How to Accept Yourself

From Tantra Is Not What You Think, by Daniel Sutton

You accept yourself by dropping the idea that you are a problem to be solved. Beneath the self-criticism sits a quiet assumption that you are not okay yet. You always were. Stop improving long enough to meet yourself as you are, and the striving softens.

You are not a project

Somewhere along the way, most of us came to treat ourselves as a project: a slightly faulty thing that, with enough effort, discipline, and self-improvement, might one day finally be acceptable. The self-help shelf feeds it, the comparison machine in your pocket feeds it, and underneath it all runs a single quiet sentence. I am not okay yet. Not okay until the weight, the job, the confidence, the relationship. Always one fix away from being allowed to rest.

Here is the thing the striving never lets you notice. There was never a finished version of you waiting at the end of all that work, a final you that would at last deserve your own kindness. There is only ever this you, here, now. Accepting yourself is not reaching that finish line. It is realising there was no line, and stepping off the track.

Self-criticism is the second arrow turned inward

When you stumble, fail, or fall short, there is a first, honest pang. Fair enough; you are human and it stung. But watch what most of us do next. We fire a second arrow into the same wound, and we aim it at ourselves: what is wrong with me, I always do this, I am not enough. The first arrow was the event. The second is the long, cruel commentary you add, and it does far more damage than the original misstep ever did.

You would not speak to a friend the way the inner critic speaks to you. Accepting yourself begins by noticing that second arrow and, gently, choosing not to keep firing it. Not by arguing the critic into silence, but by letting its noise be there without believing every word, and turning toward yourself the same plain decency you would offer anyone else having a hard day.

Meeting yourself as you are

• Catch the “not okay yet” assumption when it runs, and question it. On whose authority were you not allowed to be okay until some condition was met?
• When you fall short, name the first arrow honestly, then refuse the second. Try the words you would give a friend: “That was hard. Of course it hurt. It does not make you a failure.”
• Let yourself be a work in progress without it meaning you are broken. You can want to grow and still accept the one who is growing. Those are not opposites.

Accepting yourself is not giving up on becoming better, and it is not arrogance. Loose is not limp. People change far more readily from a place of acceptance than from self-attack, because self-attack spends the very energy growth requires. You can set the whole exhausting project down and still move, lighter, in the direction you wanted to go. If what you carry is a persistent low mood or a self-criticism that will not lift, please reach out to a doctor or a qualified professional; that, too, is a brave form of letting go. The free 7-day guide offers a gentle place to begin, and the fuller method is in the book Tantra Is Not What You Think.