Welcome fellow souls to « The Human Family Crash Course Series, » a new project collaborated together by empress2inspire.blog and sensispirit.wordpress.com. Together we will be working on a different topic for each crash course; our first topic is focused on « Self Love. » Each topic will have eight posts with posts on Mondays and Thursdays. We hope you enjoy our series and we look forward to knowing how our posts have inspired you!

Together we have struggled with self-acceptance, however we know we are on an eternal journey towards finding our true self; peeling away layers of the onion of self. Self-acceptance comes hand in hand with self-love and here are some tips to help you on your journey towards fully accepting yourself, the beautiful soul that you are.

Self-acceptance is:

• The conscious awareness of your weaknesses and strengths
• Fully accepting who you are without conditions 
• The recognition of your talents, capabilities, and worth
• The feeling of satisfaction with your self, regardless of past choices.

Benefits of self-acceptance:

• Positive mood regulation
• A decrease in depressive feelings and the desire to be approved by others, fear of failure, and self-critique
• Positive emotions, sense of freedom, self-worth, autonomy, and self-esteem

Tips:

• Speak to your higher self. The inner voice that has compassion, empathy, and love, to others, and to yourself.
• Be kind to yourself. Cultivate self-compassion, in not judging yourself, or over-identifying with self-defeating thoughts or behaviour. Make your inner voice your best friend.
• Believe in yourself. The path to self-acceptance can be rough, it’s not all sunshine and roses. There will be times that current external circumstances, past experiences, and our programming make it hard or impossible to accept ourselves. Always believe in you! 
• Forgive yourself. Let go of past regrets and experiences. They are all lessons not mistakes, move on once you have sought the gift from your pain. We do the best with the knowledge we have in a given moment. Forgive yourself.
• Celebrate your strengths. And accept your weaknesses or shadow self. Ask yourself some questions. What areas of work do you excel at? What are your unique talents? Making a list of your strengths and past achievements and re-reading them when you are having an off moment is a great way to practise self-acceptance.
• Create a network of a support system. Surround yourself with people that accept you how you are, who are you are and believe in you – and avoid those that don’t. Indeed, quality and strong relationships are a  key to happiness and acceptance of self. 

We’ll leave you with these:

“Embrace the glorious mess that you are.” – Elizabeth Gilbert 

“Accept yourself, love yourself and keep moving forward. If you want to fly, you have to give up what weighs you down.” – Roy T. Bennett

Let us know how you are learning to find self-acceptance within yourself below, we hope these tips help.