Showing Compassion For Yourself

The only true way of finding happiness, is showing compassion for yourself. Here's how to successfully do it...

Compassion is defined as 'alleviating distress'. A distressed person will feel various degrees of anger, fear, sadness, despair; in short - negative emotions. When you're feeling negative, you will receive feedback reinforcing your negativity whenever you interact with others.

This happens both because you elicit such responses through your negative attitude and project your negative perceptions onto most situations you encounter.

Simply put, you reap what you sow while you're sowing it.

THE BIGGEST MISTAKE is to think that compassion is foremost about taking another person's pain upon yourself. Not so. Firstly, show compassion for yourself, the rest will follow due to the 'reap what you sow' principle.

How can you show compassion for yourself?

Meditation, which means 'awareness', helps you become aware of distress and pain as well as pleasure. The good thing is that simply becoming aware of distress helps alleviate it. This is a good thing! It is in fact backed up by science.

With awareness of distress, you're now also able to take further action to relieve it.

Please notice...

That's perfectly fine! You are showing compassion for yourself by accepting who you are - the good, the bad, and the ugly. There's no one else like you. And as every other species you have a niche, a special place to which you shall adapt if you want to be happy. A place to thrive!

You can only find this place by getting to know your true self, through the pain and pleasure, a lot of which I'm sure you have already been through.

You see, reason and emotion interact in the human brain. Compassion meditation, focusing on positive emotions, tends to trigger positive reasons corresponding with the emotions. Done regularly, compassion meditation can dig up a treasure trove of great memories, dreams, aspirations, enjoyable activities etc.

These are known as your flow activities (in Positive Psychology terms) - 'niche pointers' --> Your Happy place, remember?

And so, compassion meditation is an excellent way to help make you aware of your true dreams and hopes, which you in turn will realize when you're showing compassion for yourself in doing the things you love, and loving yourself for doing them.

That's how you reap and sow true happiness.

Go from Showing Compassion For Yourself to The Science Of Compassion.





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