Hi friend,

Welcome to Lesson One of Boundless Self-Compassion. If you’re starting out with trepidation about poking at your wounds and unpacking your traumas, you can relax for now. Your journey towards self-compassion begins, strangely enough, not by gazing inward but by looking outward.

Since you signed up for this course, it is likely that the idea of self-compassion doesn’t quite make sense to you for whatever reason. Perhaps you are disappointed by yourself and about how your life has turned out. Perhaps you hold yourself to higher expectations than you hold others. Or perhaps you truly don’t believe you deserve compassion from anyone, let alone from yourself.

If this is the case, then no matter what I say about your basic good, your value on this planet, or your right to self-compassion, the words will bounce off of you without even making a dent. You’ll have a list of reasons I am wrong, reasons you should feel badly about yourself, reasons you are dissatisfied with the person you have become.

But we’re not going to focus on those reasons today. If a garden is overrun with weeds, we don’t start by grasping at the thorns. That gives us bloody fingers but leaves the roots clinging deep. Instead, to rid a garden of weeds, we loosen the soil with water and with a trowel. We dig deep to find the stubborn roots of the weed, and we pull from there. It is only by removing the whole weed that we can make room for the beautiful flowers that have yet to be planted.

And so it is with the beliefs that get in the way of planting seeds of self-compassion. We must loosen the soil of our garden before we can address the roots of those beliefs themselves.

Compassion and Common Humanity

The word compassion comes from the Latin word compati, which means “to suffer with.” For many of us, it is easier to sit with someone else while they are suffering than it is to hold positive feelings about ourselves while we are suffering. It might be that we’re scared to truly sit with ourselves, because we don’t know what we’ll discover. Often, we want to believe we did something to deserve our own suffering--because if we did something to cause it, maybe we can do something to avoid it next time. And for some of us, we just haven’t learned how to be kind to ourselves when we’re less than perfect.

Whatever the reason for your own particular self-compassion block, I believe that the first step towards learning how to practice self-compassion is to develop our connection with others. We are beings wired for connection, for love. And it is often easier to start practicing love and compassion towards others--and then apply it to ourselves by extension--than it is to jump straight to trying to love ourselves.

Kristin Neff, a self-compassion researcher who works and teaches here in Austin, terms this awareness of others (and knowledge of belonging with them) Common Humanity. Personally, I call this our Universal Mind. The only way to move beyond our own limitations is by tapping into our connection with the Universal—whether the universal is “God,” the natural world, or (in this case) your community and in fact humanity as a whole.

To be a human being means to have weaknesses, to make mistakes, and to experience pain. We are all suffering under those burdens. We have all suffered heartache and loss, felt stressed about finances, worried about those we loved. We have all felt inadequate in our bodies and felt stupid. We’ve all lost relationships and had major disappointments.

In fact, every single person on this planet is experiencing some kind of pain, always.

Developing a sense of common humanity is important to developing self-compassion because it means you are suffering with others, not in isolation. If you have ever thought that your life seems to be much harder than other people’s lives, or felt that your own inadequacies dwarfed others’, then you have not yet developed your own sense of Common Humanity.

Such a sense of separation from everyone else probably increases your suffering, because it tells you that are uniquely suffering. It blocks your ability to connect with others and increases your loneliness. It also reinforces the belief that you do not even deserve compassion because you are so uniquely flawed.

My friend, you are not uniquely flawed. You are a human being, and being human is fucking hard.

To that end, today’s meditation and exercise is intended to help you develop your own sense of Common Humanity. I invite you to do both with a sense of gentle curiousity about yourself, and your own sense of your belonging with humanity.