Week 4

Jun 26, 2025

Hi beautiful people,

This week, we keep going with cultivating loving kindness and compassion for oneself. The theme of week 4 is being a friend to yourself, embracing your natural aspiration for happiness, and practicing gratitude. 

Enjoy the meditations and practices this week and thank you again for all your time and engagement!

1. Guided Daily Meditation:

Self-Appreciation & Compassionate Resource Meditation

2. Daily Practices:
  1. Every day in the evening, choose one thing to appreciate about yourself! Share this with someone, like your buddy, and/or write it down in your journal. Allow yourself to sense the gift that you are.

  2. Then, choose one thing to appreciate about your life! A person/relationship, a pet, something from the natural environment, an event that happened, etc. Share this with someone, like your buddy, and/ or write it down in your journal. Allow yourself to sense the gift that this is in your life.

  3. Choose one action this week that allows you to live your life aligned with one of your core values. (Feel free to use the Personal Value List)

  4. When there is a quiet moment in your day, and when you feel like it, ask yourself, “In my deepest heart, what do I really value and want in my life?”

  5. Continue, when you find yourself caught up in a challenging emotion such as anger, sadness, disappointment or frustration, to see if you can connect these feelings with an underlying need that you are seeking to fulfill (Feel free to use the Needs List.)

  6. Optional Book Reading: A Fearless Heart by Thupten Jinpa Chapters for Week 4: Chapter 7, Chapter 9, ‘Greater Well-Being’, pages 181 – 195

 

3. Science: 

 

4. Supplemental Resources:

 

Videos

 

Gratitude- Moving Art 

This is a short, inspirational spoken word video about gratitude. Watch it and check in with what’s present for you after you watch it. 

 

Positivity Resonates

CCARE Meng Wu Lecture by Barbara Fredrickson at Stanford.

Barbara L. Fredrickson, Ph.D., is Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Director of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab (a.k.a. PEP Lab, PositiveEmotions.org) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is a great video lecture about how positive emotions broaden our awareness, build resilience, significantly improve people’s well being and their positive contributions to others.

 

Positivity Ratio

 

 

Quotes and Poems:

 

No Self-Care without Self-Compassion

There can be no self-care without self-compassion, which is compassion turned inward. It is the ability to connect to our feelings, to respond to our suffering with kindness, and to desire that our suffering be ameliorated. Self-compassion prompts us to treat ourselves in ways that alleviate, rather than cause or amplify, our pain and suffering. While many of us understand compassion, mercy, and kindness to be essential in our interactions with others, we don’t always see these as core values for our relationship with ourselves. We neglect our self-care, directly and indirectly contributing to our pain and suffering. We judge ourselves for our own suffering, listening to the voice of our inner critic as it rehearses our shortcomings, our errors, and our deficiencies. But it doesn’t have to be this way! 

What if we are supposed to love ourselves? What if we are supposed to be kind and gentle, caring and nurturing, empowering and forgiving of ourselves? If we are unable to do this, ultimately we may be unable to do it for our neighbors. Self-compassion, then, is not indulgence; it is a necessity to live into our truest nature.

~ Chanequa Walker-Barnes

 

 Self-Love as a Healthy Delight

By self-love I mean a healthy delight in your true, imperfect, uniquely wonderful, particular self. I mean an unconditional appreciation for who you are, head to toe, inside and out: quirks, foibles, beauty, and blemishes—all of it. I mean seeing yourself truthfully and loving what you see.  

Honestly, the stories playing out in the world can make it difficult to love yourself, and therefore your neighbor. Messages from the culture that you don’t matter, not just because of your race, but because of your gender, sexuality, economic status, or religion, can thwart self-love. Even if you’re born into circumstances that others consider ideal, messages in the culture can signal that you’re not good enough, light enough, thin enough, smart enough, rich enough,  famous enough, feminine or masculine enough to measure up to some ideal. The space between those ideals and your realities can make it difficult to embrace your particularities and love them. Learning to love your particularities is not just an individual project; you need your communities—your posse—to see those pieces of you, to accept them, and to love all the parts of you, fiercely. 

~ Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis 


Radical Self- Love

Radical self- love to me, I always describe it as your inherent sense of enoughness… I say the same thing that decided that there should be daisies and butterflies and the river Nile and sunrises also decided that there should be a [you]… And if we can connect to that, if I can connect to the sense that the most stunning sunset I ever saw is made of the same material reality as my own beingness, how is that not miraculous? How is that not phenomenal?

~ Sonya Renee Taylor

 

 

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

~Derek Walcott