Grace Is the Essence of Self-Love

Give Yourself Some Darn Grace

Imagine sitting next to a beautiful creek, and you notice all the beautiful things that are surrounding you. The trees and the rocks. The mountains in the distance and the clouds gently floating by. Then you catch a glimpse of your reflection on the water, and you have this palpable love for what you see. Your reflection, in that moment, is part of the beauty that surrounds you. When you come to the realization that you are part of what makes up this beautiful experience we call life, that is self-love.

But to paint yourself into the beauty of life, you must have some grace with yourself. There are many self-proclaimed self-help gurus who instruct people to focus on the positives and practice positive self-talk, but I think that is missing the self-love mark. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe it is important to be positive and practice positive self-talk, but I don’t believe the hindrance to self-love is our inability to identify the positives, rather I believe it is our inability to have grace with the negatives.

The hindrance to self-love is not our inability to identify the positives, rather it is our inability to have grace with the negatives.

If we all had a little more grace with ourselves, the world would be a much brighter place. Sometimes we screw up, and that’s okay. Actually, we probably screw up a lot more than sometimes, and that’s okay, too. And when you do screw up, you can choose to beat yourself up or let it go and move on. But don’t let it go for the sake of letting it go — instead, actually acknowledge your screw ups, learn from them, and be okay with them, because at the end of this thing we call life, we’re going to have a lot more screw-ups than done-ups. No one gets this life just right.

As humans living on planet earth, we will all experience heartaches and headaches, and sometimes we’ll even be the cause of heartaches and headaches. You can love it or hate it, but I hope you love it. This life, with all its wildness and utter unpredictability, can be a beautiful experience if we just give ourselves and everyone else a little more darn grace.