Why is self-compassion important and what is self-compassion meditation?

Experts over at Harvard Health hold that "forgiving and nurturing" yourself sets you up for better health, good relationships, and joie de vivre.

How can we argue with the folks at Harvard Health? Who doesn’t want better health, good relationships, and joie de vivre (or an exuberant enjoyment of life)? It seems silly to even ask these questions, BUT what if we were misinformed on how to get these gems of life? What if we were looking in all the wrong places? Maybe, outside ourselves.

We all have the ability to offer kindness, support, and nurturing words or actions. We often are great at doing these very things to our spouse or partner, to our kids, to our parents or family members. We actually may even excel in this area.

So for example let’s imagine your 2-year old kid falls and scuffs his knee. What do you do? Well many parents would rush over and pick them up, brush off their leg, give them a hug and a kiss, tell them “everything is going to be okay. I’m here. You are okay.” and just comfort them until they are ready to get back to playing.

Now let’s say your friend lost their job. What do you do? Do you say… “hold on. I’m coming over. I’ll bring a bottle of wine (or ice cream or whatever) and we’re going to talk through it. I got you. Let’s find a way to get you back on your feet. I’m here for you.” and we may often go as far as… “those jerks don’t know what they are missing out on. You are awesome! We got this!”, right?

So when you have a friend or family member who runs into a mishap like getting fired from work, or hurt, how do you treat them? Surely you don’t choose this time to abandon them.

No, as I showed you often comfort them like a champ. Like this was your job. Like you get paid to do this and you are an expert! You comfort both verbally and physically. You tell them, “Everything’s going to be okay.” You hug them and bring them hot chocolate, right?

Let's Flip the Coin. Now, It's You in The Situation.

Your relationship has ended, you’ve lost your job, or you’ve hit a light pole in a parking lot while backing up.

Most people are merciless and ruthless to themselves: “What the hell is wrong with you? God! Why am I such a dumb ass? Why do I do this stupid shit all the time?”

Any of this sound familiar?

Give Yourself a Break

This tone is very different than the previous one with your friend. Why is that?

There are many possible reasons for that:

Self-love is a foreign concept to you –you are forever hard on yourself
You mistake self-compassion for self-pity, and you despise the latter
You are not kind to yourself because self-indulgence is a ‘sin.’
Or maybe it is as simple as you’ve never really been taught what self-compassion is or how to practice it.

Self-Compassion Expert, Dr Kristin Neff defines it like this…

“First, to have compassion for others you must notice that they are suffering. If you ignore that homeless person on the street, you can’t feel compassion for how difficult his or her experience is. Second, compassion involves feeling moved by others’ suffering so that your heart responds to their pain (the word compassion literally means to “suffer with”).

When this occurs, you feel warmth, caring, and the desire to help the suffering person in some way. Having compassion also means that you offer understanding and kindness to others when they fail or make mistakes, rather than judging them harshly. Finally, when you feel compassion for another (rather than mere pity), it means that you realize that suffering, failure, and imperfection is part of the shared human experience.

Self-compassion involves acting the same way towards yourself when you are having a difficult time, fail, or notice something you don’t like about yourself. Instead of just ignoring your pain with a “stiff upper lip” mentality, you stop to tell yourself “this is really difficult right now,” how can I comfort and care for myself in this moment?

Instead of mercilessly judging and criticizing yourself for various inadequacies or shortcomings, self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted with personal failings – after all, who ever said you were supposed to be perfect?” This info was pulled from Dr Neff’s website.

WOW! Can I get an AMEN? Have you thought about compassion much before? What about self-compassion? If you are like me you rarely thought about this stuff. You probably understand the meaning of the words from a theoretical level, but like me probably never thought deeply about this stuff nor ways to practice self-compassion. Am I right?

I certainly had no tools to squash negative self-talk or even knew THAT was a thing. I did it, but never noticed or paid much attention to this self-talk and had no idea how harmful it could be.

Psychologists now believe that self-compassion has more beneficial results than self-esteem. Self-compassion is the birth child of self-love. It is not self-pity or self-indulgence. It is not arrogance or complacency. Instead, it’s acknowledging your own faults, mistakes or suffering, and responding with caring, kindness, and understanding.

Self-Loathing Poisons Your Life

Your negative self-talk will follow you to work, to your finances, and even relationships. You will miss opportunities by telling yourself that “I’m not good at this.”

Picture a student in an exam room –a student who can’t stop thinking of himself/herself as “dumb.” Unless a miracle happens, this student might never finish the paper, let alone pass the exam.

Also, experts recently found that self-blame and ruminating elevates your chances for mental health problems. Anxiety and depression are examples.

There is a great article inc.com put out titled –Science Says There’s a Simple Reason You Keep Thinking Negative Thoughts All Day – You can blame it on the cortisol.

Meditation Quiets the Mind

Peace of mind, focus, and self-confidence are essential conditions of success and happiness in life. These things are hard to attain when your inner self-critic is ever active, telling you hurtful discouraging things.

Meditation connects you to a deeper level where the mind is quiet. There are many ways to explain how this works –but the easiest and most obvious one is deep breathing. By slowing down your breath in meditation, your racing thoughts slow down.

Keep in mind though that meditation only does this temporarily. Your mind will still race while meditating and may even include negative thoughts during your meditation. This is okay and normal even for the most seasoned meditator.

Understand though, that the practice of mindfulness can help draw awareness from a busy brain or monkey mind, to the essence of your being—the inner you—the sanctuary of peace and happiness. The inner you is the deep space beyond all the craziness of life—this is your eternal, righteous self, and what Buddhists call Buddha-Nature.

Your inner-self is the source of peace of mind and loving-kindness. Being one with this authentic higher self—through meditation—gives you new perspectives that allow you to let go of or find ways to change negative self-talk. You may even be able to identify and leverage opportunities in bad situations.

Reprogramming The Brain With Self-Compassion Meditation

Okay, so we’ve discussed all the bad stuff in our lives and in our minds. Now what? Is this just continuing to fill our minds with head trash and negativity? Is there a way out of this mess? Is there a way to end all this negativity?

Well, here’s the thing… you’ve spent your lifetime thinking negatively. You’ve been raised and indoctrinated to think like this. This was not intentional, but it is harmful none the less.

Yes, meditation and mindfulness are tools to become more one and more accepting of yourself, but depending upon your association with the inter critic and how ingrained they may be, meditation and mindfulness alone could take a long time to evict this awful tenant of the mind. So what can you do?

Well, this is where I recommend a reprogramming of the mind. You’ve often heard people say that when in a negative state, you should try to start watching more positive programming, or listen to more positive music, or read more positive uplifting books.

Well the same is true with self-compassion. In order to build strong self-compassion you need to first understand self-compassion ( I hope this article helped a bit) and then you need to practice self-compassion on a regular basis. Think of it like this… how many times a day or a week do you catch your inner critic speaking harshly to yourself or about yourself? If you start looking for this, you might be surprised how often it happens.

Most people could say this happens very often. So because of that we need to feed our mind, body and soul with nurturing thoughts as often as possible.

Self-compassion meditation is a tool to help nurture and “reprogram” the mind.

If you’d like to give it a try, I have created several audio files of guided self-compassion meditations. If you use these daily and when a life disaster arises, these self-compassion meditations will help you in big ways.

The more you use them, the quicker you can reprogram the mind to move to a healthier more positive lifestyle and belief system.

If you are in a difficult time now, I’d recommend you use these at least daily and especially anytime you a flooded with stress or emotions related to a struggle you are going through.

If you are not struggling currently, but know you have constant negative self-talk and an inner critic that can be harsh at times then adding a self-compassion break is good in the moment of these outbursts, but maybe a loving kindness meditation every morning when you wake up, maybe use another one as you’re driving around town, and another one right before bed.

This is serious and intentional work, it will take time, but it may be one of the best investments in yourself and your health that you can make.

Give it a try and share your comments below. I’d love to hear what you think of the ideas shared in this article and your thoughts on the self-compassion meditations provided here.

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Want to try adding mindfulness and meditation to your self-care routine? Click below to get several self-compassion meditations to start using as soon as you sign up.

Self-Compassion: What is it? How to Use Self-Compassion Meditation