Self Compassion
Self-Care is a very trendy term right now. All the things we do for to make sure we’re taking care of ourselves is very important. And it’s crazy to me that we had to promote this term in our society right now because we’ve all become so overwhelmed and busy that we forget to take care of ourselves. But it’s true. We all need reminders to just care for our bodies and our minds.
Self Compassion is different. Self compassion is about caring for yourself as a human, part of society and the Universe. It’s about caring about yourself, more than caring for yourself. To me, self compassion happens on 2 levels. First, when I allow myself to set boundaries, take up space, be heard, or simply just exist without judgement. Actually, that’s not simple. Have you ever tried just sitting and doing nothing and not judging yourself? It’s so hard not to criticize ourselves!
The second form of self compassion happens when you make a mistake and don’t beat yourself up about it. You accept that it happened and move on. I don’t find myself doing this very often. I really hate making mistakes, so I not only work hard to prevent them, I am hypercritical on myself when I found I’ve messed up. You would think the severity of the mistake would alter my reaction, but no, not really; sometimes the tiniest mistakes are the worst, mostly because I feel I should have been able to avoid something so small and simple. It takes a lot of work to move on from most of my mistakes and the only mistakes I ever really 'write off’ are the ones where I did my best in a situation I wasn’t prepared or trained for. In my mind, those aren’t mistakes, just learning experiences.
Today I found myself practicing self compassion without even having to force it. It was small, but my thought process on it was a huge win! I’ve been trying to cut back caffeine recently. I’ve been doing good job so far, having cut my intake in half over the last 2 weeks, and trying really hard to stick to it. Well, today I didn’t. I had an extra drink. I didn’t think much about it, and I think I mostly drank it just because it was in front of me. As I finished, I thought to myself: “Huh, I wasn’t supposed to do that. I guess today wasn’t a good day for that particular habit change. I’ll try again tomorrow.”
WHAT?! So simple yet huge! I didn’t yell at myself about how I’m a failure for not sticking to my goals. I didn’t get sad and compound on it to make myself feel like I’d never be able to change my habits if I couldn’t do it for this one day. I didn’t judge myself at all for it! I let myself have the mistake and the hope that I’d get back to my goal tomorrow. Why is this such a revelation to me?!
I’ve spent my entire lifetime feeling judged for everything. True, it’s me doing most of that judgement, but it still makes me feel like I have to be ‘perfect’ all the time. So for me to have that kind of a reaction to a mistake, even a minor one…especially a minor one, is a really big deal.
Self-Compassion, like everything else in life, is a practice. Some days, we’ll be better at it than others. Maybe today it was really hard to move past a mistake, or set a boundary, or make your voice heard, but tomorrow is a good opportunity to try again.
