Psychotherapists in Texas talk about self-acceptance, what the sacred pause is, and how they are connected.

Due to society making us believe we need to be perfect, we set high standards for ourselves, usually forgetting the normalcy of flaws, and that everyone has them.

Having self-love and acceptance are such important aspects of a healthy, happy lifestyle. These attributes are most important when it comes to the mind, body, and spirit because when we do not accept who are we're allowing a wedge between ourselves and the energy that sustains life.

Self-love and self-acceptance, although related, are not the same. Self-love refers to how you see yourself and self-acceptance is more about the affirmation of who you are. To be able to learn to love yourself, you need to delve into what you struggle to accept about yourself. Research shows that from the moment we stop judging ourselves and being so harsh, our self-esteem rises. 

In a sacred pause, we stop judging ourselves and others. We stop the business of life. The pause, in most people's experience, is the beginning path to healing ourselves, our relationships, and our mindsets. 

Take a few seconds, stop in your tracks, pause and just be. 

Most of us will find it difficult or feel uncomfortable when we pause our thoughts, drop what we are doing, or delay the doing. We're all wired to feel that discomfort when we're just being with ourselves. We stay busy to distract ourselves from the discomfort that arises as we learn to practice self-acceptance. 

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” 

Those influential words by Thomas Mermer relate our business to violence. When we're busy, we are tense and we struggle to feel tenderness. When we are unconscious of our inner experiences and are acting from auto-pilot, we neglect to notice the harsh inner critic that weighs us down and diminishes our life energy. If we pause and take a step back, we can allow ourselves, albeit uncomfortable, to feel intimacy towards ourselves. In other words, it allows us to start practicing self-acceptance. By pausing, we break our routine of judging and worrying due to low self-esteem.  We can begin to develop the relationship within ourselves and change the old patterns.  

Learning to pause is the first step to what may be referred to by some as radical acceptance. The pause is a way of training our minds to take a break before responding. It's a moment where we allow ourselves to sit and process the problems. To take a note from Viktor Frankl, in between the stimulus and the response is a pause. It is in this pause that we can slow down, evaluate our automatic assumptions, automatic beliefs, or unconscious behaviors that affect our daily lives. During this pause, we can insert self-compassion.  We can practice the pause by sitting down to meditate, paying attention to our breathing, doing yoga, or by taking some time in nature. However, you'd like to pause, remember to try and focus your attention on self-acceptance. 

Once we have paused, we can begin to accept who we are and what we love about our uniqueness. We can start to trust our natural intelligence and open up more to intimacy within ourselves and our relationships. It can feel as if you are awakening from a dream; coming out of a pause with a clear lens on who you are and want to be. This is when self-acceptance can become possible, We are able to practice what Buddhist Tara Brach refers to as The Radical Acceptance. 

If you would like to learn more on Self Acceptance and the Sacred Pause, Buddhist Tara Brach’s book, The Radical Self Acceptance, explains the concepts further.