How to Cultivate Compassion for Yourself?
First off compassion isn’t something you find, it’s something you PRACTICE!
The problem about self-compassion is that it is made up of some of the most challenging habits. And what are they? Practice and patience. But keep in mind the words, “It is worth it!” as you read this article, because compassion is at the core of moving forward in your healing process..
Learning how to have compassion for yourself, forgive yourself, and find grace for your mistakes is a pathway full of challenges. The good thing about a challenge is that our brain loves them! We find it easiest to learn through a new challenge that activates our brain in new ways. Thankfully, with every new situation we can still use our familiar tools of wellbeing that we’ve been practicing. Our aim is to practice each of our inner-tools-of-wellbeing in lots of different external circumstances because we know with lots of practice we become well rounded and a master of that tool, allowing us to face whatever comes our way!
What are these tools I’m talking about? Well one of them is what I’m writing about today, The Tool of Self-Compassion, but we all have a variety of different tools we can use to heal and each comes through our different experiences and the lessons we have been exposed to. I’m simply on a mission to jumpstart your tool belt and expose you to these lessons I’ve learned around compassion!
Strength
Grace is allowing yourself to get back up even if you don’t feel deserving of that privilege
When we understand there are challenges along the path of healing we will strive to start out on the path with a deep grounded sense of strength.
If you are working towards mastering self-compassion, you will first need a foundation of love for yourself; a foundation that is made of true beliefs. Along this journey we break down the false beliefs and replace them with new ones that serve us instead of harming us. When we fail we will become aware that we still have active false beliefs, but this is not to discourage us, rather simply to bring our awareness to the fact that we are still working to change these temporary mindsets, therefore we give ourselves more time. Two of these beliefs that are important to our foundation of self-compassion are ‘love of self’ and ‘strength in oneself to carry on.’
Compassion is really about having an understanding of yourself that goes beyond the present moment, one that sees who you really are in the big picture and sees your potential too. One that loves the “you” at your core. It doesn’t mean you have to love the action or words that, that “you” is doing or saying in the moment, but you certainly must be accepting of where that “you” happens to be at the moment.
Strength comes in because resilience is a huge part of grace! Grace is allowing yourself to get back up even if you don’t feel deserving of that privilege. It’s about giving yourself PERMISSION to step back up into the best version of who you know yourself to be, regardless of who you were 5 minutes ago!
Oftentimes after getting upset we reach a point where we realize we don’t wanna be upset anymore or we want to help ourselves and do something nice for ourselves that will make us smile or feel better. But then, because we feel so unworthy (because we’re judging our worth based off of our past actions) we hold ourselves back and tell ourselves lies like, “You only deserve to feel better if someone else comes along and tells you, you can or someone else from the outside looking in gives you validation to be ok and move on. Someone else needs to give you permission to stop punishing yourself. You don’t get to stop punishing yourself until someone else says you’re worthy and you’ve paid enough of a price for your action.”
How sick are those lies? Well I’ve been there, many many times unfortunately. But now I know that I’m the one who gets to say, “You don’t deserve this punishment, stop punishing yourself.” or “It’s ok to act nasty for an hour and then realize where you went wrong and make a U-turn and start being and acting the way the true you wants to act. What you were an hour ago only taints who you are now if you let it” or maybe it’s just as simple as saying, “I accept you even though you’re acting self-absorbed right now, I understand you need to feel this way and let some of these feelings escape you so you’re not bottling it up inside of you.”
I realized, finally after much needless pain, strength begins with me, I get to give MYSELF permission to be ok! I don’t have to wait, neither can I afford to wait for someone else to tell me I’m loveable just the way I am.
I have to Love me! I have to give myself permission to practice and not be perfect all the time!
Because even if someone else does give you permission you won’t accept that permission until you accept it within yourself, you’ll argue with that someone just so you can be right. “No, no, I’m horrible, I can’t stop getting upset at myself because I hate myself, I can’t live with myself, I can’t believe you can even stand to be around me right now” Sound familiar? I hope not, but…..Anyways, even if you did accept their permission, how equipped will you be when you find yourself in the same situation, only this time they’re not around to save the day? How EXTREMELY disempowering it is to give away your power to someone outside of you.
Compassion for you begins with YOU!
The level of grace you have for yourself directly corresponds to the level of strength you have to pull it out from deep inside of yourself. You must know without a doubt that no matter who you are in the moment or how you're acting that’s currently displeasing, you must know without a doubt that if you dig deep enough there will always be enough strength within you to move on and face the next day, to face yourself. Enough strength to face the “you” in the current moment and accept her, while at the same time having a love for that woman you know her to be at her core; the woman without those old practiced bad habits. This is where patience and practice comes in! You must allow yourself time to practice seeing your core being, seeing your true self, loving you no matter who she is and then patience as you practice knowing you won’t get it all right, right away. PRACTICE THIS ALL THE TIME, not just when you’re upset, that’s the hardest time to practice. If this is your baseline of the way you treat yourself, then when the more challenging times come you will find it easier to treat yourself in this positive way.
However, seeing who you really are is a challenging thing if you’ve never connected to who you truly are. And it’s impossible to connect with who you really are if you are spending time judging yourself. So basically, a person may have no compassion for themselves and is unable to practice finding it, because every time they go to love themselves all they see are the mistakes and they simply judge, judge, judge.
NO JUDGING YOURSELF!
You cannot love yourself fully while at the same time judging yourself, you must be allowing of yourself. If you get upset, just allow her to be there. Allowing her to play out as she does is different than saying, I love how you are acting. Allowing is loving the real woman, not the actions she is displaying. If you can look past your actions or words and see the real you, then you will start to find and connect with who you truly are and in turn start to live out your life in a way that lines up with that highest expression of you!
Practice comes in really handy here; practice and a realistic goal. A realistic big picture! The end goal may be to have some grace and forgiveness for yourself in the middle of the upset, the heated situation, a moment of sadness, or anger. However, the first step towards that goal may just be finding genuine forgiveness for yourself 3 days later, or a week later, or forgiving who you were 10 years ago! Healing through forgiveness is VERY POWERFUL! But it will take practice to be able to be gracious to yourself. An empowering thing to do, would be to recognize the small steps and accomplishments you’ve made along the way and praise yourself for that and not judge the things that are still not up to par. Focus on the small wins!
Here’s an example of steps over time & You’ll notice a lot of time. Remember impatience has no place here!
At the beginning - Working on forgiving oneself for past mistakes.
A year later - Working on forgiving oneself for current mistakes and it takes a few days or even a week to come around to seeing they’re ok and can do better next time.
Year # 3 - Still working on forgiving oneself for current upsets but getting a lot faster with it, now they can forgive themselves as quickly as the next day and see that they were only upset for an evening and it’s nothing that they can’t move past.
Year 4 - Now they are able to forgive themselves in the same day, maybe it’s a few hours after they’ve been upset and they can talk themselves into loving themselves anyways knowing they are doing their best.
Year 5 - Been practicing this for years now, and finally realizing that even in the moment of stress they can talk themselves into an allowing place, “It’s ok if I’m upset right now, I won’t always feel this way, at least I’m still trying and haven’t given up. It’s ok if I feel upset, something is really upsetting me and I realize I must make a change.”
Year # 6 - Now after years of practice they could care less about getting as upset as they used to but they know they’re not perfect and everyone gets upset sometimes, but when they do they just recognize how it’s helping give them clarity on things in their life that need an upgrade and they move through it with ease and speed. They don’t let it affect them long term; 10 mins tops!
The thing is, the years of steps are not always so linear and sometimes in year # 5 you’ll act like you haven’t been practicing and you slip right back into the year # 2 behaviors, but that’s ok too. It’s good to know that this is normal and you’re not alone. “One step forward, two steps back” happens to all of us. It doesn’t mean you’re a failure, you’re just still practicing
Opinions
breaking down judgement
An easy place to break down judgement is in the area of “opinions” You must care about what you think of yourself first and foremost! What opinions do you choose to have about yourself?
You cannot allow what anybody else thinks about you to cause you to judge yourself. At first you have to disconnect with what you think of yourself too. Have no judgement for yourself, you can’t tell yourself you have to be better than you are, you must simply allow yourself to be regardless. However you owe it to yourself to think well of yourself on a regular basis as well! Fully understand, you get to choose how you feel about yourself and you get to choose what opinion you have of yourself.
Anytime you have an opinion that takes you further from compassion, stop that thought in its tracks! Disassociate from your negative judgements on yourself and when you do that you’ll dissociate with others negative judgements on you too!
“How do you do that?” You may ask. Simply do not entertain any words in your head that others have said to you that don’t feel good or any thoughts you’ve had about yourself that do not lift you up, knowing you have the control over these words and thoughts. You get to choose to carry them and keep reliving and feeling those judgments or you can choose to drop them! This is where practice comes in AGAIN like it ALWAYS does! Really practice is at the core of all healing and patience is at the core of reliance!
Practice, Patience & Reinforcement.
Practice is at the core of all healing and patience is at the core of reliance!
Compassion must be practiced just like any other skill or tool for growth. In fact without compassion many of the other tools just won’t work, it’s kinda like the tool belt and without it all your other tools just fall away and can’t be found when you need them.
How am I coming to this concussion? Because consider the opposite, beating yourself up, believing things like, “you failed again, you should be better by now, I can’t believe you’re still reacting this way after all this time!” Those thoughts, the opposite of compassion are something I practiced for many years. Yes, you can practice destructive thinking too. Unfortunately, without meaning to, we have practiced negative thinking for most of our lives.
In fact ALL thoughts are practiced, the good and the bad.
This idea that all thoughts are practiced is liberating because it gives us a good reason to cut ourselves some slack.
If we were to ever say to ourselves, “You shouldn’t be acting this way because you know better” we could respond back by saying, “Yes, I do know better, however I’ve been practicing this old way for years, so it may take years to undo. I have patience for my growth process.”
This idea of PRACTICE is the ultimate underlying idea of healing our mental health! Practice has been my mantra! If we can understand that every habit of thought or action we’ve had up until now has been practiced up until now, we will also understand we’re a master at that habit, good or bad. Which means many times it’s not so much about integrating new habits as it is unlearning the ones that don’t serve us. If we have become a master of these habits, we must also become a master at unlearning them.
You won’t just all of a sudden have compassion for yourself right after you’ve finished reading this article, in fact it is more likely that the time it takes you to integrate these new tools will depend on the time it took you to develop the unwanted habits in the first place and maybe longer depending on the development and elasticity of your brain while learning them. However our brain is really quick to forget and as soon as you stop reinforcing those old thought patterns they will quickly be forgotten.
Realizing that every habit of thought or action we long to integrate from now on will also require the same amount of time and practice it took to learn the nasty ones, means we have plenty of reason to give ourselves grace when we mess up. If we can memorize the phrase, “I’m just practicing.” We’ll find we have way more compassion for ourselves.
Next time we make a mistake we can say, “I’m just practicing.” Understanding this is just another opportunity to practice forgiving ourselves and to see how quickly we can get over it and move on.
We can also use the statement “I’m just practicing” to encourage us to STOP practicing the negative thoughts yet again. If we see it as “I’m practicing being upset” or “I’m practicing non-forgiveness” This way of looking at it can motivate us to move on quicker and STOP reinforcing those negative patterns, because the more we think them now, the most likely they are to be thought again tomorrow and if we wanna make it easier on our future selves, now is the time to make that happen! The last thing we wanna be doing is practicing the behaviors that we don’t like!
Unfortunately this second way of looking at it is not always so easy, in fact when I first began my healing journey, I had no tools at all and would get in very deep anxiety attacks where I didn’t have a logical brain to work with. I couldn’t see things objectively & I wasn't able to step back and recognize where practice came in at all. So this is an important point and maybe the most important when it comes to learning how to have compassion for ourselves: We are on the path.
The Most Important Point
So just knowing that ‘you are where you are’ is really important for finding grace for yourself.
We are on the path.
Some of us are at different spots on the path, some of us have different tools, different experiences, different levels of practiced thoughts and ways we react. So just knowing that ‘you are where you are’ is really important for finding grace for yourself. It doesn’t mean you have to enjoy where you are on your path or even like it, but it does mean you have to accept it as where the practices of your past self have brought you up until now.
We MUST know that we cannot change the past or who we were that’s brought us to where we are now. We cannot just walk into being a whole new person right away but we can find relief and a reason to be proud of ourselves by saying, “Although I accept where I am now, I will not accept this long term and I know there is a brighter future for me.”
It’s VERY IMPORTANT to know that that doesn’t mean, “I’ll never accept this ‘me’ ever ever again and it’s unacceptable if I ever act this way again” All it means is that you will not accept doing nothing about it, that you will choose to at least try and never give up. You accept who you are now and who you will be tomorrow even if she looks just like the ‘old you’ you are today. Even if the same you shows up a whole year from now, you accept her no matter what, but also you won’t be complacent! You’ll show up to the challenge and face it with one more step, with one more day of practice so that you can liberate yourself, knowing the challenge is WORTH IT!
NO MATTER WHAT show up, don’t give up, keep practicing, keep trying, keep forgiving! No one is gonna do it for you.
Praise yourself! See & choose to celebrate the small changes and growth you see in yourself!
Remember there is no room for judgement or impatience! STOP reliving the old you and dragging into the pure present moment the regrets of the past. Instead, ask yourself what would it look like to forgive myself today? What would it look like to love me right now?
What is the quality of life you choose to live?