It’s a Tibetan saying. I thought it was doubly apt as the Dalai Lama is set to celebrate 50 years of exile from Tibet and the people of Tibet labor under oppressive restrictions on basic freedoms that we take for granted. But, I also found other meanings to it; I am sure that I could find a million ways to apply this saying to my life. Today, this one application trumped: I wanted to apply this idea of compassion to myself and others who tend to view themselves or others with a critical, skewed, even pessimistic perspective.

I was reading an article on CNN from Oprah.com, and while it’s a little dense to read in the beginning, it makes a good point. We are often unkind to ourselves, our harshest critics, and some of us project that harshness onto others they love, particularly their children. Yet our perceived flaws are often what others find most endearing about us.

I was thinking about this idea in the context of my husband and other men in my life. How other people can have unrealistic expectations that I could never live up to, and how sometimes I waved off their affections because I couldn’t see my own self worth. Where they saw beauty, sometimes I saw ugliness and sometimes I saw beauty in myself that no one else could appreciate. Also too, how I have given others short shrift because of my own expectations and caused them to question THEIR self worth.

I think we need to learn to appreciate ourselves, our uniqueness, our flaws, the beauty only we can see in ourselves and the beauty others see. It’s a level of honesty that I am not sure I have quite mastered yet, I’m still too impressionable.

This quote and article resonated with me today. Now is a good time to cultivate compassion, for ourselves as well as for others.

Free Tibet.