A moment of self-compassion can change your entire day. A string of such moments can change the course of your life. - Christopher K. Germer

I look at it this way: the instinctive response to danger — the stress response — consists of fight, flight, or freeze. These three strategies help us survive physically, but when they’re applied to our mental and emotional functioning, we get into trouble. When there’s no enemy to defend against, we turn on ourselves. “Fight” becomes self-criticism, “flight” becomes self-isolation, and “freeze” becomes self-absorption, getting locked into our own thoughts.

Self-compassion has the “gleam of the particulars,” as poet Naomi Shahib Nye might say. The details of our lives are necessary to contact the deeper meaning of our daily experience.

One mental habit that can wreak havoc in our lives is self-judgment. If you watch your mind for 10 minutes after something goes wrong, you’ll probably notice that you’re criticizing yourself. It’s undoubtedly useful to know what went wrong and to correct our mistakes, but usually we go way beyond that. What can we do about self-judgment? It doesn’t work to “just stop judging yourself” because you’re likely to judge yourself for judging yourself. (Remember, what we resist persists.) The best solution is simply to “witness” judgments, letting them come and go.