Dr. Gabor Maté

And what happened was she went to a residential school where indigenous people had to surrender their children to the state and to the church.

And she made the mistake of speaking her native tongue, at which point they took a stick and they beat her.

Her forgetting her language at that point saved her life.

And then she was ashamed.

I didn't fight back.

I said, okay, you were five years old.

Could you escape?

No.

Could you ask for help?

No.

What would happen if you fought back?

They might have killed me.

So not fighting back, what she's judging herself as cowardice was actually her organism's wisdom to save her life.

And what I'm saying is that all these things in ourselves, that's an extreme example.

But all these things in ourselves that we berate ourselves for, judge ourselves for, criticize ourselves for, they began as adaptations.

We need to be very kind to ourselves.

And that's why I'm saying compassionate inquiry.

There's a spiritual teacher who says that only when compassion is present will people allow themselves to see the truth.

Well, that compassion needs to be extended to ourselves, and then we can extend it to others as well.

The great German philosopher Nietzsche, he said once that we... I'm paraphrasing him, but he said, we talk about these dead ends that we went down.