You can't beat yourself up about it

I got mad at myself for not maintaining my meditation practice regularly enough.

Think about that for a minute.

I created more stress, I criticized myself ("geez, Nicole. You can't even manage to sit quietly with your eyes closed for 20 minutes a day. 20 minutes a day! That's nothing! Really you should be doing it for hours. Way to go.") and basically defeated the purpose of my practice.

Being compassionate with ourselves means loving and forgiving ourselves, as I mentioned in my prior post. But being compassionate isn't just about saying "I'll love myself even though I weigh more than I want to," or "I forgive myself for being mean to that boy in high school." It's an active, ongoing thing. It means that even as we go through our growth and healing processes, we have to forgive ourselves.

Choosing the path of growth means that we have to recognize that it is a process. Sometimes we will run up hills and other times we will stumble or even just sit down and (temporarily) give up while walking on a flat, straight road. Being compassionate with myself means forgiving myself for "messing up." Even more than that, it means not placing judgment on how things are or where they are going. Rather than thinking of it as "messing up" just thinking of it as part of the process.

And now I think it's time to start a new post, on Divine Timing.