A little love note from my heart to yours on this Sunday morning:
There is nothing wrong with you. You aren't wrong because you haven't been the kind of woman you thought you should be or the kind of mother, daughter, girlfriend or wife you thought you should be. You aren't wrong if you have cellulite or wear a bigger pants size than you think you should.
The trap of the wrongness is that we've attached ourselve to an idea of how we should be or how our lives should be and then we judge reality as wrong because it doesn't match the idea in our head.
We don't have to live in binaries of right and wrong, ugly or pretty, thin or fat, good or bad, evil or righteous. It is SO LIMITING and doesn't actually serve us to be the women we dream of being in the world. The thing that does serve you to becoming that woman: acceptance. compassion. love. understanding.
When you approach yourself from this place of kindness, something radical begins to happen. The part of you that has been tightly wound and bound by your criticism, judgment and shame begins to unwind. You can begin to recover parts of you that have long been hiding from the light of day or working their ass off to make that critic in your head happy. But when acceptance and kindness, love and compassion enter the scene, those hard working timid parts can relax. You begin to see the beauty and rightness that you've been judging about them. You begin to realize cellulite isn't a strike against your goodness and rightness as a woman or that your passion and fire aren't things you need to water down or hide from people any longer.
Embracing the parts of you that you've rejected for so long is the first step to really living a fully embodied, fully expressed, fully satisfied life.
This all came about for me because I had the misfortune of chatting with a guy who got really offended at a joke I made about sex. He told me I was wrong and when I said that no one was wrong, that it was merely a misunderstanding between two strangers, he continued to push the wrong button, berating me for not taking responsibility, blah blah blah. But it got me thinking about how deeply entrenched we are as a culture at placing blame. At shaming ourselves and others in an attempt to feel a little bit better. If it is someone's fault, then we don't have to do the deeper inner work of looking at reality.
Turns out, reality isn't that bad and there is so much more to life than right and wrong. Go and love yourself just as you are. Even if it feels difficult or the voice in your head won't shut up about why you don't deserve that love, do it anyway. In the same way you'd love a puppy cowering in the corner, give that to the parts of yourself you've judged for so long.