Don't neglect yourself as your soul longs to be accepted and loved by you.

Ask yourself honestly: what do you require to heal? Are you replaying and reliving the same trauma over and over again? Are you immersed in your suffering and pain? What would you need to do in order to heal yourself? What would allow you to come to terms with your reality? What would allow you to function in your circumstance, to make the most of things, as they are? Are you making things worse or better for yourself? Have you found acceptance over what you can't control and shifted your focus and energy to that which you can do? What is it you feel you need? How can you fill that need in the most positive, empowering way possible? Changing your mindset and focus can have a tremendous impact on the quality of your life. Work in your best interest, not against. It is your responsibility to advocate for yourself, to be your own friend, to engage in self-care. Self-care includes your emotional state, it includes your perspectives.

Self acceptance gives you a solid foundation upon which to build yourself into who you want to become. Without that foundation, you may be building a house of cards.

Self-acceptance is the key to overcoming self-esteem issues and it is first priority for self growth. No matter what you need to do to accomplish your goals, achieve your dreams, just get through the day, you do it by approving of yourself first and last.

Self acceptance is not just about appreciating your good points it is more about being honest about your belief in values & ideals. Your self confidence takes a massive leap. Once you truly accept yourself, you will waste no energy or time on self deception or deceiving others and you will develop clarity as to just what needs improving.

I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.