You are beautiful

What a liberating thought — I am free to be me! Think about it... for years you have been molded and pushed to behave in certain 'acceptable' ways. You have been asked to adhere to tradition, to behave according to certain accepted rules of behavior, and to dress according to the norm. To act like the Jones. To make sure you didn't "paint outside the lines".

You have done as you were told, fearing punishment or worse, afraid of not being loved. You have accepted beliefs that others held without question. You agreed with what others said about you -- you were smart, stupid, pretty, ugly, etc. You have believed that what others thought was true of you had to be so — that others knew best -- that they were smarter or wiser and somehow knew what was good for you.

Look Within -- What Will You Find?

Yet, if you look within, you know that some of those accepted beliefs are not necessarily your truths. They are the truths of those around you. For example as a child, you may have been told that you were too noisy, or too playful. Now obviously, if you were behaving in that fashion this was how you wanted to be -- that was the real you wanting to express itself. When we were told that we were 'too' this or 'too' that, we felt that our behavior must be incorrect and adapted ourselves to what was expected of us... and thus lost our spontaneity and joy in the process.

Whose rules are we following now? The ones imposed by our parents? And whose rules were they following? Their parents? It goes back for many millennium and has nothing to do with us. Need there be rules at all? If we all were true to our "inner self" or our "higher self", rules would be unnecessary. We all have an ingrained sense of right and wrong, of what is loving and what is not, of what is "right" and what is not.

from self-improvement.com