I tried to desensitize my anxiety, which is to say, I consciously exposed myself to stressful situations—I tried public speaking whenever I could, but that didn’t help either. Until I learned the loving-kindness meditation and started practicing it regularly. I was once invited to speak at a conference at Harvard Medical School to speak to 600 people. I was terrified and panicked, so I practiced this meditation every morning for the previous four months. It involves repeating phrases like: “May I be safe, may I be calm, may I be healthy, may I live well.”
As soon as I arrived at the conference, my speech was announced, I stood up to speak, but I was very scared and trembling. Then a new but natural voice sounded in my head and said, “May you be safe, may you be at peace…”
And did that change your attitude towards the speech, did it calm you down?
– This is called counterconditioning. There is no miracle here. It was a combination of the experience of panic and words of kindness that changed the experience. Instead of being afraid of the audience and shaking inside, I felt joy. I attribute this to self-compassion.
I also practice mindfulness, which, among other things, means allowing difficult emotions to come and go, creating an internal space for them, a kind of non-judgmental awareness that allows them to simply be.
I wasn’t able to do this when I was speaking in public, but I also discovered why. Well, underneath my anxiety was shame. Fear that people would think I was incompetent because I was trying to talk about mindfulness while shaking like an aspen tree. By practicing self-compassion, I learned that what I was really dealing with was shame, not anxiety, because that anxiety was born out of shame.
I also learned that shame is probably the most difficult human emotion. It’s intense and disturbing. How is self-compassion different from mindfulness?
– When emotions are intense or there are too many of them, we cannot be consciously present. This does not mean that all is lost. Sometimes we need to first hold ourselves in loving awareness before we can hold our experience in loving awareness. And this is the fundamental difference between mindfulness and self-compassion.
I noticed that people were coming to me as a psychologist with intense and difficult emotions. When someone is feeling panic, despair or grief, help within the framework of mindful awareness is always limited. Because you can’t be fully aware and open to this experience. But self-compassion allowed mindfulness to work. It shifts the individual’s physiology from a state of threat to what is called a calming state and allows them to calm down. In the same way, we feel calm when someone hugs us or offers us comfort, love, support and compassion. When we are struggling, we can also do this for ourselves. Two years after the conference mentioned above, I met Kristin Neff, who is the lead researcher in this area. And in 2010, we started teaching self-compassion as part of the MSC (Mindful Self-Compassion) program that we created.
So self-compassion is a connection with yourself, but also with others? You said that when you practiced loving-kindness, you also felt joy through connection with your audience.
– Yes, it was a positive connection with the audience. Previously, this contact was negative because I was afraid of being judged. And then, when I learned to have self-compassion, I didn’t think about it anymore. I just wanted everyone to be happy and have a good time at the conference. My attitude changed. The Dalai Lama said that compassion is always a matter of one sentient being towards another.
Self-compassion and compassion regulate emotions through mechanisms of care and connection. Mindfulness regulates emotions through attention and awareness, that is, what we pay attention to and how we pay attention, so that we can focus on one thing, which will calm the mind.
Mindfulness is an open, loving, accepting way of paying attention. That’s how mindfulness regulates emotions. But self-compassion regulates emotions through care and connection. And as we know, the combination of regulating attention and activating care and connection is a very effective way to work through difficult mental states. So I’ve learned that this additional element—self-compassion—is a good complement to mindfulness.
Can self-compassion support mental health issues like depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder?
– Research shows that self-compassion is helpful for almost every mental disorder – anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. It helps with substance abuse and even psychosis. So the research basically shows that self-compassion is what we call a transdiagnostic mechanism for mental well-being. Transdiagnostic, meaning it can help with any diagnosis.
When Kristin Neff began her research in 2003, she wrote the first paper on self-compassion, and there are now seven thousand studies on the topic.
Participants in my MSC (Mindful Self-Compassion) courses emphasize how important it is for them to experience what is called common humanity. It is one of the three components of self-compassion. Can you describe the rest?
– The three components of self-compassion are, first, mindfulness, which counters overidentification or self-absorption. The second element is shared humanity – versus isolation or loneliness, and the third is kindness, which is a counterbalance to self-criticism.
Interestingly, people who have been practicing mindfulness for a long time think that it’s all about mindfulness and that there’s no need for any other ingredients. That would be true if you were always fully aware. But no one is ever fully aware, so conceptually it’s true, but not in reality. In fact, there are other aspects that we need to be fully aware of, and those are, in my opinion, shared humanity and mutual kindness.
Most people think that self-compassion is about kindness and tenderness. That’s true too, but in fact self-compassion is not just kindness, and it’s certainly not just tenderness. To be truly compassionate, we must approach our own suffering with curiosity and openness, feeling it for what it is. This is mindfulness. But to be open to what we experience and learn from it, we also need a common humanity.
We must not remain absorbed only in our own thoughts and feelings, we need to break the shell of our individuality and see what is beyond it, what is happening in a broader context, because that is how we develop.
So all three components of self-compassion work closely together. There is also courageous and kind self-compassion.
– They are like yin and yang. Many people believe that self-compassion is benign, that self-compassion is mainly about suffering.
But there is also a completely different side, which is more action-oriented and largely based on stopping harm and righting injustice. For example, it is doing courageous things like running into a burning building to save people. This is very compassionate behavior.
Compassion can have a gentle side, such as physical relief, emotional comfort, or acknowledging someone’s experience. This is the yin or gentle part. And the yang part – the courageous and resilient part, is more about setting boundaries – it means protecting, saying “no.” It’s also about taking care of needs, which means first acknowledging our needs – emotional or physical, acknowledging them, and then also saying “yes” to providing what we need.
So we must say “no” when harm is done, we say “yes” to nourishing ourselves. The final characteristic of courageous self-compassion is encouraging and motivating.
So self-compassion doesn’t mean self-indulgence or shortcuts?
– NO. Sometimes we really need to encourage ourselves to do difficult things, to motivate ourselves. It’s the ability to have an inner voice that tells us we can do it, that encourages us to take action or to fight. It tells us, “You have what it takes, I believe in you. I trust you.” That kind of internal encouragement. All of this falls under the category of combative self-compassion.
What is the Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) course?
– This course is eight weeks long. It is designed to help people learn to be more compassionate with themselves. First, we want participants to have the opportunity to experience self-compassion firsthand, and we teach them methods that can help them develop self-compassion in their daily lives. The course includes seven meditations, 20 informal practices, and 14 other exercises that can be used in everyday life. So the goal of MSC is to cultivate the inner resource of self-compassion. That’s why we like to say that MSC is a resource-building program, although it is quite therapeutic, it is not therapy. It focuses on developing and cultivating the resource of self-compassion. The basic paradox of self-compassion is that we practice it not to feel better, but because we feel bad. So, everyone who participates in the program to feel better after several struggles and internal battles ends up finding that they are the same person they always were. They still don’t feel good, and that is a moment of disappointment. But really, this is the opportunity to really learn what self-compassion is and to really be compassionate with yourself. It’s about allowing yourself to be fully human, which includes suffering, failure, and the full range of human experiences. This is what meditation teacher Rob Nairn has called “compassionate messiness.” To become not just a mess, as we always have been and always will be, but a compassionate mess. That’s why another meditation teacher, Jack Kornfield, says that our goal is not to perfect ourselves, but to perfect our love. And ultimately, that’s what we do in the course – we learn to automatically respond to suffering with self-compassion.
Dr. Christopher Germer is a clinical psychologist and co-creator of the MSC (Mindful Self-Compassion) program. He is a co-founder of the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion, a center for training, research support, and popularization of self-compassion. He is the author and co-author of books on self-compassion. Among other books, “Self-Compassion: Use Mindfulness Techniques to Accept Yourself and Develop Inner Strength” co-written with Kristin Neff has been published in Polish. He conducts MSC teacher trainings, as well as courses and workshops worldwide. Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School
Joanna Nogaj – psychologist. Certified teacher of Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC – Mindful Self-Compassion) and mindfulness (MBSR – Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction). She belongs to the Polish and German Association of Mindfulness Teachers. She leads individual sessions and courses on mindfulness and self-compassion. She organizes workshops and webinars. She conducts trainings for companies and organizations. She helps people struggling with burnout and stress. She offers psychological support to help deal with chronic gastrointestinal problems, e.g. IBS, SIBO – she created the “Calm Belly” course. She runs the Ukojenie center in Poznań. http://www.ukojenie.com
