Finding Happiness - Part 2. Compassion Creates Connection
If you’re anything like me - perfectionist tendencies, workaholic, excellent at setting the bar just a little too high - self compassion can be a pretty difficult concept.
The kindness and support we find easy to offer to friends and family, can be much harder to give to ourselves, and we are often hard on ourselves in ways that we would never be to others.
So what is compassion exactly, and how is it different to kindness? It might be easier to outline first, what it is not.
Compassion is not pity. It is not empathising to the point of taking on another’s problems - but it does involve trying to understand all the factors that go to create a situation, and being gentle with those. It is about putting yourself in another’s shoes, and it is also about seeing yourself in others.
Because, on any given day, we are all balancing a certain number of good situations and a certain number of difficult ones. We are all facing problems each day, and we will all need help and support at one point in our lives or another.
Which is easy to say of our friends perhaps; but not so easy to accept in ourselves.
So the next time you catch yourself giving yourself an unwarranted hard time - try to take a step back, and ask yourself if you would treat a friend like that, or someone you love.
Because self compassion creates a softness that spreads. It creates an understanding that makes problems easier to solve, easier to carry; we begin to recognise that we are all carrying our share of difficulties, and that insight creates a sense of connection that can be incredibly healing.
And since we are all, ultimately, looking for happiness, I think it’s fair to say that we are much more likely to find it in a sense of connection, in a sense of shared understanding and compassion, than in a continued struggle to be better than each other, or to achieve more.
Sympathising with others helps us to give that sympathy to ourselves, just as being kind to ourselves, helps us to be more understanding of others. We begin to see ourselves for who we really are, to respect ourselves a little more, to accept both our good and our bad.
We learn to give love and to receive love.
So give yourself a break tonight. Do something supportive for yourself - even if that’s just going to bed an hour or two early - because those things you need to do? They can wait.
You’ll handle them so much better after a good night’s sleep.
Further reading:
‘Self Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself’, by Kristen Neff
https://www.mindful.org/the-transformative-effects-of-mindful-self-compassion/