Quotes About Self-compassion

Rather than stumbling and fighting against their negative feelings, they are graceful in their acceptance of them.

I think I could learn a little patience with myself if I took a view of myself that included concepts like dormancy (instead of laziness), seed planting (instead of just scattered), gestation (instead of doing-something-right-this-second).

One of the reasons many of us avoid meditation is that we think of it as work—and work we may not do perfectly. What if we didn't have to do it perfectly? What if we didn't have to "do" it at all? What if we could rest—and let God do the rest?

Growth is an erratic forward movement: two steps forward, one step back. Remember that and be very gentle with yourself. A creative recovery is a healing process. You are capable of great things on Tuesday, but on Wednesday you may slide backward. This is normal. Growth occurs in spurts. You will lie dormant sometimes. Do not be discouraged. Think of it as resting.

The morning pages will teach you to stop judging and just let yourself write. So what if you're tired, crabby, distracted, stressed? Your artist is a child and it needs to be fed. Morning pages feed your artist child. So write your morning pages.

Acknowledge to yourself that the current criticism is triggering grief over a long-standing wound.

Aiming for that, I learned to write setting judgment aside and save a polish for later. I called this new, freer writing "laying track." For the first time I gave myself emotional permission to do rough drafts and for those rough drafts to be, well, rough.

Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse. This happens in any number of ways: beginning work is measured against the masterworks of other artists; beginning work is exposed to premature criticism, shown to overly critical friends.

You could do it better if only you would let yourself do it!

When we feel anger, we are often very angry that we feel anger.

Growth is an erratic forward movement: two steps forward, one step back. Remember that and be very gentle with yourself. A creative recovery is a healing process. You are capable of great things on Tuesday, but on Wednesday you may slide backwards. This is normal. Growth occurs in spurts. You will lie dormant sometimes. Do not be discouraged. Think of it as resting.

If there was one thing she excelled at, it was being her own inner mean girl.

If you think your job is to fix what is broken, you keep finding more broken places to mend.

Imagine treating yourself with the kindness that you show people you love.

My mother used to say, "When you can learn to laugh at yourself, a lot of healing comes from that."

Your real influence is measured by your treatment of yourself.

People can be more forgiving than you can imagine. But you have to forgive yourself. Let go of what's bitter and move on.

Today I will simply accept. I will relinquish the need to be in resistance to myself and my environment in any way. I will move forward in joy by accepting where I am right now.

The point is that our true nature is not some ideal that we have to live up to. It's who we are right now, and that's what we can make friends with and celebrate.

Denying our weaknesses is neither power, nor protection. We cannot overcome those disabling parts of our own nature which in fact steal our power away, if we do not acknowledge they exist.

Forgiving ourselves and learning from our inevitable mistakes transforms failure from a stumbling block into a stepping stone.

What is perfect, anyway? The absence of perfection and the existence of human nature in place of something we want to do or we don't want to do, is an excuse, not an exoneration.

Make peace with your body, it's not manmade, there are no flaws, there are no mistakes.

When you're at peace with yourself and love your self, it is virtually impossible to do things to yourself that are destructive.