Compassion for

Yourself.

When it comes to virtues, Compassion is often misinterpreted (or misplaced). We generally want to be compassionate about other beings – Humans, Animals, Nature etc. What about yourself ?

Life is mostly hard for everyone, even for those who we think it might be easy. Who knows what they are going through. We also run ourselves into mistakes, quite often. We only learn from falling or committing mistakes. Trying to be perfect creates nothing but anxiety and obsession.

Should we not be first compassionate and forgiving about ourselves ?

Instead of judging and being hard on ourselves, we can be aware of what mistakes we do. Empathise and be compassionate that as we are aware of the mistake, we learn from it and try to correct it in future.

Karma always gets back to us. If we did a mistake, it will come back to us. There is no need for ourselves to punish again and drift into remorse. Be aware and acknowledge. May be feel it out or breathe it out. There is nothing that can be done, unfortunately. This can be applied to all our behaviours of fear of missing, impulsiveness, feelings of regret and so on.

Start the journey of Compassion for your self first. It will naturally follow for others. There is no compassion for others if we don’t have it for ourselves first.

If you want to make it pragmatic, think of an Agile Development Team. We usually encourage failing as a Team with an objective to fail fast and learn from it. This was not the case several years back. Apply the same for your life and move on. You will feel compassion arising naturally.