Self-Acceptance
Self-acceptance means being okay with who you are. Treating yourself kindly. Accepting that you're a human being and therefore imperfect. Allowing yourself to mess up, make mistakes, and learn from them.
"Self-acceptance means you refuse to buy into the judgments your mind makes about you, whether they're good judgments or bad ones. Instead of judging yourself, you recognize your strengths and your weaknesses, and you do what you can to be the person you want to be. Your mind will tell you an infinite number of stories about what sort of person you are, but you don't have to believe them. Consider the following example.
"Have you ever watched a documentary on Africa? What did you see? Crocodiles, lions, antelopes, gorillas, and giraffes? Tribal dances? Warfare? Nelson Mandela? Colorful marketplaces? Amazing mountains? Beautiful villages in the countryside? Poverty-stricken shantytowns? Starving children? You can learn a lot from watching a documentary, but one thing is for sure: a documentary about Africa is not Africa itself.
"A documentary can give you impressions of Africa, some dramatic sights and sounds that represent it. But a documentary can't give you the real-life experience of Africa: the taste and smell of the food, the feel of the sunlight on your face, the humidity of the jungle, the dryness of the desert, the feel of an elephant's hide, the pleasure of interacting with the people. No matter how brilliantly filmed that documentary is, even if it's a thousand hours long, it can't come close to the experience of actually being there. Why not? Because a documentary about Africa is not the same thing as Africa itself.
"Similarly, a documentary about you would not be the same thing as you yourself. Even if that documentary lasted for a thousand hours and included all sorts of relevant scenes from your life, all sorts of interviews with people who know you, and all sorts of fascinating details about your innermost secrets, even then the documentary would not be you.
"To really clarify this, think of the person you love most on this planet. Now, which would you prefer to spend time with, the actual living person or a documentary about that person? So, there's this huge difference between who we are and any documentary that anyone could ever make about us, no matter how 'truthful' that documentary may be. And I've put 'truthful' in quotation marks because all documentaries are hopelessly biased in that they only show you a tiny part of the big picture. Since the advent of cheap video, the typical hour-long television documentary is the 'best' of literally dozens, if not hundreds of hours of footage. So inevitably it's going to be quite biased.
"And the bias of a human film director is nothing compared to the bias of our thinking self. Out of an entire lifetime of experience, literally hundreds of thousands of hours of archival 'film footage,' our thinking self selects a few dramatic memories, edits them together with some related judgments and opinions, and turns them into a powerful documentary entitled This Is Who I Am (and it usually has a subtitle: Why I'm Not Good Enough). And the problem is, when we watch that documentary, we forget that it's just a heavily edited video. Instead, we believe that we are that video! But in the same way that a documentary of Africa is not Africa, a documentary of you is not you.
"Your self-image, your self-esteem, your judgments about the sort of person you are, all these things are nothing more than thoughts, images, and memories. They are not you. Like it or not, the simple fact is . . ."
