Week 4
Discovering Your
Compassionate Voice
Home Practices
The practices from this session are:
Loving kindness for Ourselves
Compassionate Letter to Myself
Workbook: Chapters 11-13
Practice Tips: Rather than practicing to fix or improve anything, you are encouraged to meditate simply (1) to know what is like to be alive (mindfulness), and (2) to receive love (loving kindness and compassion) - perhaps even more love than you might receive from others during the entire day.
Meditations
© Christopher Germer & Kristin Neff (2021). Mindful Self-Compassion. All rights reserved.
“ …we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is…not to try to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.”
Informal Practice: Compassionate Letter to Myself
As we discussed, we all have parts of ourselves that we do not like. It could be an unhealthy habit, a tendency toward irritability, or difficulties completing tasks among others. When you become aware that you are being unnecessarily self-critical, writing a compassionate letter to yourself can help you cultivate a more compassionate and encouraging voice.
Based on the work of Gilbert (2012), you can write this letter to yourself from three different perspectives:
From a Compassionate Other to Yourself - Think of an imaginary friend that is caring and unconditionally loving. This friend is wise, compassionate, and listens to you. Write a letter to yourself from the perspective of your friend.
From your Compassionate Self to Another - Write a letter as if you were speaking to a dearly beloved friend who is struggling with the same concerns as you.
From your Compassionate Self to Yourself - Write a letter from the perspective of your own compassionate self. This is the part of you that wants to help you because it cares deeply about your wellbeing.
Self-Criticism and Safety
The desire to keep ourselves safe underlies most self-criticism. The self-critic is usually trying to help us in some way, to protect us from some perceived danger, even if the methods it uses are unproductive.
Sometimes a critical inner voice is internalized shame from early caregivers, or from cultural oppression, and has no redeeming value whatsoever. ("You will never amount to anything," "It's all your fault," "Nobody loves you").
When we stand up to abusive voices from the past, or start being kind to ourselves, we may feel frightened and unsafe. It feels like breaking an invisible agreement that helped us survive. This fear can be met with self-compassion as well but we need to proceed slowly and have access to a personal trauma counselor.
Please note that some people do not seem to have a harsh inner critic. This may be because they don't have one, or perhaps they just have never explored this aspect of their experience and so they cannot recognize critical self-talk. However, the inner critic can also be experienced somatically as a sense of helplessness, despair, or agitation.
Of course, just like the inner critic, our inner compassionate self also wants us to be safe. While providing unconditional self-acceptance, it would like us to change behaviors that are causing us harm. We're going to explore what it feels like to motivate a behavioral change from both a self-critical and self-compassionate perspective.
Stages of Progress:
The Muddy Middle and Beyond
The Fly, by Robert Van Antwerp
We are now in the "muddy middle" of the program. If you are finding that you have doubts about your ability to become more self-compassionate, know that that's not a problem. In fact, it may mean you are making progress! Self-compassion training typically goes through three stages: Striving, Disillusionment, and True Acceptance
The video "The Fly" is a good example of the stages of progress: Striving was when the martial artist was trying to kill the flies, disillusionment was when he broke down in the futility of the struggle, and true acceptance was when he opened his hand.
In MSC, we say that progress is the refinement of intention—learning to practice self-compassion for its own sake, not as an effort to manipulate moment-to-moment experience. “Progress” really means dropping the idea of progress. The refinement of intention is best expressed in the paradoxical statement: “We give ourselves kindness not to feel better, but because we feel bad.”
Striving
We all start to practice self-compassion, or any self-improvement effort, with the intention to feel better. It is full of hope. Sometimes the practice bears fruit right away; for example, when we discover for the first time, “I can love myself!” This realization can be quite elevating, like the infatuation phase of a romantic relationship.
Disillusionment
Of course, as in any romantic relationship, infatuation is usually followed by disillusionment. In interpersonal relationships, disillusionment is the discovery that our beloved is no longer the answer to all our problems and is, after all, a human being. In self-compassion practice, disillusionment corresponds to the discovery that “I am still the same person as before!” with the same uncomfortable feelings and personal flaws. When this happens, we might blame ourselves or the training program for failing to make a more substantive change. The problem usually lies in the intention behind the practices—the wish to change our personalities or how we feel rather than accepting “what is” with an open heart. When this happens, self-compassion has been hijacked in the service of resistance. The fault is not in the techniques but in the intention behind their use.
Consider the following example of using loving kindness phrases to overcome insomnia. When we first learn loving kindness and have a curious, beginner’s mind, we may successfully comfort ourselves with the phrases when we’re lying sleepless in the middle of the night and easily drift off to sleep. Upon waking in the morning, we may be excited by this success and decide to use lovingkindness phrases the next night to fall asleep. Predictably, it doesn’t work because the intention behind using the phrases has changed from self-comfort to a slick, new strategy for resisting or avoiding suffering. That’s when we become disillusioned.
Meditation teacher Bob Sharples (2003) describes these efforts as the “subtle aggression of self-improvement” and, as an antidote, he recommends that we “practice meditation as an act of love.” Disillusionment is an important phase of self-compassion training because it lay bare our counterproductive striving.
Radical Acceptance
Radical acceptance is the last stage (Brach, 2003). Radical acceptance refers to “fully entering into and embracing whatever is in the present moment” (Robins, Schmidt & Linehan, 2004, p.40), which also means embracing ourselves and others just as we are. How do we progress toward radical acceptance? Mostly we do less.
In radical acceptance, we are not throwing compassion at ourselves to make our pain go away, or accepting the status quo in our personal, community, or social context. Instead, we are opening to the pain as it arises, with self-compassion. Some sayings that may reduce unnecessary striving are:
“The point of spiritual practice isn’t to perfect yourself, but to perfect your love.” (Kornfield, 2017)
“We are not here to learn self-compassion—we are here to embrace our imperfections!”
“I’m not okay, you’re not okay... but that’s okay!”
To repeat an earlier analogy, radical acceptance is like a parent comforting a child with the flu. The parent is not trying to drive out the flu with their kindness—they give care and comfort as a spontaneous response to the child’s suffering until the illness passes on its own. All human beings suffer in life. Can we offer ourselves the same kindness and affection as we might extend to a child with the flu? And can we offer compassion to our "imperfect self," our "failed self," or our "shameful self?" When we can, that’s radical acceptance.
The stages of progress do not always proceed in a linear, sequential manner. For example, when we notice we're in radical acceptance, we instinctively grasp to that state and slip back into striving. When we notice we're in striving or disillusionment, and meet those states with mindfulness and compassion, we move into radical acceptance.
No stage is “better” than the other. Our task is not to “progress,” but rather to meet the stage we are in with kindness and compassion.
Over years of practice, our periods of striving and disillusionment diminish and radical acceptance increases. The progression is like an upwards spiral.
...the curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am...change seems to come about almost unnoticed.
— Rogers, 1961/19995, p. 17
The Journey, Mary Oliver
The Velveteen Rabbit is the best-known work by the English-American poet, Margery Williams (1922/2014, p. 5-8).
This passage nicely captures how inner beauty emerges when we live authentically and turn toward the sharp points in our lives with kindness.
"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time…Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive.
But the Skin Horse only smiled.
