A Lesson in Self Compassion

Yesterday was STRESS. I started the day off already a little bummed out and with some things on my mind. But then work delivered its own set of challenges and throughout the day, I felt myself becoming more and more critical of myself. By the end of the day, I had some very judgmental self talk going on and all kinds of ideas about what I would, or should, or could be doing differently. So I put on a meditation recording by one of my favorite teachers, Tara Brach, who works a lot with the feelings of insufficiency a lot of us are plagued with today. The meditation involves feeling all of your pain and suffering on the in breath, but then essentially zooming out and holding all of that emotion in a space of compassion on the out breath. I was having a really hard time staying present and focused on the meditation. I could let the emotions in, sure, they were already there. But finding compassion for myself was a lot more difficult and I felt my mind running off and criticizing and comparing still.
But then the meditation shifted and she asked me to call to mind a friend who’s dealing with the same kinds of feelings. And I did have someone come to mind who I relate to very much and can see how we struggle the same. So I thought about her and on every inhalation, felt her pain, and on every exhalation, held her in a space of understanding and compassion. This was 100x easier to do and I felt myself breaking through so many layers of resistance, feeling just how deserving this person was of love and acceptance and remembering how we’re all the same. It was much easier to forgive myself through someone else and by the end of the meditation, that hypercritical voice had shut up.
It’s easy to be hard on ourselves. It’s much less easy to be hard on the people we love, which can make for an incredibly good practice in compassion until we, ourselves, are included in that scope.