🏝️Self-compassion by Kristin Neff

It's changing my life!

Although the book Self-compassion by Kristin Neff has been out since 2011, I only recently encountered and read it—and I’m so glad I did!

The book straightforwardly lays out what self-compassion is and why we need it, drawing on research performed by Neff and her colleagues.

Writing for a general audience, Neff discusses common points of resistance to self-compassion, examples of its healing power in different areas of life, and relevant stories from her own personal life.

I listened to the book as an audiobook through the Libby library app, and then I also went and bought a physical copy of the book (as I tend to do with books I listen to and love—I want to have them to reread, mark up, and refer back to).

Here’s a passage I liked from the opening chapter, for example:

“Self-compassion involves wanting health and wellbeing for oneself and leads to proactive behavior to better one’s situation, rather than passivity. And self-compassion doesn’t mean that I think my problems are more important than yours, it just means I think that my problems are also important and worthy of being attended to.” (p. 12)

Thus, self-compassion is not self-pity, self-indulgence, or selfishness. It’s also neither letting ourselves off the hook when we’ve hurt others, nor wallowing in guilt about it:

“If we’re consumed with feelings of shame and inadequacy because of what we’ve done, we are actually being self-absorbed…Self-compassion provides the emotional safety needed to take responsibility for our actions, consider their impact on others, and sincerely apologize for our behavior.” (p. 182)

There’s so much more deep wisdom in this book, but my time is running out for working on this post…

So let me say that as for me, because of this book, I have been practicing self-compassion more—telling myself things like, “This is hard, you’re doing just fine, it’s okay not to do all these things right now, you’re only human, just do what you can,” and so on…

And just like that, I’m changing my internal narrative!!

It’s truly revolutionary.

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