Sublime

Barbara Stanny’s Overcoming Underearning Kate Northrup’s Money: A Love Story

By spending a little time cultivating friendship towards yourself, you are gradually dissolving the negative forces of fear and guilt within. This reduces your adhesive preoccupation with your own mental landscape which, in turn, releases a wellspring of happiness, compassion and creativity that benefits everyone. A good way of looking at this is t

Maintaining our self-esteem is critical. Fundamentally this is about loving ourselves unconditionally – compassionately recognising our core humanity and capacity to make our own way.

Being nurturing toward those we care about means sometimes saying no. In the same way, self-compassion involves valuing yourself in a deep way, making choices that lead to well-being in the long term. Self-compassion wants to heal dysfunctions, not perpetuate them.

By sacrificing ourselves to the insatiable god of self-esteem, we are trading the ever-unfolding wonder and mystery of our lives for a sterile Polaroid snapshot. Instead of reveling in the richness and complexity of our experience—the joy and the pain, the love and anger, the passion, the triumphs and the tragedies—we try to capture and sum up our

We don’t need others to respond with care and compassion in order to feel worthy of love. We don’t need to look outside ourselves for the acceptance and security we crave.

Here’s an exercise to help increase self-compassion:24 1. Write a description of a situation that you’re beating yourself up about—it can be anything from an aspect of your sexual functioning to your romantic relationship (or lack thereof) to your work to your body or anything else. Be sure to include the self-critical thoughts you’re battering you

Any time we admit a difficult truth, any time we face that which we have been afraid to face, any time we acknowledge, to ourselves or to others, facts the existence of which we have been evading, any time we are willing to tolerate temporary fear or anxiety on the path to better contact with reality, our self-esteem increases.