5 Pillars for Greater Self-Acceptance and Well-Being

We’ve been talking a lot about Embodied Acceptance. In trying to define what that means to me, I discovered that there are five pillars that feel essential as building blocks towards healing.

In my Embodied Acceptance workshop, there are five sessions with one class focused on each of the five pillars, learning to shed outmoded thoughts, build new foundations for resilience and self-care, and consider how we might function without the shame and limitations we’ve long placed on ourselves.

Let’s take a look at the five pillars now.

Sensing and Feeling

Self-acceptance begins with self-awareness. We can’t accept something we don’t know intimately. 

Avoidance and denial will usually disconnect us from our feelings and sensations. Even cues like hunger, thirst, fatigue, and pain can become dulled or waylaid when we are not living fully in our bodies. 

This class asks our senses to guide us back home into our bodies. We will practice body neutrality and body appreciation by simply noticing first our internal signals, cues, and sensations, and then experiencing the ecosystem of our environment. 

We will explore both interoception (inner sensing) and proprioception (sensing our relationship to the world). We will use our bodies to gain awareness, and we will dance in celebration of its miraculous abilities. 

Unconditional Worth 

Underlying our ability to accept ourselves is a very big question: Am I worthy? 

Feelings of worthlessness can sabotage our efforts and desire for self-love, creativity, relationships, and growth. And yet, our worth is unconditional. We don’t need to do, make, say, create, or provide anything to have value. 

We need only be. But what does being mean? We can notice and be in our bodies, but we are more than just a body. 

There is something that animates us; our energy, our spirit, our essence. In this class, we will connect to our essence as a way to experience our undeniable worth and we will move and dance with it. 

We will open our awareness to how unique our essence is and also to its potential to connect us to everything else in the world and experience a deep sense of belonging.  

Embodied Support 

Support is a foundational need. At the body level, our inner support systems allow us to breathe and move and survive. Our inner emotional support systems allow us to both function and express ourselves, creating relationships and meaning. 

Support, though, is not a one-way street. To truly receive support, we must also know how to surrender to it, to yield. Feeling “safe” is not only determined by our environment, but also by our own choices to be moved, held, and supported. 

Often, though, we are surviving without feeling supported, either by ourselves, or others. In this class, we will practice yielding and surrendering as a way to feel physically and emotionally supported and we will notice if that feeling of support can entice us to explore the space around us in a more integrated way. 

Presence and Power

Grounding. Strength. Impact. Flow. 

How often do we feel we are living inside these qualities richly and deeply? 

What systems are required in order to access our inner power? 

How can we detach the idea of power, and impact, from ideas of violence or harm? 

How can we use our inner support, our sense of worth, and our self-awareness, to become powerful activists in our own lives? 

In the Embodied Acceptance class, we will practice connecting to our power by embodying physical qualities such as strength, directness, and flow. 

That same strength can also help us notice the impact that we can have on our environment. We will observe what type of impact we want to make. 

We can also practice moving with both control and abandon, in order to experience our agency and conscious choice-making. 

Play

No one needs to teach us how to play. But sometimes we need help remembering that we deserve to play, that our delight, desire, and joy are essential components to our life. 

There are so many ways in which we get shamed, bound, silenced, and stifled and our play gets put in a corner. 

In this class, we will remember joy, flow, release, delight. We will actively engage in play as a mindful choice, and we will bring pleasure back to the center of the room. 

We will activate our bodies to prioritize creativity and play. 

Because you are worth it.