Self-compassion is fundamental to a healthy mind, heart, and body, as well as creating healthy relationships, families, and environments. Yet, many of us were not adequately taught by our families or others how to be non-judgmental, kind, and compassionate with ourselves. So, when we’re under stress, we tend to use our default ways of responding. Going through a pandemic, most of us are already feeling a lot of stress and lack of patience, which makes self-compassion more necessary than ever. If we were programmed to be self-blaming instead of self-compassionate, each time we judge ourselves, we chip away at our

Our lives have changed dramatically, overnight. The intensity is increasing daily, and with it the uncertainty of not just our future work and personal lives, but how we’ll get by in the next few weeks. People are panicking all around us, and it’s hard to not get swept up in it. “Maybe they’re right and I should panic more,” you ask. “Or, maybe I’m overreacting.” Life is disorienting right now and with every day bringing alarming news it’s normal to feel a constantly elevated level of anxiety. We all know that we need to stay socially distant from each other.

As a Latino psychologist, I’m consistently surprised at how under-represented and invisible upwardly-mobile Latinos are in the American eye. While issues related to Latinos in the United States are easy to find in the media, virtually all of them are about the poor or undocumented Latinos. Yet, there’s also a fast-growing middle-class sector that is becoming affluent. Almost 50% of the population of Los Angeles County is now Latino and more than a quarter of those households have incomes in the range of $100,000 to $200,000 (Beacon Economics, 2014). Latinos are rapidly closing the education gap (Valladares, 2019), and despite