on compassion (take note, self!)

I'm reading a great book on how to be a writer, not because I'm actually interested in being a writer, but because it's written by one of my favorite authors in the whole world, Anne Lamott.
In a passage from the book, Bird by Bird, that really struck my fancy today, she talks about writing characters well -- how you have to give them space to do their own thing, and not judge them while they do it. She then encourages the author to apply this inner distancing to him/herself, saying:

"Obviously, it's harder by far to look at yourself with this same sense of compassionate detachment. Practice helps. As with exercise, you may be sore the first few days, but then you will get a little bit better at it every day. I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place of friendly detachment toward myself, so I can look out at the world and see all those other things with respect. Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying gently to bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen, maybe to be seen and noted with a kind of reverence. Because if I don't learn to do this, I think I'll keep getting things wrong."