Self-Compassionate Living Newsletter, May 2025
“By means of a diversion, we can avoid our own company 24 hours a day.”
Blaise Pascal
“If we can trust and listen to our inner divine image, our whole-making instinct, or our True Self, we will act from our best, largest, kindest, most inclusive self.”
Richard Rohr
“Always remember how you want your story to end.”
Barton T. Geger, S.J.
Thank you for subscribing to the Self-Compassionate Living Newsletter! You can cultivate self-compassion by learning and practicing it. Engaging with a supportive community usually makes it easier. You signed up to receive this monthly newsletter as part of that effort. I will endeavor to inform and inspire you, and together, we will explore ways to treat ourselves better. Thank you for inviting me to join you on your journey!
Last month, I introduced the concept of separating who you are from how your body feels. This concept is a valuable concept to learn and practice to be more self-compassionate, and I will talk more about it in future newsletters.
This month, I’m going to introduce some concepts and offer some short commentary on them. Thus, when I mention them in future newsletters or in my Creating Self-Compassion classes, hopefully, the concepts won’t feel so foreign to you.
Self-compassion, Being Present, Wisdom, and Reality
Self-compassion
Self-compassion can be defined in many ways depending on the situation. A good all-encompassing definition is treating yourself the way you want to be treated, especially mentally and emotionally. Please note that mentally and emotionally, self-compassion is a mind skill! Interestingly, it’s also paramount to know how you want to be treated. We will come back to this (a little bit) in the Awareness section below and a lot in future newsletters.
All the definitions I use are from a glossary I’ve created; you can read it by clicking here: Blair Ashby’s Glossary for Learning Self-Compassion and Communication.
For many of us, treating ourselves well frequently feels unnatural. We are very good at grabbing and holding onto things that feel good. Unfortunately, for being self-compassionate, we tend to also struggle releasing things that feel good even if they don’t build our lives up. That means that self-compassion is a skill that we learn and then practice. Self-compassion is a discipline; it is not a feeling. It’s treating yourself the way you want to be treated!
Fortunately, positive feelings toward yourself will arise as you practice self-compassion. Those positive feelings are a consequence of treating yourself well; they are not self-compassion itself; they are a result of practicing self-compassion.
Learning to discern positive feelings from treating yourself well is sometimes a challenging aspect of becoming self-compassionate. Fortunately, because you want to be more self-compassionate, you can learn the difference between the two experiences. All it requires is using wisdom and patience to sift through the sometimes-confusing thoughts and feelings triggered by experiences.
Being Present or Awareness
Being present is the foundational skill of self-compassion. The more present we are in each thought that happens in our brain and the activities we experience, the more possibilities we have to treat ourselves better. Being present means you are consciously and intentionally active in your thoughts and actions. Notice the secret is intention; what do you really, Really, REALLY want in each situation? Intention takes effort and energy, so it also matters how much you’re willing to invest in your life.
The opposite of being present is autopilot.
Autopilot is just a name for a survival mechanism our brains use to save energy, and it has some other familiar names like habit and muscle memory. Many people think autopilot is bad or wrong; it is not. Instead, it is a method developed by survival to save energy in our body, which has the unfortunate consequence of rendering us consciously asleep. Our bodies are working, performing the normal tasks needed for mental or physical survival, and our logical, intentional thinking brain is put to sleep to save calories. From a self-compassionate perspective, when we are on autopilot, we are not intentionally creating our lives because we are letting muscle memory and habit direct our actions. In other words, we are not consciously alive; we are simply not dead.
Wisdom
Wisdom can be a compound term. In the practice of self-compassion, I mean aware, intentional, knowledgeable, experienced, and patient. When we utilize all those skills, especially patience, we become familiar with the usual ways our mind reacts and processes thoughts, and we learn how we want it to react and be treated.
In my life, when I started practicing self-compassion, it took me several months to identify my authentic desires and my core values for my life. It was easy to define the things that felt good and brought me pleasure; it was challenging to define my authentic preferences beyond the feelings. Who I really, Really, REALLY was and what I really, Really, REALLY wanted for my life, much less for my individual days and hours, was information frequently unknown to me. I can imagine that sounds strange to hear. Let me offer an example.
My whole childhood, I was told I was an extrovert by my friends and teachers, and I believed those statements. I was told my whole life I was extroverted, and I was so caught up in being the extrovert I was always told I was, that I never listened to myself to understand that being with people in person, although fun, drained me. Once I started paying attention to myself, and after several months of watching and learning about my energy levels, I discovered I was an introvert. Unfortunately, this ignorance of myself had dictated and created my life all the way through bankruptcy and a divorce before I learned to be present to my thoughts, emotions, and body.
Upon understanding this factor about myself, many of my life’s actions made a lot more sense. Once I realized being in person with people drained me, I began reshaping my life to cultivate my love of community with people and not feel drained by it for days afterwards.
I also learned that instead of grasping onto any easy answers that seemed to make me feel better instantly, watching how I felt with every situation helped me understand my brain/body’s way of interfacing with people and situations. Then, I utilized all that knowledge to create the life that offered me joy, peace, and contentment in all situations.
Thus, being patient through positive and negative feeling situations, learning from them, and then using that knowledge to formulate my life, offered me the wisdom I needed to create my life instead of reacting to life.
It also wasn’t easy, and that brings us to reality.
Reality
We all believe we know reality. Thus, when scientists and philosophers say we don't really know reality, I suspect most humans refuse to believe them, and a few, including me before I started to practice self-compassion, ridiculed them in our minds. Yet, they keep repeating this concept.
Wisdom says, “Listen, there may be some truth in that idea.”
To our survival-based minds, we feel weak acknowledging that we feel insecure when accepting reality as it is (removing our certainty that we know everything about a situation, in other words). That perceived weakness may even scare us into trying to avoid reality entirely.
What if we were to recognize that we don’t experience reality accurately?
Truly acknowledging that we don’t know gives us the wisdom to be careful and compassionate because we understand there is a high likelihood that we don’t have the complete picture. We further understand that moving forward on incomplete information sets us up to believing distortions built up in our heads based on incomplete information.
Alternatively, if we understand that we have an incomplete view of reality and stay open to whatever reality (life) throws at us, we allow ourselves the most possibilities to navigate each situation with the least amount of suffering for ourselves and others.
In the future, I’ll talk more about managing our minds to allow ourselves more possibilities.
Next Month
In next month’s newsletter, I’ll probably discuss the power of patience, especially with yourself and your journey to being more self-compassionate.
On a Personal Note
For several weeks, Self-CompassionateLiving.com hasn’t been working correctly. After many emails with tech support at the website hosting company, it appears the website is working correctly now. Thank God! If you are visiting Self-CompassionateLiving.com and something isn’t working, please email me so I can correct it; thank you!
Next Saturday morning, I finish up the April-May Creating Self-Compassion class. The class is a fantastic group of nine people who have asked powerful questions and created a remarkable vibe. I am taking the rest of May and probably June off to finish the Intro to Self-Compassion video series (more on that below) and update the Self-Compassionate Living.com website. In late June or July, I will probably begin another Creating Self-Compassion class. I will send out a letter announcing it so you can tell your friends or join it yourself for a refresher.
I have been working on the Introduction to Self-Compassion video series that I will give away to everyone who signs up, or has signed up, for this newsletter. I want to complete it by the end of June. Once I complete it, I will send you access to it. Thank you for being so patient with me as I work on it.
In conclusion
By this point, you've probably realized that self-compassionate living is about building a new relationship with your brain, specifically with the lessons, memories, and beliefs that you have learned. Self-compassion begins with mind management, allowing you to live with greater joy, peace, and contentment (JPC) and experience fewer negative emotions. The information I share in these newsletters is designed to help you practice self-compassion. Please utilize it and discover and learn about your mind, so you can create the life that you want to live.
See you next month, and may the rest of this month be peaceful.
Thank you for inviting me to walk with you.
I believe in you!
Blair
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