Acceptance Leads to Freedom

Letting it Go seems to be the theme of my life these days   This song has become my fav and I play it in yoga class often these days. The concept of accepting people, situations, and ourselves just as we are right here right now feels as free as the wind that is blowing my hair around today.  It’s the kind of freedom we so rarely find within.

So about those thoughts/worries/obsessions…..no one really cares but you!  That’s the secret.  Our internal dilemmas feel SO incredibly serious.  That is until there is ANOTHER tragedy in one of our communities and we then realize that whatever we have been ruminating over is minimal compared to the current disaster.  Until again we forget and come back to our internal struggles.

When I think about this song I am reminded that what a lot of our struggles are about is seeking approval and acceptance from people other than ourselves.  When we are least capable of giving ourselves love we will kvetch  about how inconsiderate others have been to us.  When we are seeking approval from others it is generally when we are incapable of approving of ourselves. It is not the job of others to spend their limited time focusing on boosting our self esteem.  Think for a moment just how narcissistic approval seeking actually is. Right?  It’s the  ME SHOW all the time when we are in that place.  But if we turn it all around and begin to accept ourselves just as we are, we no longer are in need of the constant attention of others.

I used to struggle with people pleasing.  Then I struggled with rebellion.  The current decade of my chronological age has taken me to a place of finding the middle ground between the two extremes.  Building my own business has been really cool and really stressful.  Cool because I get to do things my own creative way.  Stressful because I am the only one holding down the fort.  But at the end of the day, if I am in a good space, I can allow myself to blow like the wind and accept the peaks and valleys that present themselves.

This transition of my career has been life transforming; causing me to face and let go of old belief systems and old parts of my self that no longer serve me.  Acceptance and embracing who you are with no apologies is so freeing. I feels like the biggest exhale my body has ever taken.

Recently I wrote an article for the Huffington Post

WAIT A MINUTE DID I JUST SAY THAT?

YES!!!!

I was published in the Huffington Post on an article I wrote about my process of digging myself out from under burn out thought the help of several holistic health practioners.  In the article I share about my experience working as a therapist in the mental health field and feelings that I have about the need for more comprehensive treatment for those struggling with compounding stress levels and complex emotions.  Know any of those people?!  LOL yup you guessed it….that’s all of us.

The article was a very important piece for me to write on so many levels.  Most importantly it was about claiming my truth, sharing my wisdom and thoughts and bringing forth a call to action to help others struggling in a similar way.  It was claiming my voice that had been squelched for a long time due to thoughts being counter culture.  It was also formulating a mission that I have had to help spread the message of what we need as a culture to help bring us back to a place of healing.

While I knew the piece wouldn’t necessarily be embraced by all, it was an important step in fully embracing and claiming my space in the world.  It was just as the song says….

Let it go….

Let it be…

Why don’t you be you

And I’ll be me….

Do you have something about yourself that you have been keeping quiet and not fully embracing and accepting?  What has that felt like for you?  For me it felt literally like a choke hold around my neck; so much so that at times I really could barely breathe.  Now that I have let the caged bird out, I no longer feel that way.

What is holding you back from letting your own caged bird out?  What can you do today to take a step forward to claiming your own space in this world?

Cheers to being free!

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1 Comment

  1. […] we accept what we can change and let go of the things that we cannot.  As I discussed in our chat, Acceptance Leads to Freedom, it really is when we learn to accept what we cannot change that we are set free.  It is the ole […]

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