4 reasons why you should practice self-acceptance

Lelia Koena
4 min readDec 27, 2020

Acceptance is a difficult notion to apply in everyday life but so liberating. Whether it is about accepting external situations or accepting yourself, applying it in your life is always liberating and calming.

To accept is to see things as they are. Accepting does not mean being in agreement, but it’s about welcoming situations, people, and yourself as you are at the moment T. Acceptance is seeing and welcoming things as they are and not as you would like them to be.

So self-acceptance is seeing yourself and welcoming yourself as you are and not as you would like to be. Self-acceptance is living in non-judgment of yourself. Accepting yourself is accepting who you are as a whole. Entirely. Fully. It is accepting both your good qualities and your faults. Your strengths and weaknesses. Your light and your dark side. Your feminine energy and your masculine energy. Your pains and wounds, joys and resilience, pride and success, failures and life lessons.

To accept yourself is to accept: ⁣
- Your physical body completely as it is⁣
- Your current thought patterns, whether limiting or extremely powerful and different from others⁣,
- Your soul with its life mission and its wounds.

Accepting yourself also means accepting not always to be as you would like to be. It is to progress gradually towards the future vision of yourself while having love for yourself. It’s realizing that you are a complete and complex being who is evolving and doing her best.

There are dozens of reasons for practicing self-acceptance. Today I have chosen to give you the 4 most important reasons:
- to find inner peace,
- to forgive yourself,
- to heal your wounds,
- to be fully accomplished.

Accept yourself to find inner peace

woman in yellow and teal sleeping beside lavenders

When you fully accept yourself you decide to stop fighting with yourself. You decide to become one with yourself. To become one with your body, your mind and your soul. You choose to welcome them in their entirety, without any value judgment.

Accepting yourself brings you serenity and peace of body, mind and soul.

Accepting yourself allows you to make peace with yourself, to find inner peace which will help you forgive yourself later on.

Live in peace to forgive yourself

It takes a lot of self-love to fully accept yourself. It also requires forgiving oneself for one’s mistakes, shortcomings, and weaknesses.
But how can you manage to forgive yourself if you don’t make peace with yourself first?

To be successful in forgiving yourself, you will first need to accept yourself for who you are. With your flaws and your weaknesses. Because yes, no one is perfect!

By finding this inner peace you will be better able to develop love for yourself and therefore forgive yourself. To forgive yourself means to let go of all feelings of resentment, anger, frustration, shame, disgust towards yourself. It’s giving you the right to make mistakes and learn from them to move forward. It’s about granting yourself the right to be who you are today.

Forgive yourself to heal your wounds

When you fully accept yourself you also become aware of your pain and suffering and accept them as part of you. When you finally accept that these wounds are part of you, then you stop fighting, wanting to remove them, suffocate them or ignore them.

Just like your flaws, when you choose to accept yourself and therefore forgive yourself, you finally decide to welcome your suffering and give it legitimacy so that it can finally play its role in your life: to push you to evolve.

Recognizing and welcoming your wounds as part of you in the present moment is the start of your healing.

Accepting yourself therefore leads you to free yourself from the judgment of yourself, to cease this incessant inner war with your imperfections and to fully welcome the pain of injuries instead of rejecting or repressing it. By doing this, you heal little by little.

Heal oneself to finally be fulfilled

Accepting yourself therefore also allows you to reconnect with you, with your strengths, your light, and your full potential. ⁣

Indeed, when you heal, you can finally free yourself from the voice of your ego, listen to your intuition and reconnect to your soul and therefore to your life mission.

And from this life mission stems your personal development, your personal accomplishment and your personal success.

Bottom Line: Accepting yourself helps you face your flaws, observe your wounds, embrace your vulnerability and then make peace with yourself, forgive yourself, heal and unleash your full potential.

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Lelia Koena

Lélia, passionnée par la vie et amoureuse de la nature qui rêve d’un monde équilibré et libre. Fondatrice de Koena. https://iamkoena.com