Yesterday was one of those days.

A long (but great!) dinner with friends the night before meant a late and fuzzy start to the morning. Reviewing my planned work for the day, there were reports to be written, research to be done and clients to chase. But for some reason I didn’t feel up to it all and spent most of the day in my Inbox and busying myself with inconsequential matters. Instead of putting the day to bed and starting afresh tomorrow, I ploughed on until late, increasingly frustrated and unhappy with my day and myself.

Through my digital wellbeing company 8fold, I help people use digital technologies to be more effective and balanced and create time in their day for focussed important work. And here I am unable to do the same. What a failure!

This disastrously unproductive day had me reflecting on the topic of today’s post: self-forgiveness and importance of compassion for ourselves (as well as others).

As small business owners we can be incredibly hard on ourselves. We have no ‘boss’ taking us to task if we waste a day, but we feel the guilt more acutely now we work for ourselves then we ever did as employees. Having those odd ‘off days’ seemed justified when it was on someone else’s time but not on your own watch. Sound familiar?

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are an ancient text that provide the backbone to the philosophy of yoga and consist of 4 chapters or books containing 196 aphorisms or sayings that allow us yogis to reflect on and improve ourselves.

One of the Sutras says that feelings such as doubt, lack of enthusiasm, laziness, mind-wandering and missing the point are all normal distractions of the mind.The goal of yoga is not  to beat ourselves up for feeling this way but instead to clear these disturbances from the mind and free ourselves from the despair, nervousness, and disordered inspiration and expiration that co-existent with these obstacles.

Yoga Sutra 1.33 helps us with this goal by suggesting that we cultivate friendliness towards happiness and compassion towards misery and offer ourselves, and others, compassion, friendliness, delight and, ultimately compassionate detachment.

Can we forgive ourselves when unhappiness fills our day? Can we delight in the moments, however fleeting, of feeling we accomplished something, however small? Can we be as compassionate towards ourselves as we are towards others and forgive ourselves? These are good questions to reflect on when we are feeling like a failure.

A note of caution here. If everyday we fail to achieve the goals we have set for ourselves, then all the self-forgiveness and compassion in the world is not going to make us feel any better. I would suggest that with a compassionate heart, we keep in our minds the yogic concept of ‘tapa’ or self-discipline voluntarily imposed by yourself. In yoga practice we refer to this as ‘getting back on the mat’ – be compassionate to yourself if you have disappointed yourself but the important thing is to move on, and get back on the mat.

So that is what I am doing today - getting back on that mat!

I wish you a wonderful weekend.

Namaste.

[Image with thanks to Denise Carbonell via Creative Commons - Denise is a New York based artist that sells these beautiful hands via her website Metal and Thread]