Compassion – To identify with strong feelings of suffering.  Sounds simple enough, right?  But what happens when you don’t even have compassion for yourself?  Can you really be compassionate with others?  What if you’re confusing self-pity with self-compassion? And you start putting yourself down for all your failures thus leading to anger, self-hate, and depression.  How can you sympathize with another’s misfortune?  The answer is, I can’t! I’ve become emotionally exhausted.  One thing that I’ve realized about compassion, is that to be able to have compassion for another, I first must have compassion for myself.  It’s only then that I can truly have compassion for another.  In the past this is something that I’ve been missing.  I too often put myself down in life and confuse self-pity with self-compassion.  But, now it’s time for me to change.