6-minute read
Self-Acceptance – The Art of Accepting Your Own Internal Experience
Learning how to accept yourself is an important step toward self-validation. Learning how to fully embrace and accept yourself can be difficult, though. Most people can think of an aspect or two about themselves or their lives that they’d like to change.
One great way to get closer to feeling self-validation is to learn how to accept your own internal experience. Your internal experience is a conglomeration of multiple things, including your thoughts, emotions, opinions, and sensations.
All people have their own unique internal experiences – for example, you may view parts of life differently than your friends or family members because they don’t have the same thoughts, emotions, opinions, and sensations as you.
Learning how to accept your own internal experience is important because, once you can do this, you can begin to feel fully able to live in the NOW with confidence.
What does it mean to fully accept your own internal experience?
Acceptance can be tough. Often, people have to accept parts of themselves or their lives that are less than satisfactory. For example, you may notice a part of your personality that you don’t particularly like because it makes you feel insecure around other groups of people. This can make accepting your own internal experience (and feeling self-validation) difficult – if you feel like others are judging you, it’s hard to convince yourself that you’re actually doing fine.
When you’re able to fully accept your own internal experience, you take the entirety of who you are and make peace with it – even the difficult-to-accept parts of who you are.
You recognize that you are made up of many different pieces and parts and that having all those pieces and parts is okay and normal. Even when you may not like some of your pieces and parts, you still acknowledge that they are a part of who you are and they are important because they brought you here to this perfect NOW.
If you struggle to accept your own internal experience, what can you do to make it feel easier?
Learning how to accept your own internal experience takes time, but it is possible to do. To make the process a little easier, consider these strategies.
- Keep a journal of your thoughts and feelings throughout the day. I have many journals on my website or on my Amazon author page that are made to help you stay in the NOW.
Keeping tabs on your most common thoughts and feelings is a great way to get more in touch with your internal experience. As you jot down the thoughts and feelings you experience throughout the day, you’ll begin to notice patterns that can give you a lot of information about yourself. Use this information to build a better, clearer image of who you are.
- Let yourself actually experience your emotions.
Getting emotional can be difficult for many people – so difficult, in fact, that it may be tempting to hide or ignore these emotions altogether. Experiencing feelings like anger, sadness, frustration, jealousy, guilt, and more can feel impossibly uncomfortable.
However, actually feeling and experiencing your emotions is the first step toward working through them in a healthy and productive way. Let yourself actually experience your emotions – they’ll teach you a lot about your own internal experience.
- Take some rest breaks and be good to yourself.
Paying close attention to your physical and emotional needs can make accepting your internal experience easier. Rather than pushing yourself to feel a certain way or think differently, allow yourself to temporarily “step away” from a challenging situation so you can rest, relax, and recuperate. Taking time to let yourself rest can make it easier to reflect on what happened and be more accepting of how you’re feeling and what you’re thinking.