A process for developing personal compassion to engage in compassionate community for a more compassionate world

Welcome to Compassionate Sunday. We’re working through Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life by Karen Armstrong, one step per month.

If you live in the St. Louis area, an in-person study group started working with this book and will continue for the next few months. Let me know if you’d like to join us and I’ll you hook you up!

If you’d like to share a post about what you learned about compassion (The First Step) or what you’re seeing in your world (The Second Step) or self-compassion (The Third Step), use the link list below. Or join the discussion in the comments or on Facebook.

For my adventures with the third step on self-compassion, I’m continuing to explore the exercises at self-compassion.org and they continue to be helpful. Last week, I discovered that a good plan is an act of self-compassion for me.

I learned, this week, that my inner critic uses an angry and judgmental tone and is really big on demands that begin with “You should….” When I was younger, I often identified this voice as my mother’s, but she’s been gone for ten years and that no longer feels true. I have long-since internalized the critic’s voice and it’s all mine, now, for better or worse.

My inner critic really does seem to want what’s best for me, she just doesn’t have any patience with the stuff of life that gets in the way of what I claim I want. My inner critic doesn’t take sick days, doesn’t deal well with competing desires, and doesn’t see any need for experimentation to see if what I think I want is really going to work for me. A pushy inner critic makes it hard for me to step back and make sure that what I wrote in my plan is the best action at this moment.

Putting these two weeks together, then, I learned that I want to be fully aware of my emotions before I make a plan. And, I want to revisit those emotions frequently to make sure that the plan is going to take me where I want to go. That’s not what I expected to be thinking about during self-compassion month, but it works for me!

What does self-compassion look like for you?