This is a meditation on self-acceptance.
Many of us have learned to punish ourselves and put ourselves down when we're not meeting the expectations of others or even our own expectations of who we think we should be and what we should do.
And there can often be this self-critical voice and if unexamined that self-critical voice can make us go crazy.
But it's just a voice in our head and we just learned to believe that this voice in our head is us.
This self-critical,
Judgmental voice.
But it's not us because self-criticism and self-judgment,
Self-punishment is not something we were born with.
It's something we adopted from the people around us even though it's a very common thing to do.
It's not natural.
We don't need this self-destructive behavior.
But what can happen is that we can get so convinced that we need to judge ourselves and put ourselves down and criticize ourselves that it becomes the way of living and we never even question or even notice what we are doing to ourselves.
When these self-critical thoughts arise,
These self-judgmental thoughts can just notice them and let them pass on by knowing they're not your own thoughts.
They're voices that were put inside of your mind a long time ago by people who didn't know any better because they themselves were self-critical.
So these thoughts are not your own thoughts.
When you can see that they are not your own,
It's easier to let them pass on by and give yourself some space at the basis even when we are hard on ourselves and criticizing ourselves and putting ourselves down.
We do so in an attempt to improve ourselves but it's misguided.
It's a pattern that doesn't work because just like you probably rebelled against people in your life who criticized you and put you down,
In the same way you will rebel against your own self-judgment.
And when you judge yourself and criticize yourself,
You're always fighting against yourself and it divides your energy and drains you.
Nothing good comes out of it.
Whereas if you accept yourself and start to understand yourself,
That's where true transformation comes about.
And the way how you can understand yourself is by letting go of all judgments,
By knowing that you're always doing your best from that self-compassionate advantage,
From that self-caring perspective.
It's easy to see why you're doing what you're doing and what you really want.
But these insights and self transformations remain hidden from us as long as we are judgmental of ourselves and putting ourselves down.
Only when we learn to become a friend to ourselves,
The best friend,
Will we be open to willing up,
To open up everything that we've hidden from ourselves.
It's like there are two parts inside of you,
The conscious and the subconscious.
And if you consciously criticize yourself,
You will never be able to penetrate into the depth of your subconsciousness,
Because your subconscious is like a child that's vulnerable and scared to open up.
The only way this child inside of you can feel comfortable to open up is when you greet it with compassion and care and kindness without any sense of force.
So you can do this right now.
You let go of all the sense of judgment of yourself.
You let go of any forcing or pushing or any controlling of yourself and you just allow yourself to be as you are.
You stop trying to fix yourself because that just strengthens the belief that you are broken and you just for a moment relax all effort to improve yourself or to change anything about yourself.
You let go of needing to control your mind or your emotions.
You completely relax.
You're good enough.
You're welcomed.
You're loved exactly the way you are.
You don't need to prove yourself to anyone because you're already complete.
And now the self-critical voice might appear again,
Tell you how this couldn't be further from the truth,
How you're still making many mistakes,
How you might be upsetting other people or hurting them or hurting yourself and how those are signs of your flawedness and there's something wrong with you.
But it's just a story that you've been told over and over again thousands of times until it became your reality.
No one comes to this world with a sense that there's something wrong with them,
That they're flawed and that they don't deserve to be happy and at peace.
This is all based on made-up beliefs that are deeply ingrained within society.
And now just for a brief moment you can let go of all of them and just allow yourself some happiness and peace and fulfillment because these are already here.
You just need to allow yourself to see the peace and the happiness.
It's already there available to you in each moment.
You don't need to look for anything to complete you or to fulfill you because you are already complete.
