This week has been a mixture of experiences, as are most weeks at the moment to be honest. One element of it is been that I’ve been struggling with tiredness and staying present because of the heat. I’ve been trying not to be one of those cliché British people who moans when it’s too hot at as well when it’s too cold. There’s been part of me feeling uncomfortable rather than just sitting with the feeling. In other parts my life I have found my practice has started to make a difference to how I relate to certain things, so I can focus on sensations in my body, rather than getting dragged away by my usual tendency to over analyse. Thinking about resistance and experience it seemed like a good time to talk about my experiences so far with self compassion.
A friend introduced me to Kristin Neff’s book on self compassion about 5 years ago. At the start I was sceptical, at the time I thought that if I lost that critical voice inside me I might become lazy, even though writing that now seems a little bit silly. Still I have to admit that I struggle with actually being nice to myself and judging by Neff’s research other people do to.
Self compassion is something I have been coming back to in various ways and gradually I have been getting more comfortable with the idea of it. During lockdown, I decided that one of the things I could do with my time was trying make self compassion practice part of my routine and so I got myself the self compassion workbook by Kristen Neff and Christopher Germer.
The exercise I have been doing this week is around self compassion journaling, which involves taking an occurrence in the day where something went wrong or you felt some self judgement and applying three elements of self compassion to it. The Three elements are mindfulness, common humanity, and self-kindness. Here is how they work in relation to keeping a self compassion journal:
Mindfulness: where you try and bring balanced awareness to what happened and whatever is arising from it.
Common humanity: think about other people going through this situation. This is to combat the isolation we normally feel when something goes wrong or is going badly.
Self kindness where you write yourself some kind words about what has happened. I find it useful to think about what a friend might say, as that can stop my inner critic getting involved.
One thing I wanted to note about this process, particularly in relation to common humanity, is its important make sure you don’t think about things in a way that belittles your own experiences emotions and feelings. It’s about getting a balance between recognising that what you going through is difficult while simultaneously recognising that other people go through difficult things. So although these are set out as three separate steps, in reality they are all interlinked because I think in order to get the full benefit of self compassion you need to ensure that you always bringing self kindness and mindfulness to what you are considering.
Today is day 5 of journalling about incidents in this way, the workbook suggests that I do this for at least a week but so far I’m finding it really helpful so I think I will keep going for longer than that. This is only chapter 3 so I will be revisiting this in future weeks as I get further into it.
If you want to know more about self compassion https://self-compassion.org/ it can be found here and the link to the workbook that I’ve talked about is also shown lower on the same page.
moreinclusivemindfulness 