Doubts, reproaches, inner criticism, you find it hard to love yourself. You’re tired of constantly devaluing and criticizing yourself. How can you learn to love yourself? How can you rediscover self-love? In this article, I invite you to explore a powerful practice: self-compassion.

You may already be familiar with compassion, and you probably find it easy to practice it with others. What if you learned to cultivate it for yourself? Because taking care of yourself starts with accepting yourself fully.

In this article, I invite you to discover what self-compassion is. And I’ll give you the keys to putting it into practice and learning to love yourself more.

What is compassion?

Compassion is being sensitive to the misfortunes of others. When we practice compassion for others, we take their suffering into account, we are sensitive to it. This leads to greater understanding, acceptance and humanity. It’s not about pity or condescension, but about feeling touched by the suffering of other beings.

Practising compassion for others often seems easy. We often find it easier to cultivate compassion for others than for ourselves.

WHAT IS SELF-COMPASSION?
Self-compassion can help us to connect with ourselves, to understand and accept that we sometimes suffer. And that this sometimes leads us to blame ourselves instead of taking care of ourselves. Practising self-compassion to learn to love ourselves is to stop blaming ourselves, to be gentler with ourselves.

Our upbringing, our beliefs and our past can sometimes lead us to condemn ourselves incessantly. Our upbringing, for example, makes us notice more often what we fail at than what we succeed at. As children, we were more often focused on what we couldn’t do. Over the years, we’ve sometimes come to see what’s wrong with us, rather than congratulating ourselves on what’s right.

Over the years, this can become a habit, making us feel ill at ease and more uncompromising with ourselves. Apart from the fact that this doesn’t help us, we also tend to become harder on others.

Self-compassion leads us to recognize that we have moments of suffering. And that we don’t have to be hard on ourselves, but can instead develop more gentleness and understanding during these moments: self-compassion for learning to love ourselves.

ATTITUDES TO DEVELOP:
When we want to develop self-compassion to learn to love ourselves, here are some attitudes we should develop.

Accept that we suffer: when we feel suffering, whether because we’ve done something wrong, or because life’s events have taken their toll on us, it’s vital to accept our suffering. We sometimes tend to “put on a brave face”, as if it were shameful not to be well. Beliefs can prevent us from seeing or accepting this suffering, the fear of appearing weak.
May you take a moment, each time you experience suffering, to accept this state of affairs. Who says you have to be strong all the time?

The next time you feel the urge to blame yourself, could you take a moment to recognize that this is an uncomfortable moment for you?
Cultivate indulgence: when one of your friends makes a blunder or a mistake. How do you behave towards him? What words do you have for him, to comfort him? Do you call him an idiot, a moron? I hope not.

So why not pay the same kind attention to yourself when you make mistakes, or when your attitude isn’t exactly what you’d like it to be? Try to develop understanding and support for yourself. Everyone makes mistakes at some point in their lives.
When you realize that you’re saying harsh things to yourself, take a few moments to reflect. And take the time to give yourself words of comfort: “oh, it’s hard for me right now, could I be more forgiving of myself?

CAN I AT LEAST TRY?
Stop comparing yourself: when you meet people, do you tend to find them better than you? More cheerful, more intelligent, more competent, more beautiful? This attitude is quite common. Yet the first thing you might do is tell yourself that you don’t know much about these people. This habit of comparing yourself is one of the habits you need to break if you want to be more serene.

Do you share all your difficulties with the first person you meet? Do you tell them everything you’ve been through? Certainly not. And I think that most people don’t share their difficulties so easily. They often show their best side, especially when meeting people in public.
You might be surprised if you knew a little more about them. So why compare yourself? You can never really know what other people are going through, either in their day-to-day lives or on the inside. What’s more, each person is unique and goes through life’s events in a different way. For the same situation, the ways in which we experience it and adapt to it depend on each of us, our histories, our habits and our beliefs. And this difference is what makes humanity so rich. So stop comparing yourself: you’re unique, and that’s wonderful!

“Nobody’s perfect”: I’m sure you’ve already uttered this phrase to comfort a friend who was blaming himself or herself for a mistake. You’ve reassured him or her that it happens to everyone, that it’s no big deal, that he or she has nothing to blame himself or herself for. So could you say that to yourself the next time you make a mistake? Accept your humanity, the fact that, yes, you have the right to make mistakes, that, yes, you’re human, and that any human on this earth makes mistakes. It’s by learning to love ourselves more that we find greater peace and serenity.

Accept life’s ups and downs: life can throw up some good surprises, but it can also throw up some not-so-good ones. And I’d like to tell you: “that’s life”. You don’t have to try so hard to make everything perfect – it’s not possible. By focusing on the goal of a “perfect” life, you’re stressing yourself out unnecessarily.
It can even make you feel responsible, and put a little more pressure on yourself.
Of course, you can change a number of things, and make your life as smooth as possible. But you can’t escape grief and painful events simply by not wanting them to happen.

You can also show self-compassion in these moments by realizing that, yes, it’s a difficult moment, that it’s hurting and bothering you. But pretending it doesn’t exist or blaming yourself won’t help.

WHY LEARN TO LOVE YOURSELF?
Without self-love, there can be no self-fulfilment. If you don’t love yourself, you’ll end up not loving others. By blaming and reproaching yourself, you end up sad, even bitter and angry.

Learning to love yourself means opening yourself up to the possibility of accepting every aspect of yourself: your foibles, your mistakes, your blunders, your shortcomings. It also means learning to forgive ourselves.

Learning to love ourselves means stopping putting constant pressure on ourselves to succeed at everything, to be perfect, to miss nothing. It means allowing ourselves to have ups and downs, and not blaming ourselves for them.

IN A NUTSHELL
I’ll summarize the essential points: accept your suffering when it arises, be indulgent with yourself as you would be with a good friend, don’t compare yourself with others, don’t try to be perfect (nobody is), accept that there may be painful moments in your life.

I hope this article has given you the keys to cultivating self-compassion, and putting more gentleness into your life.