Now let’s talk about love and compassion as the other foundational perspectives to look at wellbeing with. It may seem hokey or really hippie crunchy to talk about love and compassion as the answers, but they really are! 

Just like awareness, the love and compassion aspects of wellbeing start with yourself: self-love and self-compassion. 

For many of us, myself included for a long time in my journey, we don’t truly and deeply love ourselves unconditionally. When we start digging deeper into self-love and making this a focus for our wellbeing, so many other aspects of wellbeing will fall into place once we are comfortably seated in the place of really loving ourselves. 

Let’s go back to the example I used for awareness with the rabbit hole of healthy eating and let’s use the lens of self-love here. In my journey to loving myself unconditionally, I realized that putting too much shitty food in my body didn’t align with loving myself unconditionally (notice I said “too much”…I do believe in moderation and enjoying the pleasures of life, even with food!).

I remember when my first son turned 1 in 1997, I didn’t allow him to have cake at his birthday party with sugar in it because I so deeply wanted to give him the best start in life. After the party, there I am stuffing my face with the sweets I wouldn’t allow him to have because I loved him so much (and what about me?). 

I realized many, many years later on my journey that I wasn’t loving myself unconditionally the way I was loving my children and I also realized that having some sugar in your life doesn’t make you an awful person (or an unhealthy person either!). When I began to love myself more and more, I naturally wanted to choose healthier things to put in my body as an act of self-love. This felt very different from the pressure of “omg I need to eat healthy, count all the calories, count the macros, follow Weight Watchers, blah, blah…” Coming from a place of loving myself and wanting to take the best care of myself feels much more simple, aligned, and soft. 

Lastly, let’s look at wellbeing through the lens of compassion, starting with self-compassion. The Miriam Webster dictionary defines compassion as “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/compassion) 

It’s always been easy for me to cultivate compassion for others but it has been a-not-always-so-easy practice to learn to show compassion for myself (and I am still practicing this!). When we begin to look at the suffering that we create for ourselves (with our minds especially) we can practice cultivating compassion for ourselves on our journey. 

For me, cultivating compassion for myself takes the pressure off that I often put on myself that I would never put onto someone else (we are often so much harder on ourselves than we need to be!). Let’s go back to our example of healthy eating and look at it through the lens of compassion. 

I have a very active sweet tooth and there was a time in my life when I would choose dessert over “real” food anytime I allowed myself the opportunity (especially after my divorce when I was living on my own half of the time for the first time in 18 years). When I would eat a bunch of donuts for dinner, at first I would feel this sense of freedom that “I can do whatever I want!” and then later, I would berate myself for my seemingly childish nature. Then the next time I wanted junk for dinner, I would restrict myself (like I would a child) because it was “for my own good.” 

It took me a long time to learn more about my habit energy with this cycle and to recognize that I was not showing myself any compassion at all as I tried to change this for myself. Once I softened and showed myself deep compassion in this area of my life instead of rigid harshness, I naturally began to make choices that were more balanced and supported my wellbeing.