RE:MIND: Issue #6
1. Self-Compassion Makes You Tougher
Most of the conversation on self-compassion is about how it can make you softer, kinder, and generally a more agreeable person.
It makes sense. If you’re prone to pushing yourself too hard and beating yourself up, being nicer to yourself is the perfect medicine for helping balancing things out a little.
But self-compassion is much more than not believing you’re a failure in life when you loose a table tennis match and deciding to take a nice long bubble bath when you’re stressed out.
When she first heard about it at a Buddhist meetup, Dr. Kristen Neff thought self-compassion was all about taking it easier and pampering yourself. Naturally, then, she thought if she became kinder towards herself it would only make her lazy and selfish. Then she delved a bit deeper into it and, some twenty years later, became the leading researcher in the field.
Rather than being a simple way to chill out and make yourself feel better, Neff found that self-compassion is the foundation of resilience. It makes you take more responsibility for your life, it helps fuel your motivation to change, and makes you more likely to act in a way that benefits others.
Read more about it in my latest post on Medium.
2. Take Three Steps Back To Move One Step Forward
In 1990, when his California-house burnt down in a forest fire, travel writer Pico Iyer lost “every last thing” he “had in the world”, including his notes for three books he was working on (this was pre-computer days).
Knowing how frustrating writing can be, I would probably have taken this as a sign it was time to quit and go pick beans instead. But instead of seeing it as a major setback or life-ruining catastrophe, Pico saw it as an opportunity: it would make a move to Japan, which he’d been wanting to do for a while, that much easier.
“It seemed to me a way — a challenge, one of those challenges life gives us — of [thinking] about what is really important.”
Since then, Pico has lived in the same neighbourhood in Japan and has emphasised a simpler, slower, and more conscious way of living. One of his particularly poignant ideas is—as he discusses in a podcast interview with Rolf Potts—the idea that technology propagates the idea of continual advancement. Day after day and year after year, new technologies arrive that allow us to travel further, experience more, and communicate at a greater rate. This constant improvement can make it seem like our lives are always getting better, when in fact the opposite can be the case:
“We have more time-saving devices, but feel like we have less time. We have more ways to connect with each other, but less of an ability to connect with ourselves.”
Rather than actually moving us forward, the continual expansion and growth of technology often only leads to a greater need for more, better, and faster technology, not a higher quality of life.
Real progress doesn’t always look like moving forward. According to Pico, it can look more like taking six steps back, twelve steps sideways, and maybe a half-step forward. In fact, at the best times, it can look like standing still and going nowhere. In his TED talk, Pico talks about “The Art Of Stillness” and how those who can be content with going nowhere are often the ones who help us progress the most:
“It is often exactly the people who have most often enabled us to get anywhere, who are most intent on going nowhere.”
When Pico’s house burnt down, it could have been considered as a huge backwards step. But instead, Pico chose to see it as an opportunity. Specifically, an opportunity to realize how much crap he’d accumulated, to respond to a major challenge and face a new one, and to remind himself about what really mattered.
That’s real progress.
Check out his TED Talk, The Art of Stillness.
3. “I Once Was A Young Boy Like You, Afraid To Do The Things…”
I’ll keep this last one brief. It’s a joyful little song that takes the format of a Chinese parable. A friend sent it to me while I was struggling with making the decision to either finish my thesis now or postpone it for a year.
Safe to say, it was exactly what I needed to hear.
I’m going to finish the damn thing.
Enjoy: