Understanding Self-Compassion - Cultivation

Self-compassion is an active process that draws on our capacity to be both firm and gentle with ourselves. It is a skill that we develop with regular practice over time.

The feeling of shame and the experience of negative self-talk is universal. We all have the narrative inside that, on observing and evaluating our actions, criticizes us and places blame and judgement not just on our actions, but on who we are at our core.

This criticism may be noticed in response to our actions, though commonly we can also notice it in response to our thoughts and emotions. Perhaps it’s ‘inconsiderate’ to feel sad over what you don’t have when you know that you do have so much, or maybe it’s ‘not okay’ to feel angry at someone who hasn’t intentionally hurt you. You may even feel that certain emotions are just not valid at all regardless of the situation.

This mechanism could be seen as taking on a protective role in trying to keep us safe from external judgement or punishment. However, what it’s usually really doing is keeping us disconnected from ourselves, preventing us from showing up authentically in the world, inhibiting our ability to cope with our feelings and ultimately increasing our sense of suffering.

Self-compassion offers a gentle counterforce to this process and helps us witness the roots of our suffering and take actions that will lessen its intensity. As we cultivate self-compassion, we can offer kindness and care to the messengers inside of us and slowly develop new coping mechanisms that align with who we are and how we want to show up in the world.

Self-compassion as a practice offers us the opportunity to increase our capacity to be with ourselves and our suffering.

As with any practice, we can simply start with where we are at in this moment and gradually develop our skills over time. While some people may dive straight into these practices, others may find them completely out of reach and require professional support to get started. Please know that you’re very welcome to reach out to me to see where I may be able to help, or what recommendations I can offer to find someone suited to your needs.

Getting Started

I’d like to reference the 5 components of compassion from my definition to help provide a framework for what exactly it is that we’re trying to achieve when cultivating compassion.

1.      Recognising Suffering

2.      Suffering as part of the Common Human Experience

3.      Displaying Empathy and Acceptance

4.      Welcoming Emotions with Warmth

5.      Action to Alleviate Suffering

With this in mind, I’d like to start us off with a simple mindful based self-compassion practice that you could practice on a daily basis any time and anywhere.

1.      5 Minute Embodied Check-In

What are the feelings and sensations present in your body at this moment?                

You might like to just scan from head to toe and noticing what sensations arise (e.g. tension, pain, numbness, high energy, softness, hardness etc.). What thoughts arise as you connect to these feelings and sensations?

2.      Recognise Challenging Feelings and Sensations

It could be as simple as saying to yourself something like “this is a really difficult experience for me” or “this really hurts”. Voicing these out loud can be helpful to connect with this acknowledgement more deeply, and sometimes we may find ourselves repeating or re-phrasing it a few times until it sinks in that this statement is true.

3.      Acknowledge your Feelings as Normal, and that it is OK

There is nothing you can feel that hasn’t been felt before. Whatever you are feeling right now, someone else is also feeling it in this very moment. The specific circumstances may be somewhat unique to you, but the general context is not. The messages that our emotions carry are pretty universal and there is always a valid reason that you are feeling what you’re feeling.

4.      Show Appreciation Towards your Feelings

Emotions are messengers – they do not appear just to taunt us and make life difficult, but rather to express to us that action needs to be taken. This can be difficult when it’s hard to see what the message is, or when the message is something painful like the grief of loss, or the fear of our future. If you can, the invitation is to try and find connection to gratitude, and you may like to say something like “these feelings are telling me that this situation is not OK and it is showing me what values are important to me, thank you for showing me this”.

If that feels like a bit of a stretch, that’s OK! You can still try this step whenever it feels manageable with other feelings, and perhaps you’d like to spend a bit more of your time acknowledging your feelings as normal and accepting them for what they are instead.

5.      Self-Soothing and Comfort

Once you have gone through these steps, it can be nice to re-connect with your feelings and sensations, ask yourself what you need in this moment, and take action. For example, do you need comfort and care? Perhaps this can be offered via self-touch – a hand on the heart, a self-hug, or getting under a weighted blanket. It could be that you have an excess of energy in your body and in order to relax you need to first release – this could look like shaking your body, dancing, going for a run or doing some yoga.

Additional Steps:

• Asking for Help: If you are struggling to accept, understand or welcome your feelings alone, it can be really helpful to reach out to someone you know will be empathetic and compassionate towards you at this time. If that’s not available in the moment, you could also try journaling for now, and then discuss with your support professional when you next have a session together.

• Action Planning: Once you’ve seen to your immediate needs, you may like to set aside time in the following days or weeks to assess what action, if any, can be taken to further alleviate ongoing suffering. This might involve working through things in a therapeutic space, having a difficult conversation with a manager or colleague, or re-evaluating priorities in life. It can be really helpful here to have clear what your values are, and to assess if you are living in alignment with them.

How to Cultivate Compassion

To really embody self-compassion, I would encourage drawing on 3 important realms of healing: behaviour, cognition (mind) and somatics (body). This means that we can think about how we behave and what actions we take, what we think and how we talk, and how we move and soothe our body.

I’d like to invite you to explore some important concepts that can really help with integrating self-compassion into our daily life – into who and how we are – as opposed to simply following a practice every now and then.

There’s quite a lot of information to follow, so if you feel this is something you’d like to really practice, you may like to bookmark this page and know that you can dip in and out of it, taking what you need for that moment each time.

Language

It always fascinates me how the language we use impacts the way we think and feel, not just in the moment but also conceptually. The subtle differences in how we express ourselves can have surprising effects on how we perceive ourselves and the world around us.

In exploring your use of language and how it affects you, you may like to simply observe or perhaps keep a self-compassion journal where you can also note down how your self-talk makes you feel and reflect on this in different moments. These observations and reflections can help you identify patterns which you can gently challenge and transform.

Release and Reframe

I start with release because it’s so important that we do acknowledge what the story is that we tell ourselves, and don’t try to push it away. This is part of the process of accepting and welcoming what we feel.

However, these thoughts have a tendency to show up on repeat and reframing offers us the opportunity to gently but firmly challenge these thoughts that are no longer serving us. The thought “I’m too quiet”, for example, carries with it a message – perhaps that of feeling overlooked at work, or a fear that your friends don’t enjoy your company. However this same thought can very quickly and easily turn into repeated shaming where we hold onto it as evidence for how we are ‘not good enough’. Releasing and then reframing the thought each time it surfaces can help us to gain perspective and see ourselves through another lens.

The thought “I’m too quiet”, for example, could be re-framed as “I think very deeply, and I share my thoughts when I feel it’s relevant”.

Tone of Voice

How does your tone of voice sound when you are talking to, or about, yourself? Is it kind and gentle and loving, or harsh, demeaning and critical?

Adjusting our tone of voice can have a profound impact on how we receive information. I’d like to invite you to try an experiment. Let’s take a seemingly neutral statement “this wall is white” (or whatever feels more appropriate for you if that isn’t neutral). I want to invite you to say this phrase aloud in your best harsh, punishing and critical voice – to really feel that as you say the phrase aloud. How does it feel in your body to do this?

Now, after taking a breath, you can try repeating the statement but making an effort to do so as softly, gently and even as lovingly as possible. How does this feel in your body?

There’s a good chance the latter feels much more welcoming and pleasant, and that your body is holding less tension than when you say it with harshness. The same will apply to an extent when we are talking about ourselves.

Kind and Caring Words 

Talking to ourselves with warmth, using kind and caring words, even affectionate and loving words where we feel able to, can be so powerful. One way to help with this could be to imagine that you’re talking to a child that you care about.

Imagine the next time you’re feeling sad, you say something to yourself along the lines of “Oh, my love, I know it feels so sad right now, it’s OK to feel this way, I’m here with you”. Can you imagine how that would feel to receive? It might feel a bit odd at first but it can feel incredibly empowering.

Of course, using terms like ‘love’ may feel out of reach at the moment and that is, of course, OK! Perhaps there is a term that feels more caring, or simply more neutral for you. It’s all about starting from where you are at.

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Social Connection

Shame tells us that we are unworthy, that we are uniquely ‘bad’ in some way and that we should hide and isolate, lest we be exposed for what we ‘really are’. Of course, what this does is makes us feel more alone and allows our inner critic to keep us in a spiral of shame without interruption.

Spending time with people who love us, or people who can show us the empathy and compassion that we are struggling to touch on in that moment can be so powerful. Feeling accepted and welcomed by others can help to soften and soothe that inner harshness and help us to recognise that our feelings are quite normal.

Friends, family, colleagues or community who will show empathy, understanding and compassion to you is really important. If you don’t currently have that, then a therapeutic professional can be another source of external compassion you can seek.

If you see the potential for a compassionate response in the people you are close with, but it is not what’s offered to you, it could also be worth asking for what you need. For example, you could request that when you share how you feel, you do not get met with advice or opinions and instead ask to be listened to and be offered empathy and care only.

Social connection can also help on the level of the nervous system and physical touch where connecting with another physical body who is grounded and calm can really help us to connect with those same qualities in ourselves.

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Touch

Where language acts as a cognitive way of communicating empathy and care, touch acts on a somatic level and helps us to feel grounded.

Physical touch can be with another being, including an animal or a tree, or it can be with ourselves. The impact of touch can help our nervous system to enter a more relaxed and calm state, hormones are released that also help us to feel good, or at least offer a bit of respite from our pain, and the overall impact is that we can feel more safe and more connected – including a sense of belonging. As with social connection, this can be really powerful in combatting the internal narrative that we are alone or that suffering is all there is.

The touch can be as simple as placing a hand on the heart, holding hands, self-hugging (or receiving a hug), caresses or pressure. A weighted blanket, hot water bottle or pillow to hug can also help.

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Comfort and Self-Soothing

Self-care, self-comfort and self-soothing are great ways to take action towards alleviating the suffering that we are experiencing. This might look like:

• Taking a warm bath

• Going out for a walk in nature

• Listening to soothing music

• Practicing self-touch

• Eating a warming and comforting meal

• A tasty cup of tea or hot chocolate

• Reassuring ourselves and talking with our inner child/children

It could also look like taking some time to acknowledge our basic needs and then taking whatever action will help with that. You can view a list of needs here.

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Mindfulness – Non-Judgmental Observation

Much like compassion, mindfulness is a skill that we can train in ourselves and the more we practice, the more self-awareness and self-connection we develop, and the easier it is to recognise our suffering, allow in our feelings, and have capacity to sit with them in kindness and non-judgmental observation.

Our inner observer can simply witness our thoughts, feelings and experiences and label them for what they are, without attaching a story to it. We may observe ‘here is sadness’, ‘here are my anxious thoughts’, ‘there is my sense of hope’, ‘those are my punishing thoughts’. Cultivating this non-judgmental observation helps us to take a step back and view our experience with understanding and empathy, and even to call upon curiosity, rather than being consumed by the feeling which is then more difficult to bring compassion to.

You can check out my other posts on getting started with mindfulness and check my YouTube channel or free resources page for more information on this enormous topic.