#54 Accept Yourself

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 Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women, like you, with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intention.

My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend. If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing-up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Well, hello there. Welcome back to Your Favorite You Podcast. I can't believe it, but here we are. And. I'm excited to get your two started today's podcast was once again, inspired by the things in my life that I am currently loving and doing. So, it was inspired initially by the life on purpose calendar with Erica Lane.

And then it was additionally inspired by a book I recently read by Eckhart Tolle. The quote for the day when I'm writing this podcast is from the writer, Melissa Camara Wilkins on the calendar. She says, who has to accept me before I can feel acceptable? Who has to decide that I am okay and allowed before I'll believe it?

Me. Only me. Feeling acceptable is entirely up to me. I will read it again. Who has to accept me before I can feel acceptable? Who has to decide that I am okay and allowed before I'll believe it? Me. Only me. Feeling acceptable is entirely up to me. We have been socialized to look outside of ourselves for acceptance.

We have been taught that our accomplishments determine how successful we are, and therefore how acceptable we are. If you are a parent, you have been taught that your children's accomplishments determine your worth as a mother, and whether or not you are acceptable as a mom. We have been taught that our waist size, the vehicle we drive, the books that we've read, the places that we've traveled to, the neighborhood we live in.

You get the idea, these things make us acceptable to other people and conversely make us unacceptable to other people, which of course leads us to categorize how acceptable we should be to ourselves. What might change if we all decided that we were going to accept and love ourselves? Just as we are, and then go out and live our lives like that.

What if we were to relax and spread into ourselves like Cory Muscara suggests? Cory Muscara says taking up space is a spiritual practice. The belief that you have to remain small in order to be accepted and liked is the ego masquerading as self-care and the belief that you need to remain small in order for someone else to shine is the ego masquerading as compassion.

You not being you is not only a disservice to yourself. Which I personally think is a huge disservice, as I am convinced that the purpose of my life is to get to know myself on the deepest level possible and bring her forth into the world to help other people do the same thing. So, you not being you is a disservice to the world.

The world needs each of us to bring forth our full potential. Believe it or not right now, there are gifts that only you can bring into the world. By this point, many of you are thinking, but how, how do I do this? Melissa, my answer today is different than my answer in the past. I recently listened to Eckhart Tolle's book, The Power of Now. Jon and I had previously read his book, A New Earth, years and years ago when we were both kind of dissatisfied with our present.

It too was a transformative book. Like it blew both of our minds. In The Power of Now, Eckert speaks about many things. The thing that I want to highlight is the power of the present moment. Most of us are so caught up in remembering and reliving the past in our minds, which usually leads to depression.

Or we are so caught up in thinking and worrying about the future, which usually causes anxiety. Some of us are caught up in both ruminating on the past and worrying about the future. So, we are both depressed and anxious. When we focus on ourselves, we are unable to forgive what we did or did not do in the past.

And we are telling ourselves the lie that some imagined future is going to be better or worse than what we have right now. So of course, it becomes nearly impossible to accept ourselves. What he suggests and what I'm going to suggest to you is to check in with yourself in the present moment as much as possible.

At first, this will look like you noticing when you're not in the present moment. So, you will catch yourself ruminating on the past. Which only exists in your mind, or you will catch yourself worrying about the future, which spoiler alert also only exists in your mind. So, you'll catch yourself in the past or catch yourself in the future and then bring yourself to the present in this moment.

Right now, if I'm not thinking of either the past or the future, can I accept myself? If the answer is no, you very likely have started thinking about the past or the future. It's kind of a mindfuck. If the answer is yes, notice it. I can accept myself right in this present moment. That means that you are actually in the present moment.

Check in with your body. What do you feel? Can you connect with the feeling inside your beautiful self? This is one of the most powerful things I teach my clients to be the observer of your thoughts without believing that you are your thoughts. Most of us have very little awareness of our thoughts. As Eckhart points out in his book, we all have seen the person on the street with mental illness who are saying their thoughts out loud for all of the rest of us to hear.

One of the very few things that separate those of you listening to this podcast and me, frankly, recording this podcast from those mentally ill people on the streets is that we just keep our inner voice inside instead of broadcasting it for other people to hear. The voice is no less. Messed up. All I'm asking you to do is notice how you're speaking to yourself inside your head.

If you are suffering and struggling to accept yourself, you will notice that all of your sentences in your brain are either past or future focused. Now, of course, we can use the past to inform us, to learn from, to figure out how we got where we are. And of course, we can use the future to plan for where we are going, but as a society, we place so much emphasis on the past and on the future that most of us are missing out on what is right in front of us.

One thing he says in the book that really struck me is that it is not uncommon for many of us to spend our whole lives waiting for the future. I know that I have for sure been guilty of this in the past. I am happy to say that although this does still pop up from time to time, I am spending fewer and fewer moments in this state of living, and I am staying present much more often.

One of the things that helps us to be in the present moment is a simple breathing meditation. The power of consciously noticing yourself breathing in and breathing out is really underestimated in my opinion. If you struggle with this, there are so many apps you can use on your phone to help you with meditation.

My favorites are Insight Timer, another is Calm. Another app is called Headspace. Most people who have never meditated before do well with guided meditation of this type. The goal of meditation is not to clear your mind completely of thought. In my estimation, the goal of meditation is to notice your thoughts, and as soon as you notice them, to let them go.

Some like the idea of imagining them floating away on a cloud. Others prefer the visual of letting the thoughts come and go, like leaves floating by on a river. When you notice the thoughts and you choose to let them go, you are actually in the present moment. So, meditation definitely helps with present moment awareness.

You don't have to do this for hours a day in order for it to be beneficial. Just 5 to 10 minutes a day on a regular basis is more than enough to get you started. And if you like it, you can work up to longer practices. One of my favorite people to follow and meditate with on Insight Timer is Sarah Blunden.

We will link to her in the show notes for sure. I have sent her guided meditations to many friends and clients when the situation has called for it. Take a listen if you would like. It is completely free. Because the universe likes to always help me practice what I'm preaching, I've had plenty of opportunities to live in the present moment today.

The first of these happened when I thought I was supposed to have a zoom meeting for a book club to discuss the power of now only to discover that I had the day wrong and the meeting was actually the day before after I allowed my disappointment, I very quickly got present and was able to sit outside on this crisp October morning and be present.

Nothing has gone wrong. That is what I kept thinking as I sat there waiting for the call. I was sitting outside on this beautiful fall morning, being with the trees and the flowers and the squirrels and the birds. And I got to spend the weekend listening to Eckhart read me his book, life is, I was going to say good, but if you take the time to read the book, I'm just going to say life is.

If you already know the power of the present moment, this will make sense to you. If it doesn't make sense, I invite you to read the book or listen to it on audible and practice the power of presence. I hope that this episode gets you one step closer to accepting yourself and what is. If you are wanting to take this work deeper, please reach out to me for a consult.

I'm currently offering one on one coaching, and I will soon be opening up availability to work with me in a group setting. Once again, for the group, we start again in January, which is honestly just around the corner. All right, folks. I'll see you all next week. Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you for listening to the podcast and loving on me all the time. Now that my group launch is closed, I am opening up two spots to work with me one-on-one. If one-on-one coaching is more your jam, please reach out to me to book a consult by going to my website, MelissaParsonsCoaching.com, and clicking on the Work with Me tab.

I would love to discuss with you how I can help you on a one-on-one basis. Talk to you soon.