Welcome to episode 317 of Live Happy Now.

Dr. Kristen Neff has been teaching us about self-compassion for almost 20 years, and now she's teaching us how to get fierce.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week, Kristen is here to talk about her new book, Fierce Self-Compassion, which

looks at an aspect of self-compassion that's often overlooked.

But fierce self-compassion is just as important to our well-being as tender self-compassion,

and she's here to tell us why.

Kristen, welcome back to Live Happy Now.

Oh, thanks for having me, Paula.

I'm really happy to be talking with you

again. You are the person to talk to about self-compassion and you've been guiding us on this

journey to self-compassion for almost 20 years now. I wondered if you could talk about,

has the way that we think about self-compassion and our awareness changed in that time that you've been studying it and helping us along this journey?

Yeah, I think it has.

You know, when I first started writing about self-compassion, people hadn't really heard of the term before.

You know, even in more Buddhist circles where I got the idea from,

they talked about compassion for others or oneself, but they didn't really have that term self-compassion.

And there was a lot more skepticism about it. I used to get a lot more raised eyebrows when I talked

about self-compassion. And now, you know, again, almost 20 years later,

there's, I think, a lot more acceptance of it. One of the reasons is a huge amount of research,

well over 3,500 studies showing the benefits of self-compassion, which helps a lot. And it's kind of

followed on the footsteps of mindfulness toward more popular acceptance. So that's nice.

I still have to advocate for it, but not quite as hard as I used to.

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