Self-Compassion – An important Practice for our Healing and Wellbeing
Something that has helped me incredibly much in my healing and self-love processes is self-compassion. I practice it almost daily and, therefore, I have programmed by brain to think in self-compassionate ways.
According to self-compassion researcher Kristin Neff, who has been studying the concept for two decades, “self-compassion involves treating yourself with the same kindness, concern, and support you’d show to a good friend, when faced with difficult life struggles, or while confronting personal mistakes, failures, and inadequacies”
To me personally, self-compassion means meeting yourself with love, acceptance and understanding. When I am going through a difficult phase, instead of being hard on myself, which would make things even worse, I nurture myself and tell myself that it is ok.
3 Core Components of Self-Compassion
According to Neff, self-compassion is made up of 3 core components:
1. Self-Kindness:
Instead of judging or criticising yourself, you meet yourself with warmth, kindness, and understanding. This could look like you are telling yourself: “You did your best in that moment. You did not mean to make that mistake and you did not know any better”.
2. Common Humanity:
Often we think we are alone with our struggles or that we are the only ones who make certain mistakes. When you practice self-compassion, you acknowledge that imperfection is part of the shared human experience. No one is perfect and we are all struggling in different ways. For example, you could tell yourself: “This is completely human to go through something like this and I am not the only one with these struggles”. You could even reach out to trusted friends or family members and open up about how you are feeling. Often you will find that the people around you have had similar experiences in some way.
3. Mindfulness:
Instead of trying to suppress your negative emotions, whether it’s anger, shame, guilt, sadness – you name it -, you turn towards them in a non-judgmental way.
You observe them and allow them to be fully there. If we are trying to fight or suppress difficult emotions, they will only come back stronger. However, if we allow ourselves to feel them fully and accept them, we give them space and therefore can process them.
Emotions are like water. They flow through us and are there to be felt fully. The difficult ones as well as the pleasant ones. In the end, we can view emotions as information. They arise to send us a message, for example, whether we do or don’t like something, whether something goes against our values or boundaries, or whether we want more of something. Making peace with all our emotions and accepting them lovingly, is one of the most powerful steps for our healing and self-love.
Self-Talk matters
As human beings we are constantly talking to ourselves. Whether we like it or not, our mind will always judge and comment on the things we are doing. Some judgments will be positive, some will be negative. Many are struggling with a real inner critic that undermines oneself and makes one feel sad, anxious, and not good enough. I guess for some of us the inner critic is not even an inner critic but an inner drill sergeant!
Through practicing self-compassion, we can change our self-talk to be of a kinder and more supportive nature. If we practice SC regularly, this will create neural pathways in our brain to think in more compassionate patterns. We are basically programming our brain for self-compassion!
Examples of self-compassion phrases that I am using are:
“Laura my love, you are doing the best you can”.
“This is a truly difficult situation, what do you need right now to feel held?”
“ I am not feeling good and that is totally ok”.
Or one phrase that my yoga teacher taught me:
“Laura my love, of course you are feeling this way, given these circumstances!”
When I make a mistake, I tell myself something along the line as:
“I am upset with myself and that is ok. I did not know any better. I am going to learn from this, and I will know better next time.”
One self-compassion exercise to start with:
If you have never practiced self-compassion before, here is one exercise to start with. All you need is a journal / piece of paper and a pen.
1. As a first step, think about times when a beloved friend is struggling, going through a hard time, or feels bad about themselves. How would you respond to your friend (especially when you are at your best)? What would you say, do, and in what tone would you talk to them? How would you feel internally? Write all these things down.
2. Next, think about times when you are struggling, are feeling inadequate, or are feeling bad about yourself. What is your typical response? What do you say, think, do? In what tone do you talk to yourself? How are you feeling internally? Write it all down.
3. Is there a difference between how you would respond to a friend and to yourself? If yes, how does it differ and why? What might be the reason for you treating yourself differently?
4. Write down what impact it would have on you if you treated yourself the same way you typically respond to a friend who is struggling. How can you apply this next time you are going through something difficult?
(This exercise has been adapted from self-compassion.org).
Starting your self-compassion journey
If you are completely new to self-compassion, chances are that you will simply forget to practice it. It is a new habit you are creating, and that can always be difficult in the beginning. To overcome that, you could schedule a daily self-compassion break. This break does not need to be longer than one or a few minutes. During this break, simply check in with yourself whether you are experiencing anything difficult. Acknowledge it, fully feel it, remind yourself that this is completely human, and use one of the self-compassion phrases to show yourself some kindness.
I cannot stress enough how powerful it is for our mental health to show some self-compassion to ourselves and I hope this article motivated you to be just a little kinder with yourself!
Are you noticing that you are quite harsh on yourself? Are you criticising yourself often and find it hard to be kind to yourself? Coaching and somatic exploring can help you understand your inner critic better and make peace with them. You can contact me for a free discovery session, to discuss how exactly that could look like.