One of the most important choices you can make for yourself is to learn to be in compassion for yourself — for your own experiences, feeling and needs. It never occurs to most people to choose compassion for themselves or to practice self love .
With most people, their ego wounded self is in charge most of the time. When safety is your highest priority and your intent is to have control over getting love and avoiding pain, you are operating from your wounded self. The wounded self generally treats the inner child — our soul self, our feeling self — in two ways: ignoring and judging.
When you ignore your feelings and needs, you are abandoning yourself. You might find yourself in compassion for others' feelings and needs while not even being aware of your own—caretaking others in order to get their approval and hoping others will then attend to your feelings and needs.
Or you might not care at all about others feelings and needs and just pull on them to take care of yours. Anytime your attention is on others and you are ignoring yourself, your inner child will feel abandoned. You might think that your feelings of abandonment are coming from others not attending to you with love and approval, but feeling abandoned is really coming from ignoring yourself.
When the wounded self is not ignoring your feelings , it is often judging you. Self-judgment is a form of control. The wounded self believes that if you judge yourself, you can get yourself to do it "right" and then you will get the attention and approval you seek.
The wounded self is always focused on getting love, compassion, connection, attention and approval from others, and uses self-judgment in the hopes of becoming "perfect" enough to have control over getting what you want from others.
Compassion for yourself
When we move into the intent to learn—when loving ourselves and learning about what is loving becomes our highest priority—we stop ignoring and judging ourselves. Ignoring and judging are certainly not loving to ourselves. This is when we start being able to feel compassion for ourselves.
Compassion, like love, peace and joy, is not a feeling that is generated in the body. These energies are what God is—what Spirit is. When our intent is to learn about loving ourselves, our hearts open and God/Spirit is able to enter. Compassion is not an experience we create—it is an experience we open to. When your intent is to love yourself, you will begin to feel compassion and kindness toward yourself.
What our inner child really needs
When we are truly in compassion for ourselves, we find that we no longer need or seek approval and attention from others. When we are able to have compassion for our anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, anger, aloneness, emptiness, sadness, sorrow, loneliness, heartbreak, grief, and helplessness over others, our inner child feels loved—seen, acknowledged, understood and valued.
I find that when I move into compassion for myself when others are angry, blaming, distant, needy, and/or pulling, I can easily discover the loving action in the moment, toward myself and others. Compassion for myself brings great clarity and a deep sense of safety. Instead of trying to get others to change so that I can feel safe, my safety is coming from my own loving actions toward myself and others.
This may sound simple, yet it is very difficult to remember to do. Most of us are so used to responding to our painful feelings from our wounded self that we completely forget about compassion for ourselves. I have found that the more I practice compassion for myself throughout the day, the more I am able to remember to open to compassion when painful feelings are present.