Quan Yin - I pulled that card for advice a few days ago (upshot), and I'd been thinking about self-compassion (vs self-pity, which I have a lot of lately) and here's the thing: 1. compassion begins with the self (it's true, the Dalai Llama and others have explained this at length, if you don't know what compassion feels like wholly then you don't know shit about it and you've had pity/guilt [at MOST] instead) and 2. you have no compassion for yourself.
Maybe you've had a bolt of it, here and there? Like when I looked at Ears, like looking in a mirror, and he was new and I felt a bolt of my own total vulnerability, that I had come into the world just like he had, at the mercy of who/whatever, and I had compassion for myself. It lasted a microsecond, but so unusual a feeling was it (unlike self-pity, which I takes baths in) (or self-scrutiny, therapuetic as that may be, bla bla) that I still remember it. Look inside your mind - do you even have a microsecond of self-compassion to remember? A moment of real tenderness? Not understanding and not pity, but tenderness. Have you ever smoothed the hair away from your own forehead in your mind and thought how beautiful and fleeting you are, how tiny and brilliant, a flame sputter in the wide universe precious enough to rend your heart? Have you ever thought of yourself selflessly, something like "I'd do anything for you" - ? I doubt it. I bet you suffer yourself, not suffer WITH yourself.
I've been thinking of these things in the last couple weeks, mostly hating myself, hating my body for sure, and scared for it. Hating my weaknesses, which I could go on cataloging forever and never run of ones to note. In pain a lot, the dishes undone, the laundry undone, my legs unshaved for weeks, as if flipping myself off in every little way I can think of, like I'm my own unwanted lover. I'm surprised by how much simple affection has come my way in that time from others, a LOT of it - I have not been surprised at the lack of affection in that time too - but though fleeting, I have had moments of thinking "I do not respect a lack of compassion" in those instances. ("Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable." - Tenessee Williams) It is a very subtle shift in thinking going on, which might well be what I take away from this whole thing. It's not "why don't you love me better wa wa wa", ie self-pity. It's "I do not respect your lack", and/but that lack started with me in the first place and I'm exhibiting it every day, flipping myself off and kicking myself out of the way, trying hard to break up with myself without even bothering to say so, just doing it via disdain. If I were my own lover, I'd be appalled at my lack of giving the slightest shit - I'd think things like, 'you can't even say something nice, once a day or even once a week, to someone who has tried so hard to be decent? not even when she's upset and not feeling well? you can't do a dish or even SMILE at her? NOTHING?' and I'd not respect that.
I do not respect myself for my lack of compassion towards myself (nevermind anyone else's lack). And so now I have self-disdain for my self-disdain. How the hell does a person begin to turn this around and find/have/practice self-compassion? Honestly, I dunno. But I've read a million times that to bring about change, you have to not want it, you have to "accept where you are today", the yogi mantra: accept. So, I'm trying to have acceptace of my lack of compassion hoping it'll bring on some compassion: I am self-assholic, I accept this as true.