Hey! Welcome back to your daily mindfulness. Today, we're going to talk about self-compassion. So yesterday, we discussed how we can easily add another layer of suffering and pain to our experience by fighting, resisting, pushing, and judging. Well, one of the other ways that we can help combat that or work with that, I think is a better word, is through cultivating some self-compassion. If we're beating ourselves up for having the experience that we're having, it's just going to be a very bumpy journey.

So there's something powerful to be said about cultivating a relationship to our experience, that's kind, that's warm. And there's a great researcher, Kristin Neff, who is probably the world's leading researcher on cultivating self-compassion. And she says there are three things that we need to work with when it comes to self-compassion. The first is self-kindness over self-judgment. So self-judgment, notice if that word resonates.

If you ever find yourself caught up in the internal narrative of what's wrong with me, why can't I get this right? Or even I'm an idiot. It's abrasive. Rarely would we let someone else talk to us in that way, but we tend to get away with it ourselves. So, self-kindness over self-judgment. What's it like to have a kinder, inner narrative to yourself? It's okay.

You did your best. Like we're trying, we're human, we're, we're doing our best to get it right. We didn't ask for this to happen. It's just a part of life. Do you hear or feel the difference in that? The self-kindness versus the self-judgment? At least for me, even as I'm saying it, I can feel a difference in my body.

This can go a long way when it comes to cultivating resilience during different cold times. Even though something like self-kindness doesn't feel like resilience in the normal way we would think about it. It allows us to navigate the experience without creating more suffering. So self-kindness versus self judgment. The next thing she talks about is common humanity versus isolation.

So, the common humanity piece is, is our ability to see with perspective that whatever we're going through and whatever we're experiencing in relationship to it, is a part of the human experience. Everyone goes through this. Everyone has difficult thoughts. Everyone has difficult experiences. Everyone gets confused, has doubt, is unsure what they're supposed to do next at some point in their lives.

This is just what it means to be human. But a lot of times we isolate. We take it personally. We say, you know, woe is me, or we get caught up in self-pity, or this is just something I go through. That, that isolation is, is limiting.

And it's painful because it leads to more of the self-judgment that we just talked about. So this common humanity just broadens our perspective, opens our heart, allows us to connect to the reality that this is not an individual experience. Which takes us to the last one, mindfulness over self-identification. When we get so caught up in self-identification with the thoughts of, these are my thoughts, or I'm the one thinking this, or I'm the one having these emotions. On one level, it's kind of true.

On another level, these things are just arising. And we can hold them in our awareness with that perspective of not getting so sucked into the content, rather just observing. Oh, Look at this thought right now, look at this emotion, look at this sensation, look at this pain. This is what it's like to hold this moment as it is. So these three things, can we cultivate them to deepen our self-compassion? More self-kindness, seeing the common humanity and cultivating mindfulness.

We'll talk more about this in today's meditation. Thank you for your practice and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.