In this episode, Elise talks about mindful self-compassion and its relevance to our daily journey of finding ourselves. She also discusses how the practice is not about self-indulgence nor a form of self-pity. Finally, she shares how we can learn self-compassion through the different resources available today.
If you want to harness the power of self-compassion, this episode is for you!
Here are three reasons why you should listen to this episode:
- Understand the meaning of self-compassion
- Learn how to practice self-compassion daily
- Discover the connection between self-compassion and happiness
Resources
- Get a copy of The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook by Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer
- The previous episode of Elise’s podcast:
- Episode 4 | 8 Healing Resources to Return Home to Yourself
- Read The Feeling Wheel by Gloria Willcox
- Check out Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hanson
- Grab a copy of For Your Own Good by Alice Miller
- Try the Insight Timer
- Sign up for Elise’s Newsletter and receive a FREE PDF to start your self-compassion journey!
- Connect with Elise on Instagram: @elisekindya
- Sign-up here for Community Drop-In Group Sessions!
- Enroll here for the self-led six module Visualization course!
Episode Highlights
[03:07] The Practice of Mindful Self-Compassion
There is a lot of hatred and bigotry in the world. However, our problems would be lessened if we start practicing self-compassion. Self-compassion allows us to release ourselves from self-hatred and judgments. We don’t have to pressure ourselves to be better at everything.
[06:37] The Pillars of Self-Compassion
Self-compassion has three pillars: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness.
We have the tendency to fall into self-criticism whenever we talk about ourselves. Mindfulness brings us to the present. It helps us examine our thoughts and how it affects our body. Self-kindness means building up ourselves amid difficult times. We know the best way to help ourselves.
Elise: “[We] don’t have to abandon ourselves or look outside of ourselves every time something goes wrong. We can start first to access this well that’s within us that will never run dry.”
[11:02] Creating Space to Be Whole
Most people assume that self-compassion is a means for self-pity or boosting ego. On the contrary, it is actually the practice of carving space to find and be your true self.
- Let yourself experience your emotions and understand how you respond to the present situation.
- We must not only embody our positive emotions but also accept the negative ones too.
[15:00] What Doesn’t Fall Under Self-Compassion
Self-compassion is not about self-esteem. It’s about practicing kindness towards ourselves and accepting our reality.
- Showing kindness to yourself means checking your emotional and physical state.
- Hatred stems from our malnourished souls trying to find ways to boost their fragile self-esteem.
[18:31] Reset and Center
Mindful self-compassion helps you find your center and determine what you should prioritize. Listen to the full episode to know how self-compassion helped Elise’s life.
Elise: “Just because people expect you to do things a certain way doesn’t mean that that’s how you have to do things. Just because you’re juggling a lot of things in your life doesn’t mean that you have to keep doing that.”
[22:10] Accepting Imperfection
Practicing self-compassion helps you accept imperfect situations and manage your expectations.
- Learn to appreciate the good and bad things in life.
- Be grateful for being your authentic self.
- Celebrate your uniqueness.
[25:18] Coming Home to Yourself
- Finding yourself is a lifelong practice.
- Choosing to embark on this journey means showing up every day for yourself even if it’s difficult.
- How we perceive life is all in our heads. We can control how we think and feel about a situation.
[27:28] Loving-Kindness Meditation
- Loving-kindness meditation is about deserving peace, happiness, and freedom.
- It’s the practice of extending the ripples of love from yourself to others.
- Elise shared that she gets easily angered before. Loving-kindness meditation allowed her to extend her compassion to everyone — even to those who are difficult to empathize with.
[30:04] On Happiness
- Everyone deserves to be happy.
- Happy people don’t inflict pain on others. Tune in to the entire episode to hear about Elise’s examples of personalities with unhappy lives and how it affected them.
Self-compassion can save humanity from suffering.
[31:46] Self-Compassion Is Not Indulgence
- There is nothing wrong with slowing down and giving yourself a break.
- Give yourself the love and care you deserve.
[32:29] Learning Loving-Kindness
- Once we extend our loving-kindness to everyone—even to those we find detestable—we could make the world a better place.
- Loving yourself becomes easier once you start extending love and kindness to other people.
Elise: “We have to be in this cycle of giving and receiving to be in cooperation with other people [and] to live on this planet.”
[33:28] Opening Ourselves
- Opening ourselves to emotions also means inviting feelings we want to avoid.
- We can only meet people as deeply as we have met ourselves.
[36:33] Learning Self-Compassion
Online and personal classes are available if you’re interested to learn about mindful self-compassion. It’s also possible to do this practice on your own by buying workbooks related to it. There are also journal prompts that help in gaining insights on self-compassion.
- Applications are also available for meditation practices.
[39:44] Elise’s Learning Moment
- Elise recognizes some parts of the podcast might have come off as offended or triggered.
- Knowing her blind spots is a teaching and learning moment for her.
She initially didn’t want to upload this episode. However, she applied self-compassion in the situation by analyzing her emotions and talking to people she trusts.
- We must accept that messing up at some point is normal.
- Elise wants to be an example in living one’s authentic truth and encourages people to do the same.
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Transcript
Elise Kindya: We have to be able to acknowledge that something that we’re going through is actually pretty hard. It’s okay that we’re experiencing difficulty with that and we can be our own best friend through that difficulty.
Welcome to Returning Home: The Podcast. My name is Elise Kindya, and I am a trauma-informed and intuitive therapist. This podcast is a space that I have created for you to discover a deeper understanding and love for yourself which leads to expanding what you think is possible in your own life.
My goal is for you to feel excited to live your life as your full authentic self. By listening to these episodes, you will learn things like how your brain works, my favorite resources for healing, stories from my own life, practices that you can press play on to add to your healing toolkit, and so much more.
I invite you to return home to yourself in big and small ways to live the life you desire on your terms. You can live connected, empowered, and aligned. When you return home to yourself, anything is possible. I can’t wait to share all of my insights with you. Now let’s begin:
Hey, everyone! I just wanted to preface this episode by saying you are going to hear me fuck up on this episode. It’s really funny because I first wanted to pull this episode and re-record it because I was ashamed of something that I said. Then, I processed it, actually, with my therapist, and she helped me conclude that what I wanted to do was let the episode air the way that it is.
If you listen to the end, I’ll kind of process through where I messed up and, or in my own opinion, where I messed up, and how I’m going to practice self-compassion for myself. Thank you so much for listening and I hope that you get something out of this episode.
Hello, and welcome back to Returning Home: The Podcast. This is Elise Kindya, and I’m so excited to be bringing you this next topic of the podcast. We are on episode six — just slowly making our way to double digits, and then hopefully triple digits after that. Thank you so much for being here. I hope that you’ve been able to listen to the past episodes of the podcast and that you’re getting a lot out of it.
Today, I really want to delve a little bit more deeply into a topic that I covered a few episodes ago in the top healing resources that I recommend. I probably mentioned on that episode that this topic — this resource deserves its completely own episode because it’s so good. Today, I’m going to talk about Mindful Self-Compassion and the power of this practice, and how I conceptualize the power of this practice.
If you have been hanging out with me for a while, I’ve probably mentioned this to you. I do bring this work into the therapy room with my clients because I think that it’s something so lacking in our society — not just today, but it’s been for a long time. It’s my belief — and it’s kind of a disruptive belief that if people were practicing self-compassion, then we wouldn’t have so many of the social issues, the ills of our society that we have today like racism, sexism, classism — all of these kinds of forms of bigotry and hatred.
I believe that they start inside of our hearts, and they permeate out and leak out into the world. I believe that if everyone were to devote time to learning about what self-compassion is, and dedicating some time to practicing it that the problems that we have today just wouldn’t be as severe.
I mean, yes, there’s greed. Money complicates things if we choose to let it complicate things. Social structures are complicated, and they’ve been in place for a long time. I believe that they are there because people hate themselves, and because they try to protect what they think of as being theirs from other people.
I want to talk about self-compassion because I think that if you were to understand what it is, then you can start to practice it, and start to reclaim some of this brain space that we give away to judging ourselves and to hating ourselves, and forgetting that we are also just human beings trying to get through the day and have a good life, and whatever it is that you’re trying to have — fill in the blank there.
We put so much pressure on ourselves, and it’s really exhausting. It tends to then kind of a lot of us — I don’t want to say we buckle under the pressure but there is this sense of “we can never do good enough, we can never reach high enough, we can never achieve enough, and we’re always beating ourselves down in our minds.” And it doesn’t have to be that way.
I had mentioned in a previous episode how I always make this outline and I am working from these notes. Today is another example of a time that I’m not going to do that. I am just kind of speaking from the heart. I do have my Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook in front of me, so I will be referring to that as needed. But I do think that this is something that can flow from the heart pretty well because it’s something that I practice. I try to keep this work in mind on a daily basis, multiple times a day. I hope this episode flows and that it makes sense. But I do just kind of want to speak from the heart here.
I think it’s really interesting when I work with my clients on this work — self-compassion. I don’t suggest it to all of my clients, but there is a large portion that I do because a lot of what I hear them saying about themselves is harsh. It’s pretty harsh. I believe — as I said earlier — that’s where a lot of the ills of our society are being born. It is inside of our own minds.
Something that I think the work of Mindful Self-Compassion, which was developed by Dr. Kristin Neff and Dr. Christopher Germer. They’re the authors of the Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook that I use with my clients. Something that I think it does well is outlining what is self-compassion and the three areas that they have designated that make up self-compassion are self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness.
When I hear my clients talking about themselves, and this very ingrained, deep voice of self-judgment, self-criticism — I can just see so much that what they think about themselves is the exact opposite of these three pillars of self-compassion. Thinking things like, “I’m the only one that does things like this. This only happens to me.” What’s really true is that common humanity tells us that everyone is dealing with these kinds of problems — judging themselves, overly critical of their appearance, or their work performance, things like that.
Mindfulness, of course, is an aspect of self-compassion because it brings us in relationship to our moment to moment experience with our thoughts, with the effect that those thoughts are having on our physical bodies, and the kind of stress and tension that tends to build up over time.
Then, of course, self-kindness has to be a part of self-compassion, right? We have to be able to build ourselves up instead of tearing ourselves down. We have to be able to acknowledge that something that we’re going through is actually pretty hard. It’s okay that we’re experiencing difficulty with that, and we can be our own best friend through that difficulty.
I think a lot of times people are searching for things outside of them to fulfill them. When in reality, you are the expert on yourself, you know yourself the best, and you can come up with ways to help yourself get through a difficult situation in the best way. Other people aren’t going to know the exact right thing to say to help you, or the exact right thing to say to just pull you out of a funk, or to help you feel better about something that’s going on at work, or in your family or with a friend. You know yourself best.
When we can combine all of these three aspects of self-kindness, mindfulness, and common humanity, to get to know ourselves well and to be able to put these tools in place when we’re experiencing suffering, we can be our ointment — our own sound that we put on a wound. We can be our own first aid kit.
That’s not to say that we don’t need our community. Of course, we do. But we don’t have to abandon ourselves or look outside of ourselves every time something goes wrong. We can start first to access this well that’s within us that will never run dry. As long as your heart is beating, as long as there’s air in your lungs, as long as you have thoughts in your head, as long as you are you, that well is there for you to access and for you to draw water from.
I really encourage my clients to practice mindful self-compassion. It’s important too because I think a lot of people think of self-compassion as being very indulgent. In the workbook, she goes through this. How maybe self-compassion, people think of it as like a pity party for yourself, or having an inflated ego, or thinking, “I’m just so great. I could never do anything wrong.” It’s really not that at all. It’s carving out time and space for you to be your whole self, to feel the fullness of your humanity, to let yourself experience the emotions that are coming up in your life, to witness the situations that you’re a part of, and how you are responding or reacting, and to give yourself the grace that you might give other people.
I like to say to my clients that, “Life is 50% positive and 50% negative.” There’s all of this stuff out there about positivity, and just always being happy and always seeing the bright side of things. For a long time, I thought that that’s how I needed to be in order to be a happy person or to be a good person. I have recently in the last several years — I’ve been on this kind of self-healing, self-love journey for a long time. It’s part of why I became a therapist because there was a lot of stuff going on underneath the surface that I wanted to know more about. But it’s only within the past probably — I don’t know — six years or so that I’ve gotten more in touch with who I am, in my whole totality is okay. I can identify as a glass half-empty person.
On the Myers Briggs, I’m an ENFJ. Very heavy on the J. I had a therapist a few years ago who was like, “Take the Myers Briggs!” I did. I got like a 70% on J, which can range in different percentage increments. I got 70%. That’s very high. I was very ashamed of this so I went back, and took the Myers Briggs again to lower my J percentage. I figured out which questions I had to answer differently to get a lower percentage on that. As I’m sitting here judging that, right? It’s like, I’m coming to grips with, coming to terms with the fact that I can see problems, and I can then see solutions. I have hope that problems have solutions, and I feel empowered to take the action needed to solve the problem.
I say this to say half of life is negative because that’s how it’s supposed to be. If you look at a feeling wheel — if you Google “Gloria Willcox feeling wheel”, you’re going to see this circular chart that has dozens and dozens of feeling words on it. You’ll notice that half of the feelings are positive, and half of the feelings are negative.
We are human beings living on planet Earth — this rock hurdling itself through space. I don’t know how fast it goes — like 60,000 miles. It’s like something crazy, right? Of course, life is half negative. Anybody that’s like, “Oh, I just want to be happy all the time and positive all the time.” I’m sorry, we don’t live in the same reality.
But I’m not saying that that’s wrong. I used to be that person. I used to think, “Oh, I’m so negative. I don’t want to be the way that I am.” Until I learned this work of Mindful Self-Compassion, and I’m like, “Oh, this is all working for me. This is also how it’s supposed to be.”
I kind of want to delve a little bit into what they say in the workbook of what self-compassion is not. What mindful self-compassion is not is self-esteem. I think that’s a really important point. Self-compassion isn’t like a judgment or an evaluation of who we are. Instead, it’s a way of relating to our life and to that one constant in life, which is change. Meeting that place with this sense of kindness towards ourselves, and with this sense of acceptance of what is going on in the world and in our life.
We can’t always control everything. We have to be flexible. We have to go with the flow a little bit — I say that as a J. We have to accept the fact that life is happening, and self-compassion helps us to meet each moment in a way that is going to help us be kind to ourselves through that moment. Not grit your teeth and bear it. Not push, push, push, push, push until you can’t anymore. It’s checking in with yourself, “What are my energy levels today? Have I eaten? Have I slept? Have I taken a rest? Have I moved my body? What do I need to feel whole, and have I done those things for myself?”
Am I living in a way that is kind and mindful and aware of who I am and what I need? Or am I just shoving my head down? You know, barreling through life like a football player. You don’t have to do that. You don’t have to be asleep in your life. You can wake up, you can look around, you can ask yourself, “Who am I and how do I feel? And what would be the best thing for me to do right now?”
You’re allowed to do it. When I said earlier about we have this sense in our society of there’s so much hatred, there’s so much violence, there’s misunderstanding, there’s miscommunication, there’s bigotry — there are all of these things. I think so many people are so emotionally hungry and thirsty. They’re so unnourished in their soul that we go through life in this way of putting our heads down and barreling through, and trying to get all of these external awards that work to boost our self-esteem. It leaves us feeling so empty, and then we take it out on the people around us.
I saw this years ago, and I used it in some of my PowerPoint slides in Canva. Then, I’ve been seeing come up on my Instagram reels again. There’s the sound — the thing I used in my PowerPoint Canva presentation was this “felt bored” with the letters on it. Now it’s like a sound on Instagram reels.
But it’s like, “My mind is like my internet browser — 19 tabs open, three of them are frozen, and I don’t know where the music is coming from.” I’m just like, literally, no one told you to do that. I know you were socialized to do that.
Mindful self-compassion is the invitation to X out the internet browser. I do not care what any of that is, and reset. Like turn it off, reset, recenter yourself, take a minute, and prioritize. Like what’s the most important thing right now? “Oh, I’m going to take a drink of water because my throat is parched.” Like I’m literally going to do that right now — leading by example. I don’t need to rush to the end of this podcast episode, and burn myself out trying to say every single thing as fast as I can. I’m actually going to slow it down. That’s what I mean by putting self-compassion at the center.
Just because people expect you to do things a certain way doesn’t mean that that’s how you have to do things. Just because you’re juggling a lot of things in your life doesn’t mean that you have to keep doing that. Especially if you’re listening to this, and you heard me say that, stop what you’re doing — close all the browsers, close all the tabs. You could even shut the computer down. Close your eyes and take a rest, and come back to what is really important, “Who am I? What is my mission? What do I want to get accomplished today? Who do I want to be as I do that today?”
I was even talking to my partner, Daniel, earlier because it’s Christmas time right now, and that just has me a little bit keyed up. We just spent a couple of hours at Target yesterday — just getting all the last-minute stuff. I wake up today, and I’m a little bit — there’s like this buzzing kind of, “Am I doing everything right? I’m disappointing people. I want to do it the way that I want to do it, but I also want to be there for my family, and I also want to be there for my friends.” Like there’s this running monologue in the back of my mind. Like nothing I could do was good enough.
Then, I had to stop myself because I was like. If you had told Elise in 2016, or 17, that she would run her own business, hire people to help her with her business, be recording podcast episodes about things that she’s passionate about — I’m able to work with my own clients now and I can choose my clients. I get to set the rate that I work at. I can choose my schedule. I can take as much time off as I want. I don’t have to be anywhere in person. I can work in pajamas if I want to. I can set my own schedule, go to the gym in the morning, and get my meditation in the morning, and just live life the way that I want to.
I would have probably thought, “Wow, future Elise has it made. I bet she never has a bad day.” I was talking to my partner about this and just saying, “Wherever you go, there you are. I’m always going to be me.” Like I said earlier, I’m very much heavy on the J in the Myers Briggs, right? I see when things aren’t — quote-unquote “perfect” — I want things to kind of be perfect.
Mindful self-compassion is a practice that has helped me to recenter a little bit around managing my expectations, showing myself kindness and gentleness when I’m having a hard time. Recognizing that things aren’t going to be perfect because we’re human and that’s okay. I can give myself some grace, and gentleness around my desire for things to even be perfect — that’s a place as well where I can practice mindful self-compassion. That I can choose to sync a little bit more into the good in my life.
I did mention this book a few episodes ago, I think — Hardwiring Happiness by Dr. Rick Hansen. That’s something else that when I combine it with mindful self-compassion, and I slow it down, I get into the mindfulness piece of mindful self-compassion, and I can let the good that is happening in my life sink in. It really does help to say, “Things are okay.” It’s also okay when I don’t feel okay about things. If you Google “feeling wheel by Gloria Willcox”, you’re going to see this round chart that has dozens and dozens of feeling words in it. Half of those words are negative because half of life is negative.
We are human beings, and it is difficult to be a human being. We have a nervous system in our body that is wired to let us know when we’re threatened and when our life is in danger. We’re supposed to pick up on the negative things in life. It’s in that thinking that we shouldn’t see things negatively I think is where we get so caught up in that toxic positivity in that, “Oh, look!” Comparing ourselves to other people, “Look at how great that person’s life is over there. Why can’t I be like that?” Instead of just being you and being happy to be you. Feeling grateful that you are you. You get to be you in this lifetime. There will never be anyone else on the planet, ever, that is you.
You are so unique. You’re so special, smart. You have your own talents. You have your own perspective — and that’s all to be celebrated. I love that Mindful Self-Compassion is this workbook that you can buy for 17 bucks on Amazon that can help you sink really deeply into yourself and learn to appreciate who you already are, what you already bring to the table.
This is part of why my podcast is called Returning Home: The Podcast — Returning Home To Yourself. This isn’t an overnight practice, this isn’t a snap of your fingers and everything is better. It’s a lifelong practice. If you choose to embark, this is a journey that you get to show up to every day and multiple times a day.
Like earlier today, I went to the gym. I didn’t necessarily want to. I’m still sore from the last time I went to the gym. I was like, “Isn’t that good enough?” But I was like, “You know what? I want to do this. I want to do this for myself because I know working out makes me feel better, so I’m going to do it.”
I get to choose that journey every day. It’s the same thing with feeling compassionate towards yourself. You can have days that are harder. Like I was saying about me waking up today and having this sense of agitation, or like things weren’t right. I lived that this morning — kind of in that space. Then, I was able to invite self-compassion into that thought process and change how I was thinking about that, and change my perspective on what’s actually happening in my life.
A lot of our life is in our own heads, and it’s the way in which we choose to think about what’s happening. The circumstances often don’t change very much, but it’s how we think about the circumstances that dictate whether we see it as a positive or a negative, whether we feel good about it or we don’t feel good about it. This is why I just love being a J so much because once I decide, “Okay, I don’t feel good about that?” Now, I can do something about it. I can change it.
Something else that’s a part of mindful self-compassion that I really want to point out is this idea of loving-kindness meditation. This is something that’s part of traditional mindfulness practice. It’s also called metta meditation. This is a sense of feeling as if you deserve to feel at peace. You deserve to feel happy. You deserve to feel free. Just as you want those things and deserve those things, so do all the other people.
A loving-kindness practice brings you through a kind of visualization of extending this rippling love sphere out to yourself, and then to a person that you really love. It’s easy to get in touch with wanting them to be happy. Then, moving on to somebody who’s maybe an acquaintance or someone you don’t know that well — somebody that you just see in passing like at the grocery store, and things like that. Then, moving on to a difficult person. Somebody that it’s really hard for you to empathize with, and hard for you to want good things for. Then, moving on to a sense of like everyone on the planet — all at once deserving to be happy, feel at peace, to feel free.
I don’t know if I’ve already said this in this episode, but something that used to be easy for me was to feel really angry. I could go to anger pretty quickly. If I wasn’t neutral, I was feeling angry. Practicing this loving-kindness meditation, and I started doing it years ago. I used to teach in a school. I would teach it to students between kindergarten and fifth grade.
At the time, it was Trump time. The fifth graders are like, “Do we have to extend it to Trump?” I’m like, “If that’s somebody that it’s hard for you to feel empathy for, you could try.” You don’t have to, but you could try. I totally relate to that sentiment that they had, though, of like, “I don’t want to send it to him.” There are definitely people in my life that I don’t want to send it to but those are the very people that it’s going to help us to send it to. It’s going to be good for us to send them loving-kindness.
This is what I think is such a valuable insight that self-compassion has brought me is — just as I wish to be happy, everyone deserves to be happy. When they are they don’t go out and inflict pain upon other people.
Do you think Donald Trump is a happy person? No. Do you think he feels at peace in his heart? I’m going to go with no. Sometimes, I bring up the example of Hitler, right? There’s this book that I read in grad school called “For Your Own Good”, and it’s about child abuse. There is a section about Hitler in this book because he was an abused child. Do you think that if he had a happy childhood, he would have grown up to become the monster that he did? I’m going to go with no. There’s also the example of Voldemort in Harry Potter. Was Voldemort brought up in a happy loving home? No.
The reason why I think it’s so important to practice loving-kindness and self-compassion is that when we teach children to do this, they will not grow up to inflict this type of pain on other people. Then, we won’t have the names of Trump, Hitler, and Voldemort, and the 100 million other people that hurt people.
I think it’s a practice. I think self-compassion is a practice that could save so much suffering. It could save humanity, honestly. I really believe that. That might be a disruptive thought. That might be a little bit controversial, “Oh, Elise, isn’t that so self-indulgent?” I mean, what’s self-indulgent about slowing down and giving yourself a little bit of a break, and giving yourself some love, and some care that you deserve to receive?
Whether anyone outside in the world is going to give it to you or not, you deserve it. If you can give it to yourself first, it’s going to be easier to enlist the help of other people in the world that could also then give it to you. Loving-kindness and metta meditation is something I wanted to point out about self-compassion because I think once we can start to have a little bit of a tolerance for people that kind of doesn’t have tolerance for right now, it will make the world a better place.
It, then, becomes so much easier to have it for yourself too. “Well, if I can extend loving-kindness to X, Y, and Z person that I find detestable, I definitely could extend some to myself.” Like, even more for yourself, right? There’s this concept in self-compassion where it’s like, “You take in a breath for yourself, and you breathe out of breath for another person. Like in for me out for you, or in for you out for me.” Just as I wish to, “May you be happy.” We have to be in this cycle of giving and receiving to be in cooperation with other people. To live on this planet, we are always in a cycle of giving and receiving. It’s just whether we see it that way or not.
One other thing I want to mention about self-compassion and this workbook is they point out that sometimes when we have closed ourselves off so much to feeling, and when we start to open it back up, we’re going to let in just as much of that stuff that we wanted to shove down as much as what we’re inviting in — what we want to experience. We have to be patient with ourselves. This is a practice of learning how to balance, and learning how to hold both.
Yes, I’m opening up to more love, which means that I’m also going to be opening up more to the opposite of love. Yes, I’m opening up to more understanding, so I’m also going to be opening up to an equal and opposite amount of misunderstanding. Being able to just dance between those things — to know that no matter what’s happening, and no matter what kind of as they call it in the workbook, “backdraft”, no matter how much of that is happening, you are still worthy of this practice no matter what.
Like I mentioned, there’s the opportunity to show up to your life every day, multiple times a day. I would encourage you to try on this practice of self-compassion and see if it makes your life a little bit richer. If it makes your life a little bit more full of ease, or more aware, more colorful. If you notice smaller things in your life that add to the complexity and the enjoyment of your life.
I do think that we can only meet other people as deeply as we’ve met ourselves. This is an opportunity for you to meet yourself really deeply. Then, you can meet other people deeper and deeper as well. Those people won’t be able to meet you as deep if they haven’t done their own inner work, and that’s like a dance that you have to just keep on doing. But it’s really fun. It’s really — it’s good times. It has helped me make so many more healthy decisions in my life — decisions that serve me because I know myself better, and because I’ve committed to returning home to myself. I’ve committed to feeling compassionate towards myself and doing things that I know will make my life that much better that I’m able to be there for other people too. I’m a better therapist for it, a better friend for it, and a better partner for it.
It’s something that I think is really worth delving into. There are classes you can take in this MSC — Mindful Self-Compassion. You can do it online, or in some places, or doing it in person. It’s possible to get certified in this work if that’s something that you’re interested in. But it’s really, really good stuff, and it has helped me deal with so much difficulty with so much more grace and with so much more gentleness than I knew I was even capable of.
Because like I said, I used to be able to go to anger really fast, and it just doesn’t happen in the same way anymore. I’m really grateful for that. It’s a practice that I hope will be with me for the rest of my life. I plan on making it part of my daily life, and definitely invite you to do the same. As I mentioned, I do this work with my clients. It’s also possible for you to do it on your own. Just by buying the workbook, there are tons of journaling prompts throughout the book. You can write directly in your own book — I like to do that. In the back of the book at the very last page, there’s a link for all of these recordings that are all done by Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer, who are the authors of this workbook. They’re kind of the head researchers in this area. There’s a never-ending flood of resources for this. You can also find Kristin Neff on apps like Insight Timer. She has her own meditations up there. That all kind of center on self-compassion.
I hope that this episode has given you some good insight into what self-compassion is, and what it is not. Some helpful ways to use it, and ways that I’ve applied it in my own life — I even did it this morning. I hope that you got something out of this. Of course, if you did, I would so much love for you to rate and review my podcast. That helps this go further and further so I can keep bringing you topics like this that you want to hear about. If you got something out of this, and you’d love to share it with somebody in your life that you think could benefit from it, I would so much appreciate that. Thank you so much for being here.
I also want to mention that in January, I will be hosting bi-monthly events that are community-dropping events. Those will have a small fee associated with them. The topics will range from things like self-compassion, journaling, visualization, meditation, Reiki healing — like all different kinds of things. More information will be forthcoming on that, but I’d love for you to just stay tuned. As I said, that’s starting in January of 2022 and you are invited. I hope to see you there. Thank you again for tuning in, and I will catch you on the next episode.
If you’ve made it through the episode, you might have noticed a time where I may be messed up. Maybe in your ears and the way that you hear things, and it not being you that saying. Maybe you didn’t get triggered or offended. But me knowing myself, and knowing my blind spots, and knowing the things that I need to work on. As I sat with this episode having been recorded, I was like, “Oh, that doesn’t feel good. That’s not how I want to represent myself.” But as I said, I mentioned this to my therapist, and we talked through it. It’s a moment that kind of reveals itself to be a teaching moment and a learning moment for me.
There was this part where my tone probably sounded kind of mean. I was talking about that “felt bored” quote, and the Instagram reels sound that’s popular now. My tone was kind of mocking in a way. This is a way of speaking and being kind of flippant about things, or not taking things very seriously. Belittling, even, that I’ve learned over the years. It’s something that I am working on. Something that I am aware of is my own inner critic, and how loud the voice is, and how that does come out sometimes when I’m talking.
How I’m practicing self-compassion for this is, first, taking some time with it. I recorded this episode, and then I slept on it. It’s been over 24 hours just kind of talking to people about it that I trust, and taking some time with it. I’m reminding myself of those tenants of self-compassion. Common humanity — everybody messes up. Life is not perfect. We are not perfect. We are human beings, and we do things that we’re not proud of all the time. I mentioned in this episode how people who are difficult for us to extend compassion to are really the people that need it the most.
For many of you, that might be yourself. For me, that is very true. It’s difficult for me to extend compassion to myself. I am practicing what I preach — walking my talk, right? I’m giving myself compassion right now by letting the episode be out here and letting it be a teaching moment. When I think about it back to that common humanity piece, and it’s also self-kindness as well. It’s maybe at the most, 10 seconds of the podcast of a 40-minute podcast. It wasn’t like I was using that tone this whole time. It was a moment in time — it was a blip.
Yes, my inner critic is loud in my mind and takes over a lot but it didn’t last the whole episode. It’s like a very small percentage. I want to be an example of living 100% authentic truth. Showing that to you, and letting you in on my thought process, and even letting you hear my inner critic speak. I think this is something that — while it might be triggering, and sure we can do as best as we can to protect each other from the parts of us that are not safe, and to heal those parts so that they aren’t unsafe anymore.
The reality of being a human is that there’s going to be a level of danger — like safety, not guaranteed. I’m taking accountability here as best as I can — showing you in real-time — me practicing self-compassion, and being mindful of my behavior, words, and tone. I hope that it is helpful for you, and I hope that it can help give you permission to do life imperfectly, every now and then because life isn’t going to be perfect.
Thank you so much for being here and for tuning in. I hope that this was helpful, and I will look forward to catching you on the next episode.
