I still remember the day I started to forgive myself. Forgive myself for all the things I wasn’t and all the things I would never be. More importantly, it was also the day I started to accept myself.
I was in a yoga class and if you’ve been to yoga before you know that they often like to leave you with a message towards the end of class to take home with you.
I was resting in Child’s Pose, feeling sweaty and spent from contorting my body over the last hour, when the instructor delivered her message for the day.
It went something like this, “Today know that you are enough just the way you are. You don’t need to be any different than the person you are today. You don’t need to change who you are. You are beautiful and you are enough as who you are, right here, right now.”
I don’t know what it was about that moment, maybe it was a combination of the heat and the exhausting, yet delicious, feeling of being wrung out like a wet towel left to dry on my mat, maybe it was something that had been building inside of me for months, whatever it was caused her words to truly sink into me.
I started crying that day as she said those words. Those few words, from a person I didn’t know and who didn’t know me, changed my life.
Like many, if not all women, I’ve spent a good portion of my life feeling like I should be different. I could be smarter, thinner, less thin, less awkward, shorter, more outgoing, better, etc.
It never occurred to me that I could also just be- enough.
