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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Loving ourselves calls us to give up the illusion that we can control everything and instead focuses us on building our inner resource of resilience. When we learn to respond to disappointments with acceptance, we give ourselves the space to realize that all our experiences—good and bad alike—are opportunities to learn and grow. This itself is an act of love.
If you can’t put a name to the source of your perfectionism, try examining the social messages that surround you. Have you somehow bought into the notion that you should be the perfect (select all that apply): hostess, mother, son or daughter, partner, boss, employee, meditator, athlete, fashion plate? As soon as you begin to notice the messages you’ve internalized as distinct from you, you can begin to set healthy boundaries.
Wholehearted acceptance is a basic element of love, starting with love for ourselves, and a gateway to joy.
The journey to loving ourselves doesn’t mean we like everything about our bodies (or our personalities, for that matter). But it does mean stepping away from conventional obsessions about everything we have been told is wrong with us by parents, partners, our social group, the media, or the mean girls in high school. If we can feel and appreciate our bodies from within, we are not in bondage to the messages coming from without. When we contemplate the miracle of embodied life, we begin to partner with our bodies in a kinder way.
