Fostering Resilience through Self-Compassion

Sermon: February 1, 2026 . Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of San Dieguito

I want you to imagine that there are three versions of yourself, your past self, your present self, and your future self. What kind of relationship do you have with those three versions of yourself? Let’s start with your present self. That should be the easiest since you are most familiar with who you are right now. 

How do you feel about yourself? Do you believe you are kind and helpful? Do you believe you make good decisions? Would you be your own friend if you needed one? When you make a mistake, do you find it easy to forgive yourself? Are you sometimes disappointed in yourself? Do you often feel that you could do better?

If you’re anything close to a normal person, then your answer should be: Of course, of course I could do better. When you think this thought, as everyone does from time to time, how does it feel? Is it accompanied by discouragement and self deprecation, or it is accompanied by acceptance and the renewed energy to try and do better. Discouragement leads us down the road of repeated mistakes and stunted growth, while acceptance leads us toward resilience. Just as accepting others is an act of compassion, so is accepting oneself.

So, how do we foster self-compassion when we don’t have a great relationship with our present self?

Let’s begin by examining the relationships we have with our other selves. At this time, I want you to conjure up an image of your past self. This could be you as a child, or a teenager, or an adult younger than you are now. Imagine your younger self standing in front of you. How do you feel about this person? Do you like them? Do you think they’re kind and helpful? Do you think they’re doing their best? Or are you frustrated with them? Do you resent their actions and wish they had made different choices? What emotions does the concept of a younger you evoke in present you? 

It’s natural to be disappointed in oneself when you don’t behave the way you wish you had, when you make a choice that ended up not being the right one, or perhaps when you stood by and didn’t do anything when you could have. Initial disappointment in one’s actions is normal, natural, and is what encourages us to learn and grow. If we were never uncomfortable with ourselves, we wouldn’t change. Disappointment is a healthy and natural emotion. Holding onto disappointment for extended periods of time can become unhealthy if it stifles growth and keeps us in a mindset frozen in time. If you are looking back at your past self right now with disappointment, then unless that past self was you from this morning or maybe this week, it’s time for some self compassion. 

It’s important to keep in mind that your past self only had the context, the knowledge, and the emotional maturity available to it at that time. Whatever insight you have gained since then, even if that insight was gained only moments after this past self existed, was not insight that you once had. What purpose does maintaining a sense of disappointment with that person serve beyond self punishment? Is holding onto resentment for your past self continuing to make you a better person today?  

Resilience is the acknowledgment that experience and knowledge can and will change you, it is the understanding that your past self didn’t know better and for whatever reason wasn’t ready to behave the way you would behave now. This is not excusing undesirable behavior, but rather accepting that your emotional maturity, knowledge, and insight, along with any external circumstances and lack of context, couldn’t support you making the best possible decision. Given this acknowledgement, imagine your past self once again. How do you feel about them now, knowing that everything they did made perfect sense given their understanding and ability at that time. Do you hold any more compassion for them? 

Now I want you to think of your future self. Can you picture what you might be like in the future? Are you kind and helpful? Do you make good decisions? Do you make better decisions than you do now? It is most likely that you will.

This future you has had more life experiences than you do now. They have more context and better understand all of the aspects of each situation, all of the nuances that you may struggle to see clearly now. So if we’re looking forward and wondering how we will ever solve a future problem, instead of allowing anxiety to dominate, perhaps we should have a little faith and trust that our future selves will be more adept and able to handle any future issues that arise. Trusting your future self means you don’t have to worry about what’s going to happen and you can merely live in the present, focused on doing your best right now given the context you currently have.

Clinical Psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt has a podcast in which she emphasizes the importance of exercising your mental health as though you are taking daily trips to the gym. One of the episodes of her podcast is called “Future you is a badass.” She encourages her listeners to imagine a potential future crisis and says “The version of you that will handle that crisis, if and when it happens, will be born into existence in that moment. And that version of you will have more life experience, more context, and more capacity to handle the issue then you do now. You have to trust your future self to handle future problems. This releases you from the burden of trying to figure out how to handle something that hasn’t even happened yet.”

So if we know that your future self is going to be a more evolved version of you, can you look at your present self with more self compassion, knowing that you can’t possibly know enough now to consistently make perfectly informed decisions? I am certain that at least one of you is thinking, “Yes, but I want to be a badass now, not in the future.” We all do, and sometimes we are. However, we will be a more consistent badass in the future because we will have grown. At the same time, we are also currently the badass future version of ourselves that our past selves once desired to be. 

I’ve always been blessed to understand this concept. It’s why my father used to say that I “don’t do guilt.” Even as a child I thought that I made the best decisions I could at the time because of the context of what I knew. Did that mean I always made good decisions? Of course not. In retrospect, many of my decisions weren’t the best ones, but given the context, the education, the understanding, and the knowledge that I had, I would probably make the same decision again if I was sent back in time to be my past self. And you might be thinking, I still could have done better… but really, given the emotional landscape of your past self, given the circumstances under which you were existing, could you have? Because there was a reason why you didn’t.

Holding compassion for your past self allows you to let go of situations or experiences that you cannot go back and change. Truly understanding that you did your best allows for some grace in how you perceive yourself. And only with grace can we focus on the present and continue to do our best now, which is better informed than what our best was yesterday, last year, or a decade ago. You can hold more compassion for your present self by acknowledging that you are currently your future self’s past self. You are currently doing your best. This practice isn’t an excuse to under perform or have bad behavior. It is merely the practice of accepting where you are right now and knowing that you will evolve. 

Being resilient means understanding that we exist on a spectrum of growth. Having a relationship with your past self and your future self in which you hold compassion, helps you understand the flexibility of self. No matter how hard you might try not to change, you will. Acknowledging the changes between your past and present selves and applying those same changes in a forward thinking manner, defines you as a resilient being. And once you begin to define yourself as resilient, once it becomes your mindset and your mentality, it is impossible not to be.

Resilience is born of flexibility, of knowing that you’ll be better tomorrow, for we are all evolving every hour of the day. Humility and accepting the fact that we will make mistakes because we’re not done growing yet, keeps us in a mindset of self-compassion. Maya Angelou said, "Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn't know before you learned it.”

Just by being alive, by having experienced all that you have, by growing from where you were to where you are, you are a resilient person. And there will be more to live through, a lot more. But none of it should frighten you, because your future self is more prepared than you can even imagine right now. 

Forgive your past self. Trust your future self. Hold compassion for your present self. Expect mistakes. Your future self needs you to make them so you can grow. And on the days when you feel discouragement starting to creep in, remember the words of Lucy Maud Montgomery in her book Anne of Green Gables: "Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it… yet?"

OTHER READINGS FOR REFLECTION:

Writer, Mother, and Hope Warrior Leeana Tankersley:

“We don’t make lasting, constructive changes in our lives because of shame or self-loathing. We finally decide we were made for something more. This might come to us as a very small sense of knowing, but it’s a change in perspective, and it is the soil for new life.”

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?" That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.”

"Fear" by Kahlil Gibran

It is said that before entering the sea

a river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the path she has traveled,

from the peaks of the mountains,

the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her,

she sees an ocean so vast,

that to enter

there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way.

The river can not go back.

Nobody can go back.

To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk

of entering the ocean

because only then will fear disappear,

because that's where the river will know

it's not about disappearing into the ocean,

but of becoming the ocean.