If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.

Jack Kornfield

Buddhist practitioner and author Jack Kornfield included this quote in his 1994 book, “Buddha’s Little Instruction Book” — and it was thereafter commonly misattributed to Gautama Buddha himself. One of the tenets of Buddhism is extending compassion to other people, but we also must remember to be compassionate with ourselves. It can be a very different thing to go easy on yourself when something goes wrong. Yet we can’t fully practice compassion until we turn it inward first.