Compassion

Learning to have compassion for myself has been like learning any new skill. It felt so clunky at the beginning and like I would never get any better. I had to keep referring to notes and references as a reminder of how to do this new and foreign thing. 

self-compassion was all Greek to me

There are a lot of representations i of self love but few that fully embody self compassion. It's one thing to look in the mirror and say “Erin, I love the enthusiasm you bring to a new project.” It’s much harder to look in the mirror and say “Erin, you made a really hard decision, and it's okay that you feel devastated right now.” Its been difficult to learn how to making space for myself to be imperfect and compassionately allow all my feelings. At the beginning I had to trick myself. I would look at myself in the mirror and pretend I’m talking to someone else. That small separation from the idea of self, allowed me to give that woman in the mirror more compassion than I knew how to show myself. 

The woman in the mirror needed to be someone else because self-compassion felt selfish. Like putting my needs and feelings first somehow made me a bad person. 

Through tears or laughter or almost debilitating surrender I continued to show her compassion. Using my literal voice has been a powerful tool in my healing, so I would literally tell her “It’s okay to feel sad or hurt or numb”. “You made the best decision you could at the time.” “I’m proud of you for being vulnerable.  Or even  simply just saying “Thanks for just doing the dishes, when that felt like a huge task.”

I've made a lot of progress and I plan to share more of that in this near future. But today I felt called to share with you a model of self-compassion that I didn’t know I needed until it found me.

“I know who I am. 

I love who I am. 

I like what I do. 

And I like how I do it. 

And I like my mistakes. 

And I like the way I learn. 

And I like the pace with which I learn my mistakes. 

I don't want to be anybody else - but me. 

And knowing that, I want to continue figuring out what the fuck I am. 

That's it.”

Zoe Saldana