Self Compassion 101

Imagine you are having lunch with a friend. Over lunch your friend is tender and holding back tears. They tell you they just got broken up with by a person they thought was the one. They tell you that they didn’t see it coming, and they don’t know how to proceed. They are heartbroken. Now imagine your response to your tender, heartbroken, just fucking trying to be human friend was this…

Well, I for one am not surprised, because you got that horrible bang haircut. You look like shit,  you’ve gained seven pounds, and you haven’t gone to yoga in months, but you still pay for the monthly membership. Also you haven’t even started that thing you said you’d start and you haven’t had your car cleaned in like six months. You don’t even use commas properly. You’re a total loser, and of course no one will ever actually love you; no one ever has and no one will. Also you failed physics in college because you were at a rave with a boy you loved, and you had literally no friends as a kid. I mean, what exactly did you expect?

You would never! But here’s the thing, you would, because we talk to ourselves like this all the time. 

Welcome to Self Compassion 101, except it’s never easy. It can be well practiced, but like all great tools of human tending it sounds easy, and it’s absolutely not. I woke up at three am last night. I knew I had to write something for today, and really, I had too many ideas. The inside of my mind was like The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills on a boat trip. I put my hand on my heart and said, well, honestly, suddenly at three in the morning I didn’t know what to say. I have been studying, practicing, force feeding self compassion down the throats of therapy and coaching clients, and writing about self compassion for the better half of a decade now, and in the face of all that brain chatter, my mind went blank. I put my hand on my heart and I just said, I love you no matter what. My body braced against me, my mind kept going. I only half believed it, but half is a pretty big number, and I remembered to try. Eventually I fell asleep, but I am out of practice. So I woke up this morning and knew I had to write about self compassion, because without that my healing is harder, therefore my expansion is harder. Ultimately for me, without a self compassion practice, my limits close in on me.

We rail against self compassion, because we think we will just give into our every need, like a toddler with an iPhone, and snacks; we think we won’t get anything done! And who are we if we don’t get anything done???!!! But, when we are really practicing self compassion we are more motivated to do life on our own behalf, like actually do life, not life adjacent. It is my experience that going after the life I really wanted was impossible without self compassion.

We also rail against it because it makes us vulnerable, this is the actual real reason we fight it. Self compassion softens us, and we hate to be soft. Too much self compassion is like a blow dryer on an ice sculpture, it melts us, it thaws us, and we are terrified to find what has been waiting inside our little ice sculpture lives. We need self compassion to coax ourselves out from under the bed and we need self compassion to meet ourselves when we arrive scared and kinda disheveled. We rebuild ourselves little by little, not all at once.

Let’s imagine something else. Imagine you are in a very tiny room. Maybe take your hands the length of your shoulders. Okay, the room is that big. Now imagine you are trying to get something done, anything at all, and there is a person in the tiny room with you judging your every move. Really imagine it. Close your eyes. Does that feel effective or not effective? Now. Close your eyes and imagine doing the same task, and there is a person there holding space for you to do the task, maybe not all up in your face about what a good job you are doing, but a kind presence. Which one feels better? And which one feels more effective?

One of the three components of Mindful Self Compassion is Self-Kindness vs. Self-Judgment. This means treating ourselves with care instead of judgment. This means learning how to take action to soothe and comfort ourselves. Often we are fussy babies, we want the bottle, but also we push it away, but one of the most important questions you can ask yourself is, What do I need right now? And one of the most important actions is actually listening for a response. Maybe you are not ready to do what you hear you need yet, that’s okay. We are not robots, we are shifting changing breathing organisms; we are in biological/ psychological process always.

EXERCISES

Write about a difficult situation, not too difficult, but something that is a little stuck in your body, mind, heart. Now write a letter back from a person who loves you very much. What does the letter say? Is it filled with kindness or judgment? Just notice, like a little science experiment.

Notice how you treat your friends vs how you treat yourself this week.

Explore placing a hand on your heart or upper arm. Explore placing a hand on the back of your neck and forehead. Just start to see what you like. Fun fact. Your nervous system doesn’t know it’s your hands soothing you - it just knows it’s being soothed. Maybe your mind has big ideas about how lame it is, but notice the way your body feels.

And if you really wanna go for it. Get a pen and paper. Set a timer for 5 minutes. WHAT DO YOU NEED RIGHT NOW? WHAT DO YOU NEED THIS WEEK? Is there anything else?

May you treat yourself this week with the same amount of kindness you showered on that lame crush from 2007.

XXJenny

Art by Jenny Holzer