Love and accept yourself

This is from The Perfection through Perceived Imperfection by Kidest Mengistu.

When it comes to our own selves, we know so little of Love. We have an easy time looking into the eyes of another and uttering the words “I love you,” and yet feel embarrassed if someone were to suggest to us that we should do the same to the self-image we see in the mirror. Could you look in the mirror and tell yourself “I love you”? Most people feel awkward doing this. In fact, we’re more comfortable focusing more on what we think are our imperfections than we do on anything we might even slightly like about ourselves. “Oh my how that freckle grows and shows that I am not as beautiful as the world thinks I should be.” This surface level obsession is our biggest distraction from seeing past our physicality and into our inner beauty. Your inner beauty is your natural beauty, everything else falls away.

Have you ever looked at a giant maple tree and commented on how slanted it’s looking today? Have you ever looked at the brilliance of a sunset and thought it could do with a little more orange? How about the fluttering of a butterfly, did you think it could fly a little faster? We never seem to criticize the natural beauty in these things outside of us. So why do we notice so many “imperfections” in our selves?

I really recommend that you train yourself to look in the mirror and say, "I love you." And really think about that second paragraph above - how it doesn't occur to us to look for imperfections in the natural world so why do we do that to ourselves?