What is Mindful Self-Compassion?
When we talk about mindfulness, there are a number of thoughts that come to mind. We know it’s about building our own sense of self-awareness, creating a greater connection with our bodies and emotions, and a stronger presence within our immediate environments.
We might even know that mindfulness can help us manage a number of mental disorders, including depression and anxiety, and help us achieve a sense of calm in our often-overloaded daily lives.
But what about mindfulness for self-compassion?
What is Mindful Self-Compassion?
Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) is the process of combining the skills developed through mindfulness with the emotional practice of self-compassion. While on first glance, the two might seem highly correlated, there is a distinction to be made. To really understand how the two work together, it’s good to have a definition of each concept.
Definition of Mindfulness
According to the American Psychological Association (APA, 2012), mindfulness is:
“A moment-to-moment awareness of one’s experience without judgment. In this sense, mindfulness is a state and not a trait. While it might be promoted by certain practices or activities, such as meditation, it is not equivalent to or synonymous with them.”
More popular definitions of mindfulness come from the founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, Jon Kabat-Zinn, who advocates for mindfulness as a process of awareness for the present moment, and exploration of emotions and feelings without judgment.
Definition of Self-Compassion
Most of us find it easy to demonstrate compassion for a friend or loved one when they’re experiencing a difficult time in life. But when we experience difficulties ourselves, we’re less able to apply the same compassion we would show others to the self. We often become overly critical and judgmental, thinking destructive internal thoughts about who we are and how we behave.
A great definition for self-compassion comes from Chris Germer, co-founder of the Mindful Self-Compassion Center:
“Self-compassion involves the capacity to comfort and soothe ourselves, and to motivate ourselves with encouragement, when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate. Self-compassion is learned in part by connecting with our innate compassion for others, and self-compassion also helps to grow and sustain our compassion for others.”
So, self-compassion is about reflecting on how you can turn the concept of compassion inwards, to support your own emotional development and acceptance.
Mindfulness generally requires us to be able to pay attention to any experience or emotive feeling – positive, negative or neutral – with acceptance and without attaching constructs. Self-compassion is generally more embedded in developing an understanding and acceptance of solely negative experiences or emotions.
Mindfulness within self-compassion is about using mindfulness in a more targeted way, to support emotional development with overcoming feelings of personal suffering (Germer, 2009).
Mindful Self-Compassion sees us taking both of these ideas and combining them, so we’re using the sense of awareness and presence developed with mindfulness, and applying it to support our emotional development for self-compassion (Neff & Germer, 2012).
Mindfulness and Self-Compassion
If you’re wanting to improve your self-compassion, developing your mindfulness skills could be an excellent place to start.
While the two are distinct practices in their own right, combining them can lead to incredible personal results. In more general mindfulness practice, the focus is on the experience component – thoughts, feelings, physical sensations – and how to direct or develop your thoughts around the experience.
For example, if the experience were chronic pain, through mindfulness you would focus on understanding the physical aspects of the experience, and directing your thinking from negative – ‘this is terrible pain’ – to a neutral exploration of what is happening in your body.
However, in the targeted practice of mindfulness for self-compassion, the emphasis is very much on the individual as the experiencer. Again, in the experience of chronic pain, mindfulness in the context of self-compassion moves from the physical sensations to thoughts about the experience that are turned inwards, redirecting negative thoughts of ‘this is my fault’ to more neutral or positive thinking.
Self-compassion has a focus on the self and on soothing the individual when distressing situations occur. Through mindfulness, the individual can transform their remit of experience as an individual, and redirect or transform negative thoughts.
In the context of self-compassion, mindfulness can also help to build awareness of negative or painful experiences, emotions or thoughts, in ways that allow self-acceptance without rumination. Neff (2003) coined the term ‘over-identification’, which is essentially the process of ruminating on negative or painful experiences and allowing this narrative to dictate our thought processes.
It can be a difficult balancing act when attempting to generate self-compassion to ensure you are focusing on the acceptance of the experience over reliving the painful narrative over and over again. This is were targeted mindfulness, which places an emphasis on acceptance, can support the self-compassion journey (Germer, 2009).
How to Best Practice Mindful Self-Compassion
The negative thoughts or emotions that can fill our minds and stop us for fully developing a strong self-compassion practice are often ingrained and difficult to overcome. To build a solid practice of Mindful Self-Compassion takes time and requires, as you might guess, a lot of compassion.
To start developing a Mindful Self-Compassion practice, you first have to explore and understand the barriers you might have that prevent you from self-compassion. This will be entirely dependent on your individual life experiences and beliefs. One way to do this is to reflect on the core (usually negative) beliefs you currently hold about yourself. Write them down and then ask yourself:
How does it make you feel once written down?
When did you first develop this belief? What experiences are connected to it?
What external experiences or situations trigger this belief about yourself?
Who encourages this belief about yourself?
How would your life look if you didn’t believe this about yourself?
Now you have the starting point of your Mindful Self-Compassion practice. Changing these beliefs will take patience, but sticking with it could generate a lot of positive change for your personal development.
The next steps of your journey could include:
Develop an awareness for triggers – When negative self-beliefs arise, try to pinpoint what caused them. Where were you, who were you with, what was said? The point of this exercise is not to learn to avoid triggers but develop a greater understanding of what they are.
Practice Mindfulness – Incorporate a daily mindfulness practice, specifically focused on or around your triggers. Explore what emotions or internal thoughts arise. How would you prefer to think or feel in these moments? What phrases can help transform your emotional reactions to your triggers?
Explore difficult emotions or thoughts – Similar to how you wrote down your core beliefs when they arise bring your mind back to these questions. Build your awareness and understanding of judgmental or negative thoughts about the self, by attaching them to their origins.
Embrace what you’ve been avoiding – Often we avoid or try to remove negative triggers from our lives. Identify how or when you might be doing this, and accept this as a part of who you are. It’s a self-preservation tactic. Instead, try to allow yourself space to acknowledge and accept what you’ve been avoiding.
Be your own best friend – When you do feel negative thoughts of judgment for the self begin to arise again, ask yourself how you would respond to a best friend who thought or felt that way about themselves? Would you be cruel and critical, or kind and compassionate? Apply this to yourself.
3 Mindful Self-Compassion Exercises
There are many different self-compassion exercises available to help you understand how to build Mindful Self-Compassion into your life. Below I’ve detailed three of the more introductory exercises that are a great starting point to begin familiarizing yourself with the practice.
1. ‘How Would You Treat A Friend?’ Exercise
This simple to follow exercise is a great starting point for identifying how you would treat others, versus how you would treat yourself in a challenging situation. All you need is a pen, paper, and an honest mind.
To begin:
Think back to a time when a friend or loved one has been struggling in some way: perhaps through a big life change, a relationship break-up, or health issue. If you can’t recall a direct experience, try to envision someone close to you going through a difficult experience.
Next, ask yourself how you would respond. What would you say? How would you say it? What questions would you ask? What little gestures would you make to show your loved one you care? Write out what the best version of you would do in this scenario.
Now think about a time when you have been in a similar situation, or envision yourself in a similar situation. Write down what your immediate thoughts and feelings about yourself are in this situation. How do you talk to yourself? What words, language, and tone do you use to describe yourself in this scenario? How do you treat your thoughts, emotions or your body?
Compare the two ways you react with one another. Do you notice any differences? What are they? What fears are being played out in how you treat yourself versus others? Why do you think this is?
On a fresh piece of paper write out how you want to be treated. What words, gestures, and behaviors do you need to feel more accepting and supportive of the self when you experience difficulties? Use this to guide your mindfulness when reflecting on self-compassion.
2. ‘Identify What You Want’ Exercise
This exercise turns a focus on the ways we can often try to use criticism as a motivator (which never really works) and instead aims to correct this faulty way of thinking to use Mindful Self-Compassion to motivate you to achieve your goals. You’ll just need a pen and paper.
To begin:
Think about a specific goal or aim you’ve been wanting to achieve. This could be big or small: a weight goal, savings/financial goal, self-care goal, etc. How long have you wanted to achieve this goal? How many times have you started and stopped?
Now, think about the language, words, and tone you use when working towards this goal. How do you describe or think about yourself? How critical is this language? How positive is this language? Often, we think that being critical of ourselves will help motivate us to change, but this is rarely true.
Reflect on how the process of criticism actually makes you feel. Do you feel motivated or let down? Positive or deflated? Start seeing how this way of thinking really makes you feel versus how you think it might make you feel.
Now, focus on flipping the language. Write down words or phrases that do actually make you feel motivated. With your goal or aim, think about why you want to achieve it, and write these out in positive affirmations with a focus on how good it can make you feel.
When you catch yourself being critical or overly judgmental about yourself, your goals, or lack of achieving them, reflect back on this exercise. Use mindfulness to start amending your thinking to be more compassionate and motivating.
3. ‘The Criticizer, The Criticized, and the Compassionate Observer’ Exercise
This exercise is a little more advanced and has been developed from the two-chair dialogue exercise, originally developed through Gestalt Theory (Greenberg & Webster, 1982). It encourages you to become more connected with three different parts of yourself: The Criticizer, The Criticized and the Compassionate Observer. You will need three chairs, a pen, and paper.
To begin:
Set out three empty chairs and give each one an individual label: The Criticizer (your inner self-critic), The Criticized (your internal part of you that feels judged), and the Compassionate Observer (the part of you able to offer wisdom and compassion).
Think on the topic or belief you have about yourself that you want to generate better self-compassion for. Take the seat of The Critizer and express out loud how this ‘voice’ would speak about you or the belief you want to explore. What words, language, and phrases do they use? What tone do they use? How does this make you feel?
Next, still thinking on the same belief, take the chair of The Criticized. Verbalize how The Critizer makes you feel. Do you feel hurt, angry, sad or anxious? Maybe all of these emotions to different degrees? Respond directly to your inner critic out loud telling them how the things they say about you make you feel.
You can switch between the two seats for this dialogue for as long as you feel comfortable, ensuring that you go in depth in each ‘role’ and explore deeply how each component makes you feel.
Now take the seat of The Compassionate Observer. Try and tap into your deepest, most compassionate self and think about how you would respond to each of the other ‘roles’ without judgment. Verbalize out loud what you would say to each party, making connections with your core belief and why you feel you hold this belief. Try to uncover any common ground that may exist between The Critizer or The Criticized. What phrases do you use? What’s your tone? How do you build compassion into your words?
Stop at any point that feels right for you. You can repeat this exercise as many times as you like, but try to make sure you reflect each time. Write down any new insights that come up and make a note to explore this further. Set an intention after each session to change how you phrase something as The Critizer or how you respond as The Criticized.
These exercises were taken from the fantastic resources page of the Mindful Self-Compassion Program, developed by Kristin Neff.
by Elaine Mead, BSc.