On a rainy Sunday afternoon, I’m pondering two things. Two insights that are challenging me to reframe some very old, entrenched thinking.
“When we focus on our shortcomings without taking the bigger human picture into account, our perspective tends to narrow. We become absorbed by our own feelings of insufficiency and insecurity. When we’re in the confined space of self-loathing, it’s as if the rest of humanity doesn’t even exist.”
Kristin Neff, Self-Compassion
and
“It’s not the pain, but the shame about the pain that keeps us out of the game.”
Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior
If you can’t relate to these observations at all, I’m incredibly happy for you. Truly.
But if you can, if these phrases sent a shiver of recognition through you, if they echo in the tender places in your heart, then perhaps you too have something worth pondering.
Photo taken by me with an iPhone.