Quote:
Originally Posted by Abby
Thank you.
I think when I say that compassion is to stay, it reflects your meaning that it is to not look away. This definitely resonates with me.
I'm working on being compassionate to myself. It's a challenge because there is a part of me that quite obviously wants to destroy any positive feelings. Perhaps instead of battling this I could spend more time focusing outwards. Although I'll admit that even in this I become scared often; isn't that silly. I think it is a risk to be compassionate, mainly because it might not be accepted by the other person.
Yesterday when I was driving out of a car park and I saw a man on a bench. He looked sad; he stood up and I thought he was going to pick up the rubbish bin which, from putting two and two together, I assumed he'd punched over earlier in a rage. But he didn't, he kicked it further. He was still upset. I saw this in my rear view mirror. Part of me wanted to get out and ask him if he was okay but the other part thought about how I don't know the situation, I don't want to upset him further and as I'd passed it in the car before I fully could comprehend it all, I didn't. For me, the spark is there, it's just hard to be guided by it and not look away.
Thank you again.
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I can definitely understand the difficulty of finding compassion for yourself.
I learned this really neat trick some years back. Instead of battling with the allusiveness of "compassion for myself" which is a difficult process really, I decided to something else:
I imagine looking at myself as if I were another person but with the knowledge of what this person has been through. So I step away and look at her, and imagine what I would say to her if it wasn't me. I looked at her, I felt sadness for all the pain she went through, I felt understanding for the things she did and it was almost impossible to blame her, to think anything bad about her because my heart just went out to her.
That's how I learnt compassion for myself. It made it absolutely impossible to stay in a self-loathing place because it felt like I am doing something really awful to a person who has been through enough, why would I judge her, hurt her, despise her on top of that?
I used to imagine myself as a little girl. I had this picture of me as a 5 year old and I felt so much compassion, knowing that this beautiful little girl was so severely physically hurt. I can't look away if it was a different little girl, so why should I look away from the little girl I was? Or from the teenager who was lonely and depressed? Or from the young twenty-something woman who was desperately trying to find love and did almost anything to get it, even it meant hurting a lot of nice guys?
That helped me a lot.