A note to my younger self

If I could time travel and share one piece of wisdom with my younger self, I know what it would be. 

I would tell her that I’ve discovered there’s one thing worth pursuing more than anything else in this life. 

There’s one thing, that once you start to cultivate it, will help you to experience a sense of peace, an absence of tension, beyond what you thought possible. 

It will improve your friendships, your relationships, your physical, mental and emotional health, your work, your relationship with your body, your capacity for joy, your ability to keep promises to yourself - everything. 

It will make you more compassionate, more generous, more creative and more useful. 

It will make you stress less, worry less, compare less and think (way) less.

It will make taking action, changing habits and trying new things, infinitely easier. 

I’d tell my younger self that one thing, is the practice of unconditional self-acceptance. 

I’d say, the practice of unconditional self-acceptance is the opposite of everything your culture and conditioning taught you, overtly and covertly, and it’s the one thing that sets you free. More than therapy, more than meditation, more than all the other things you do to become you who are. 

I’d say to her, once you learn to unconditionally accept yourself, you’ll realise that most of your inner conflict and anxiety was created by judging and making yourself wrong for thinking what you were thinking and feeling what you were feeling. In essence, for consistently rejecting yourself. 

I’d share that you’ll learn to be within a really big experience, having really uncomfortable emotions and sensations in your body like sadness, anger and grief, and stop simultaneously wronging yourself for how you feel. And that this will feel like freedom. 

You’ll be in the experience fully, you’ll feel it for as long as you need, and then you’ll let it go. All along, the suppression, avoidance and numbing of discomfort was a result of you learning to make yourself wrong for feeling the way that you did. 

I’d say that you’ll heal a lot of things in your life before you access total self-acceptance. And once you get close to total self-acceptance, you’ll realise how much harder the healing was than it needed to be. And you’ll accept yourself within that, too, for doing the best you knew how. 

I’d share that any type of healing or change, in absence of self-acceptance, is like pushing s**t up hill. 

I’d tell her that you start to practice it, you really start to experience it, and everything in your life gets so much juicier. 

You start to stretch yourself out of your comfort zone in new and brave ways, experiment with new things, and walk away from the things you never wanted but settled for. 

You’ll start to believe you can do anything, because you no longer feed or entertain the internal voice that says you can’t. 

You’ll discover what it’s like to have a challenging feeling or experience, without having a mental narrative running alongside it that you’re bad or wrong for having it.

You’ll stop allowing people to be in your life that perpetuate your self-judgement and criticism by projecting their own onto you, too.

You’ll learn how to unconditionally accept yourself, no matter what you’re thinking or feeling, and you’ll change the whole entire experience you have of yourself in your mind and body. 

Which means you’ll change every moment of the rest of your life, because the only person you’ll ever spend every moment of the rest of your life with, is you. 

Love, 
Caroline