Cultivating Self-Compassion

Self-compassion is being willing to look at your mistakes or failures with kindness and understanding—without harsh criticism or defensiveness. 

Most of us believe that we need to be hard on ourselves to perform at our best, but it turns out that a dose of self-compassion when things are...

Having compassion for yourself is really no different from having it for others. No one is perfect, we all make mistakes and it’s OK to feel stressed or sad. Pain and suffering are part of our shared human experience; they are just a reaction to what’s going on in our life.

Particularly in the West, people have adopted a propensity for self-criticism as a cultural value, and tend to self-punish when dealing with setbacks and failures, she says. But excessive self-criticism gets in the way of achieving your goals. 

There are three parts to practicing se...