings create low self-esteem.
Too often we use external criteria as a means of judging our self-worth. Things like achievements, career, social status, relationships and appearance. One of the gifts of consciousness is, that it helps us to recognise, that these external factors aren’t accurate measures of our self-worth. Through being on our personal development journey, we observe how everything changes, our thoughts, our emotions, our bodies and circumstances.
In the same way, our practice helps us to realise, that it makes no sense to appraise our self-worth according to the external measures that are constantly changing. Mindfulness allows us to look inward and develop self-worth from within. We realise we have a power to accept and love ourselves exactly as we are. We don’t base our self-wroth according to the job title or bank account or a bank account. We see our virtues and our flaws, but we don’t judge ourselves by them. We accept who we are. The more we pay attention to our self-talk, the more we realise how harsh we can be on ourselves.
So, try to pay attention to your awareness about the self-acceptance throughout the day. Notice the moments when you accept yourself as you are and be aware of the times when you judge and being harsh on yourself. Each time when you get caught up in self judgement, notice it and come back to yourself with loving words of acceptance. Words that you may say to your friend. Words that are worthy of you acting towards yourself.
This is where transformation and healing begins.
‘To love oneself is beginning of lifelong romance.” – (Oscar Wild)
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