Today's Thought - August

[bluidkiti]

August 18

Connecting to Compassion

In her book Befriending Your Body: A Self-Compassionate Approach to Freeing Yourself from Disordered Eating, my friend Ann Saffi Biasetti offers an amazing perspective on compassion. Ann acknowledges that people in early recovery don't find it easy to feel self-compassion. When we embark on our healing journeys, we may not even know what compassion is, let alone feel worthy of giving it to ourselves.

In these cases, Ann suggests, we can start by looking outside of ourselves to find compassion, and then take it in. She calls this "building compassion from the outside in." We can do this by acknowledging the people around us who care about us, or we can be inspired by a song that stirs compassion or books that focus on compassion. Connecting with these external sources of compassion and focusing on what is outside of us can, as Ann reminds us, awaken what is inside of us.

We can invite compassion into our lives, embrace it, and then shower it upon ourselves.

Today's reading is from the book She Recovers Every Day: Meditations for Women*