​Self-Compassion – the Path of Patience

10th August 2016

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Compassion can be defined in many ways, but it’s essence is a basic kindness, with a deep awareness of the suffering of oneself and of other living things, coupled with a wish and effort to relieve it. Many people find that the last person that they can feel compassion for is themselves.

We are very quick to judge ourselves and in our modern ‘heady’ world many of us have taught ourselves to split off and judge our vulnerable more emotional side and therein lies the problem. If we are self-rejecting in anyway what we are doing is eroding our self-worth and sometimes in therapy it can feel impossible to feel a drop of compassion because you are experiencing the full force of your own inner critic.

Self-compassion is most definitely our life’s work at this time because somehow if we can find it towards ourselves it really supports the process of healing and enables us to truly reach out and connect to our fellow human beings many of whom are suffering and disconnecting. There’s a lot happening in the world and somehow shutting down or dissociating in some way seems like the easy way out and yet it’s also very isolating unless you have a very strong anchor to a spiritual practice.

My experience with client work is that the key to self-compassion sits with the inner child. Often a child had an experience where they chose in an instant to reject themselves. It may have been because of something someone else said, an introjected message from a critical parent or simply a moment when the child caved in on themselves because it was the only and safest thing to do. It was in that moment that the very first self-betrayal happened and most adults find themselves speaking about it in therapy.

Through the safety of the therapeutic relationship it’s possible to allow some of those repressed feelings to surface and when they do it’s helpful for them to be witnessed and accepted. The key here is allowing and accepting the human side of the psyche and meeting your inner child with the level of love that it never had. When the child within the adult experiences that acceptance there is a subtle shift in the adult and there is a shaft of light allowed into what has been a very lonely and dark place inside.

In recent years particularly in Buddhism there has been a movement towards developing a psychology of compassion. Many Buddhist teachers speak about doing loving kindness meditations as a way to train the mind to become more caring, loving and gentle. My experience is that people are extremely hard on themselves and what they need to learn to do is soften the harsh way they treat themselves inside and replace it with very gentle and loving words. That doesn’t mean you become flakey – it just means that you learn to soften, self-sooth and allow more of your feelings to just be and you respond to yourself in the way you would respond to a child in need. Loving kindness is powerful when you extend it through your actions to others and if you struggle, stop trying and simply hold the intention to be kinder to yourself and over time it will happen.

Self-compassion includes every aspect of your life including how and what you eat and drink, the amount of sleep you have and how you spend your time. If you are kind to yourself that will be reflected in the way you relate to your body, your mind and how you behave in relationships. Whilst it is on the one hand associated with many of the world’s religions and spiritual practices as some kind of divine quality it is in my view a very grounded practice because to become more compassionate I have to learn to reach out and connect to others’ humanity and I cannot do that successfully unless I am in contact with everything about me that makes me human.

Each one of us is going to have a unique way towards achieving this and many find that simply applying positive thinking and focusing the mind on the right things is going to work and sometimes it does. However for others there may be deeper issues of self-loathing surrounded in shame and these can take more time to access. Once you do this level of inner work you can love more freely and there is less fear and judgement inside in relation to others. Many people say that they wish they could express themselves more fully and it is possible when the walls around the heart slowly come down. I think we could all do with some of that :-) Let me know your thoughts…

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