How is Self-Compassion Practiced?

 

 

 

 

Several years ago a small group of Buddhist teachers and psychologists from the United States and Europe invited the Dalai Lama to join them in a dialogue about emotions and health. During one of their sessions, an American vipassana teacher asked him to talk about the suffering of self-hatred. A look of confusion came over the Dalai Lama’s face. “What is self-hatred?” he asked. As the therapists and teachers in the room tried to explain, he looked increasingly bewildered.

-          Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

 

The Buddhist teachings tell us that we all have Buddha Nature, or the embryo of the Buddha, tathagata-garbha, within us. This is identical to the Dharmakaya of the Buddha, the pure essence of the Buddha. We are all born whole and pure, embodiments of the Buddha nature, and we all have the capacity within us to reach enlightenment. (Mitchell & Jacoby, p. 163-165) In some Buddhist traditions, we can do this immediately, in this lifetime, and in others, it is the effort of many lifetimes. This Buddha Nature at our center can give us something very beautiful and innate to tap into when looking for ways to learn to practice self-compassion. As the Dalai Lama expresses in the above quote, how can you not love yourself if, at your core, you are the Buddha, in a very real and tangible way? The Dalai Lama could not even understand the concept of the type of self-loathing that is everywhere in Western society.

            Western culture in particular teaches us that we only can love ourselves if we are worthy of love. This is the difference between self-esteem and self-love or self-compassion. Self-esteem has conditions attached to it, for example, “I will love myself if I get that big bonus during my review at work tomorrow,” or, “If only I could lose ten pounds, then I would be able to love myself.” Self-compassion is loving yourself simply because you are. To overcome potentially a lifetime of learning that we only are worthy of love under certain conditions, practicing self-compassion must be just that – a practice.

I was taught a very simple way to incorporate self-compassion into my daily life and meditation and yoga practice. When encountering a difficult moment, one can make a practice of saying to oneself, “This is a difficult moment. Everyone has these moments. Where in the body do I feel this? Can I breathe/sit with this sensation?” (Bo Forbes, Yoga for Empaths Workshop, 2014) These affirmations and gentle questions mirror Neff’s three components of self-compassion: self-kindness, a sense of common humanity, and mindfulness.

            Neff (in press, 26) teaches a comparable way to deal with difficulty as it arises in daily life, or a way to go back and revisit difficult moments from the past:

The self-compassion exercises taught in the program are also designed to help people bring self-compassion to actual situations with which they are currently struggling. For instance, MSC [Mindful Self-Compassion] teaches something called the ‘self-compassion break,’ which involves intentionally calling to mind a current life struggle, finding a soothing physical expression of compassion such as putting both hands over one’s heart, then silently repeating words that convey the main elements of self-compassion (‘This is a moment of suffering, suffering is part of life, may I be kind to myself in this moment, may I give myself the compassion I need.’) These types of tools are likely to help people learn to use self-compassion in their lives with greater efficacy.

 

These are moment-by-moment ways to practice self-compassion in everyday life as difficulties inevitably arise. There are more formal ways to practice as well. Traditionally, as we have seen in reviewing the metta practices, one begins by wishing happiness, health, and peace to oneself then expands these statements of goodwill to a beloved teacher or guru, to a difficult person, and to the universe at large. In Kristen Neff’s current work with self-compassion, which in many ways mirrors Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness work of decades ago, she has aspired to boil down the broader practices of metta to just self-compassion and to simplify and systematize these practices so that they can be experienced by a broad group of people in the general public and in clinical populations. Neff also aspires to have her work be quantifiable so that the outcomes and effects of the practice on the various populations can be observed and reported on. To that end, she has developed a program called Mindful Self-Compassion, or MSC. In Neff 2012 (p. 30-31) she describes the particulars of this program as follows:

The structure of MSC is modeled on MBSR, with participants meeting for 2 or 2 ½ hours once a week over the course of 8 weeks and also meeting for a half-day meditation retreat … MSC teaches both formal (sitting meditation) and informal (during daily life) self-compassion practices. There are experiential exercises and discussion periods in each MSC session in addition to homework assignments to help participants learn how to be kinder to themselves. The goal is to provide participants with a variety of tools to increase self-compassion, which they can integrate into their lives ... The program also teaches general skills of loving-kindness, which is a type of friendly benevolence given to oneself in everyday situations (compassion is mainly relevant for situations involving emotional distress) … The program makes it clear how judging oneself when things go wrong tends to exacerbate emotional pain, while self-compassion helps to alleviate that pain … At the beginning of the program a distinction is also made between self-compassion and self-esteem, as many struggles with self-judgment are actually struggles with self-esteem. Self-esteem is often based on self-enhancement and downward social comparisons … In contrast, self-compassion provides kindness and understanding in the face of life’s disappointments, does not require feeling “above average” or superior, and provides emotional stability when confronting failure or personal inadequacies.

In place of the traditional metta phrases, in Mindful Self-Compassion, practitioners are taught these phrases: “May I feel safe, may I feel peaceful, may I be kind to myself, may I accept myself as I am.” The final phrase, “may I accept myself as I am” may prove to be the crux of the self-compassion practice, and, indeed, the crux of mindfulness as well. As more and more research and effort is put into finding out why meditation is so beneficial to well-being, as the practices are dissected and each part is quantified and measured, this piece, this accepting oneself as is, is beginning to come out on top.

To begin to practice self-compassion, one merely has to look at oneself and accept oneself in this moment. Or, as Jon Kabat-Zinn argues, practicing mindfulness itself – merely noticing each moment as it passes - is a radical act of self-compassion. There’s no excuse: We all can begin right now if we are interested in experiencing the relief from suffering that these practices have been shown to foster.