Quotes About Acceptance

Every single one of us is someone else's other.

The less we talk about shame, the more control it has over our lives.

Never underestimate the power of being seen—it's exhausting to keep working against yourself when someone truly sees you and loves you.

Have we created a space in our families where our kids know that they belong. Where there are no prerequisites for worthiness, you don't have to hustle here for me to believe you're worthy of loving. You don't have to perform here for me to think that you belong here. You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to get a certain grade on your test. You don't have to hit so many home-runs. You belong here.

we know and understand ourselves is critically important, but there is something that is even more essential to living a Wholehearted life: loving ourselves.

Honestly, as someone who rarely risked vulnerability and always steered clear of silly or goofy, it never dawned on me that adults could love each other like that; that I could be loved for my vulnerabilities, not despite them.

It is in the process of embracing our imperfections that we find our truest gifts: courage, compassion, and connection.

If we have one or two people in our lives who can sit with us and hold space for our shame stories, and love us for our strengths and struggles, we are incredibly lucky. If we have a friend, or a small group of friends, or family who embraces our imperfections, vulnerabilities, and power, and fills us with a sense of belonging, we are incredible lucky.

True belonging doesn't require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.

I remind myself, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." (Cribbed from Voltaire.) A twenty-minute walk that I do is better than the four-mile run that I don't do. The imperfect book that gets published is better than the perfect book that never leaves my computer. The dinner party of take-out Chinese food is better than the elegant dinner that I never host.

our anxiety and our fear need to be understood and respected, perhaps even befriended. We need to pull up a chair and sit with them, understand why they're showing up, and ask ourselves what there is to learn.

Here's what I learned: The heart of compassion is really acceptance. The better we are at accepting ourselves and others, the more compassionate we become. Well, it's difficult to accept people when they are hurting us or taking advantage of us or walking all over us. This research has taught me that if we really want to practice compassion, we have to start by setting boundaries and holding people accountable for their behavior. We

Experiencing vulnerability isn't a choice—the only choice we have is how we're going to respond when we are confronted with uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

Rather than risking feeling disappointed, they're choosing to live disappointed.

You don't wander into the wilderness unprepared. Standing alone in a hypercritical environment or standing together in the midst of difference requires one tool above all others: trust. To brave the wilderness and become the wilderness we must learn how to trust ourselves and trust others.

Belonging is a practice that requires us to be vulnerable, get uncomfortable, and learn how to be present with people without sacrificing who we are.

True belonging is not something that you negotiate externally, it's what you carry in your heart.

Perfect and bulletproof are seductive, but they don't exist in the human experience. We must walk into the arena, whatever it may be—

Shame is the intensely powerful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance or belonging.

If we want to fully experience love and belonging we must believe that we are worthy of love and belonging.

Believe me, comparison sucks the creativity and joy right out of life.

The profound danger is that, as noted above, we start to think of feeling as weakness. With the exception of anger (which is a secondary emotion, one that only serves as a socially acceptable mask for many of the more difficult underlying emotions we feel), we're losing our tolerance for emotion and hence for vulnerability.

I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn't change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.

we dismiss vulnerability as weakness only when we realize that we've confused feeling with failing and emotions with liabilities.