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Toward Self-Compersion
Though the word self-compassion is not commonly found in English-language dictionaries, a Google Scholar search or an Amazon search for self-compassion will produce many, many results. People today are talking a lot more about how we can be kind to ourselves, how we ourselves can join with and offer care to our own suffering and pain. Yet, English doesn't perhaps have enough popular language for joining with and offering encouragement to our own joy and pleasure. But if we can practice being kind to our hurt parts, we can certainly also practice being kind to our happy parts. We might at first want to call this self-joy. After all, we perhaps also do not have an immediate corollary in English to compassion: being with (com) suffering (passion). Or, just as self-compassion is relatively new language, we may benefit from promoting the new language of self-compersion, where compersion is defined as joy for another's good fortune. Self-compersion, in turn, denotes being with the joy experienced by an othered part of the self. To learn more about the term compersion, check out Alan M.'s March 2015 blog post about compersion.
RETROSPECTIVE
~ 9/30 ~
on this day
2021
2020
2019
2018
~ celebrating four years of daily cartoons ~