So how do I define self-compassion, then?
I really don’t see a difference between compassion for self and others.
I define them the exact same way.
I argue that self-compassion has the components of
a sense of kindness, care, understanding for yourself
versus judgment, a sense of common humanity versus feeling isolated
and cut off from others.
And then a sense of mindfulness - being aware of the suffering that’s occurring
- versus over identification, which, again, I’ll just clarify in one moment.
Let’s go through each one
separately.
Okay, so self-kindness versus self-judgment.
Kindness is more than just hearts and flowers.
Kindness has a very active component to it.
It means when you’re kind to yourself, you really want to comfort yourself when you’re
suffering, you want to alleviate your suffering, you want to soothe yourself.
It’s a very active stance where I want to do whatever
I can to help myself feel as good as possible in this moment.
Common humanity?
Really framing one’s own experience in light of the common human
experience.
It’s very funny, if I were to ask any of you, are you a human being?
Yes, of course.
If everyone else a human being?
Yes, of course.
Does everyone else suffer?
Yes, of course.
You would say that logically, but in the moment, when you just blew it at work, or you had
someone reject you, or something really bad happens in your life, what happens non-rationally
is that we get very ego-centric.
We feel like why me?
This has somehow happened to me.
I’m the only one who’s messed up.
I’m the only one who’s going through that difficult
time.
And we feel really cut off from others.
It’s as if somehow when things go wrong, that’s
abnormal.
This is not supposed to be this way.
Something has gone wrong.
But it’s not the case.
Has anything
gone wrong?
Is anything abnormal?
No!
No, that’s what life is: Life goes wrong.
No one in here
signed a contract before you were born in this world saying I will be perfect, my life
would be perfect, and yet it’s still like “this
is not the life I signed up for!
I’m pissed off about it!”
Right?
That’s how we react.
The problem with that - and there’s a lot of problems with that
- but one of the main things is when we feel isolated
and cut off from others, physiologically that’s very
frightening.
If you think evolutionarily, one of the worst things that can happen to
us is to be isolated from the group because then we aren’t
safe.
And it’s interesting: this aspect of well- being I don’t think has been studied
enough.
This sense of can we feel connected to others in our suffering or do we feel isolated
from others in our suffering?
And I can just tell you in our workshops that I’ve conducted,
especially the 8 week ones, at the end I ask what people got out of this the most, and
almost every single person says “common humanity.”
I realize it’s not just me, it’s not just me who
judges myself, it’s not just me who suffers like this.
Very important to remember that this is the
human experience, this is how things are supposed to be.
Nothing has gone wrong, yes it’s painful, but it’s normal, it’s natural.
And then this is where the mindfulness comes in.
You have to be aware of your suffering in order to give it compassion.
So mindfulness allows you not only to notice your
suffering, very important, and we’ll talk about this more, but to be with your suffering
as it is.
We don’t like to be around suffering.
If we could just get rid of pain, we’d do it.
And we have lots of psychological mechanisms to avoid that.
Again, which I’ll be talking about in a little bit.
Self- compassion says: wow, pain is occurring, can
I turn toward that?
Can I be with that?
And you actually need to do that to be able to give
yourself the caring and support you need.
Now some people do say, c’mon, you have to notice your suffering?
Isn’t it like, blindingly obvious, I’m suffering?
But it’s often really not.
The pain caused by self-judgment, I
think in some ways that’s some of the worst pain all of us experience.
You know a constant niggly- niggly pain, “I’m not good enough,
I’m not smart enough, I’m not this enough, I
blew it, I’m this or that.”
And often we are so lost in the role of self-critic that we don’t
really stop to realize “oh my God, this is really, really hurting.”
And in some ways it feels more comfortable to be
the self-critic, because at least the self-critic isn't the person that messed up.
You know the self- critic knows you messed up.
But the part of you that feels really vulnerable and insecure
and a failure, often we don’t give that side of
the process as much attention.
And then also very important when things go wrong in our lives, very often we go
straight into problem-solving mode.
It’s like: there’s a problem, I don’t want
there to be a problem, I need to fix the problem – you
know, immediately.
And what happens is we go straight into problem-solving mode and we
don’t stop to again turn towards the suffering, and say, “this is really hard.
This is difficult.
I need a little care and compassion to get
me through this.”
Then we really aren’t at our best, at our most psychologically stable,
when we go towards trying to fix that problem.
So it’s actually something you have to remind yourself
to do before going straight into fixing problems.
Just acknowledge and validate how difficult the
situation is.