Welcome to The Bloom Sessions! And an extra warm welcome to new subscribers. Here we can gently explore your inner world with therapeutic journaling and self discovery exercises. Let’s release unhelpful patterns, challenge limiting beliefs and foster healing, change, and personal growth! Why not download the Substack app, where you can listen to the audio, watch videos and find my page with 80+ past posts.
The Bloom Sessions are out on 3/4 Fridays, 10am UK time, term time. Feel free to suggest topics, as this is your space, and do join in the comments if you feel like it. You are not alone!
Hi friends
For many of us, January can be the hardest month of the year in the northern hemisphere. It’s cold, dark, damp and long. Despite this, I enjoy taking time to rest, as get tingles as I look forward at this threshold time. I sip extra tea as I tap away at my keyboard, my knees cosy under a blanket, my toes tucked inside fluffy new slippers while I dream and cook up plans.
This turning point in a year is a great time to start practicing radical self acceptance, which is our topic today.
Radical Self Acceptance
Over the last few years, adjusting to my changing body after Long Covid left me feeling vulnerable and frustrated. For a long time, and even now I found myself unable to do many of the things that I used to, including ordinary tasks, taking trips easily, and having to stop my work as a therapist, effecting my finances and sense of security. In the past, crippling grief, subsequent divorce, and the silent ostracism that followed left me feeling low. At times, my inability to meet anyones expectations, including my own, has brought overwhelming emotions. There’s a lot to push away. On the back of all this, I know am also strong, kind, more creative than ever, and I know I also have so much beauty and joy in my life, and in myself. That includes my writing here, and the community it has brought.
I bet you hold so much in your heart too. This is what being human is.
I could beat myself up about my shortcomings, my ‘failures’ and when I was younger, I did. Or I can practice radical self-acceptance. Radical self-acceptance is the practice of fully embracing who you are, including your strengths, flaws, and everything in between.
What Stops Us Accepting Ourselves?
I don’t push myself or my experiences away.
Self-acceptance is often hindered by deeply ingrained beliefs of how we should be, from family, teachers, friends or even made-up stuff of our own. We may feel pressure from societal expectations, our culture, what we see and hear online, or that pesky inner critic that convinces us we need to be "better" to be worthy. (Meet mine, Brenda, here).
This mindset creates unnecessary suffering and keeps us stuck in cycles of shame and self-rejection. We must learn to confront these internal barriers with compassion, mindfulness, and an understanding that our worth is inherent, not conditional.
Radical self-acceptance frees us from the exhausting pursuit of perfection, allowing us to live more authentically, despite everything.
These tips and therapeutic journaling prompts are designed to help you explore and deepen your relationship with yourself, through the lens of radical acceptance.
“Change occurs when one becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not.” Arnold Beisser
But How Can I Accept Myself When I Am So Obviously Flawed?
If you haven’t already, join us for ten ideas, and twelve eye-opening therapeutic journaling reflections for radical self-acceptance including the video and audio version. You also get the Bloom Sessions on Fridays and the 80+ post archive of posts.
