{May I begin to accept myself as I am.

Perhaps there are particular words of kindness and support that you need to hear right now in this difficult situation.

In other words, in a moment of struggle, we don’t practice to be free of our pain—we practice compassion because sometimes it’s hard to be a human being.

Mindfulness focuses primarily on acceptance of experience. Self-compassion focuses more on caring for the experiencer.

This means that other people are partly responsible for our state of mind, but we are also partly responsible for their state of mind. The good news is that emotional contagion gives us more power than we realize to change the emotional tenor of our relationships. Self-compassion can interrupt a downward spiral and start an upward spiral instead.

when we criticize ourselves we’re tapping into the body’s threat-defense system (sometimes referred to as our reptilian brain). Among the many ways we can react to perceived danger, the threat-defense system is the quickest and most easily triggered. This means that self-criticism is often our first reaction when things go wrong.

It’s common for people to find that it’s a lot easier to feel loving-kindness for a loved one than for themselves. In this meditation, we start with an easy person to activate the energy of loving-kindness, and then we “tuck ourselves in” to keep the flow of loving-kindness going toward a more difficult person— ourselves.

Another way to describe the three essential elements of self-compassion is loving (self-kindness), connected (common humanity) presence (mindfulness). When

Research shows that self-compassionate people not only have greater self-confidence, but they are less likely to fear failure and are more likely to try again when they do fail, and to persist in their efforts to keep learning.