Quotes About Acceptance

If you decided to reteach yourself your own loveliness today, what would you do? How would you speak to yourself? Can you allow yourself that much?

I'd spent years saving for a future that was never coming to protect myself from a past that had already happened.

I tell them that if compulsive eating is anything, it's a way we leave ourselves when life gets hard. When we don't want to notice what is going on. Compulsive eating is a way we distance ourselves from the way things are when they are not how we want them to be.

All any feeling wants is be welcomed with tenderness. It wants room to unfold. It wants to relax and tell its story. It wants to dissolve like a thousand writhing snakes that with a flick of kindness become harmless strands of rope.

People often mistake tenderheartedness for indulgence, as if being kind to themselves leads to lethargy—sitting around the house all day eating bonbons and wearing muumuus and pink rollers. This is simply not true. I often hear a variation on this statement: "If I'm not intolerant of my shortcomings, how can I ever expect to change them?" And the answer is, By doing the opposite of what you think you need to do to change. By being kind to yourself.

I do believe that there are frozen places in ourselves - undigested pockets of pain - that need to be recognized and welcomed, so that we can contact that which has never been hurt or wounded or hungry.

Every good enough mother teaches her child that no matter how bad it seems- no matter how many rejections or scraped knees or broken bones there are- it is going to be okay. Maybe not the way we wanted or hoped it would be, but still okay. A good parent returns a child to the place where she can trust that although she might be bitter or hateful for a moment, it's not the end of the world. There is love here. There is light and quiet here. There is peace.

The relentless attempts to be thin take you further and further away from what could actually end your suffering:

Stephen Levine, a Buddhist teacher, says that hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are. Being one place and wanting to be somewhere else. Being constantly agitated—another word for nonaccepting—about the inevitable. Being in a relationship with someone and refusing to surrender to the love because you don't want to give yourself to something you will eventually lose.

Most of us are so enthralled with the scary tigers in our minds--our stories of loneliness, rejection, grief--that we don't realize they are in the past. They can't hurt us anymore.

When we're convinced we have to earn joy, we don't notice the ten thousand places in which it is already waiting, asking, waving for our attention.

When you sneak food, you perpetuate the belief that you are too ugly, too needy, too intense to be seen and loved for who you are... You give yourself the message that who you are is not acceptable, and that you must pretend to be someone else to be loved.

I kept becoming larger in her presence, kept returning to who I would have been without the pretense of who I thought I should be.

hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are.

But staying with the emptiness—entering it, welcoming it, using it to get to know ourselves better, being able to distinguish the stories we tell ourselves about it from the actual feeling itself—that's radical.

You miss the life that happens in the middle zone—between now and what you think your life should be like. And when you miss those moments because you'd rather be doing something else, you are missing your own life. Those moments are gone. You will never get them back.

But staying with the emptiness -entering it, welcoming it, using it to get to know ourselves better, being able to distinguish the stories we tell ourselves about it from the actual feeling itself - that´s radical

There isn't a someday. There never was. No one has ever been to the future that you keep putting your life on hold for. All we ever have is now. And if you continually put your life on hold for what your life will be like tomorrow, or the next year, or when you finally lose the weight, you won't recognize that you already have what you want because you will have spent years training yourself to want, not have.

Your body is the piece of the universe you've been given, the place where love and joy and grief happen, where happiness unfolds. Do you really want to keep believing that it's a horrible, ugly, lumpy thing? Do you really want to keep punching yourself like that?

The exquisite paradox of this engagement is that when the suffering is fully allowed, it dissolves.

Healing is about opening the wound and letting it heal from the inside out, exposing it to wind and sun and time, not piling bandages on it and screaming each time your skin gets caught in the adhesive tape

Most of all, he loved Celia Johnson, her hats,her face,her cracked porcelain voice: 'This can't last. This misery can't last.Nothing lasts really,neither happiness nor despair.Not even life lasts long....There'll come a time in the future when i shan't mind about this any more....

Again, I did what I could. I didn't doubt, and didn't deny, that there were people who could have done a better job than me, people with more skill and experience, but I played the hand I was given, dealt with the problem, and the person, in front of me, and at least I felt reasonably sure I was doing no harm.

Topeka meant, a good place to find potatoes. That made Dorothy laugh. But any place is what you make it said etta. You've got to make it home. You've got to do it for yourself.... It's difficult because everybody wants to be loved and you think you can't find a home unless you are loved by somebody, anybody. But it's not true. Sometimes you can learn to live without being loved. It's terribly hard, but you can do it. The trick is to remember what it's like to be loved.