On the face of it, the concepts of self-awareness and self-acceptance are hardly new. However, using such words in everyday language and grasping the depth of meaning behind them is not the same.
Here’s a crash course for your enlightenment: self-awareness means knowing who you are. Self-acceptance means loving who you are, as you are.
Taken together, it means being at peace with and truly possessing all that you have been and are and have done, that you are “fierce with reality”. Your strengths and weaknesses, your habits, your limits, your gifts, your darkness and your light. You may not like some or a lot of it, but you embrace all of it.
As any human that has ever lived will admit, accepting and embracing your whole self is a challenge, sometimes the challenge of an entire lifetime. It demands of you something you may not even be able to articulate; a vision, a strength, a well so deep and its unfamiliarity so daunting you don’t want to grapple with it.
But in the shortness of life, it also demands something equally exacting—your light.
It demands you use and share your gifts—your authenticity, your presence, a ‘you-ness’ that only you bring to the world—with others.
And yet it’s incredible how this thought, one that seems so simple and natural, can fill a person with abject terror, mired in confusion and self-doubt they cannot recognize their own gifts, or deem them so unworthy or devoid of value that they hide or shrink from them.
It should be the easiest thing in the world to be the one thing we can be: ourselves.
But again and again, we choose instead to revel in the perverse comforts of life; we choose to withhold our true selves, opting instead to fill our days in an unfulfilling manner, stalled and stunted in the relative comfort of being less than what we truly are. It is no wonder then that we steep in pain, wondering what’s lacking in our lives, what we ourselves are lacking, feeling not good enough, worthy enough.
It is as if we are waiting for permission to shine our light. But there is no such permission to be had, because it is not required. To shine one’s light is not stealing treasure from the maws of a predestined fate that is unforgiving and cruel; it is an act of supreme generosity to the world, while allowing ourselves to be whole.
None of us are exempt from facing challenges in our lives. But if we are indeed willing to choose to live, we’re also not exempt from the challenge of using our gifts, of living in an authentic relationship with others, or ourselves.
Photo by Genessa Panainte on Unsplash
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