“Right now, can you make an unconditional relationship with yourself? Just at the height you are, the weight you are, with the intelligence that you have, and your current burden of pain? Can you enter into an unconditional relationship with that?”

- Pema Chodron

Pema Chodron asked the perfect question because as we transition into adulthood, our biggest fears and challenges within ourselves stems from the difficulties we face with self-acceptance.

If asked by anyone whether we accept ourselves for who we are in our purest forms, many of us wouldn’t even hesitate to emphasize the fact that we do. Not only do we do this because we crave the acceptance of others, but we can’t stand being anything less than society’s idea of what we should be. We shy away from our differences rather than embracing them and that is the root of our shortcomings.

If we as humans continue to neglect ourselves and rejecting the things that make us unique such as our height, weight, and intellectual abilities, we will never truly be happy due to the fact that if we don’t learn how to appreciate all that we are, how can we say that we honestly know and understand ourselves enough to love who we are?

How can we then expect others to know how to love us in the ways that we deserve to be loved? If we convince ourselves that we love the people that we are without understanding what it means, can we really blame others for not knowing how to love us? Think about it.

In order to achieve the things that are most important to us, whether it’s finding love or landing our dream job, we have to achieve inner peace, become one with ourselves.

Unconditional love means that we love ourselves without condition. Nothing or no one can change that feeling. Therefore, superficial things, whether they can be worked on or not, should NOT matter. In a world where society tries to force unrealistic goals upon us, sometimes unrealistic goals of being better than who we are, we have to take a stand for ourselves and show them that we’re okay, that we may not be PERFECT in their eyes, but that we’re going to be who we want to be rather than who they want to see.