Kristen Neff, in her book, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, identifies three core components of the practice of self-compassion. In previous posts, we have looked at the first two of these components. The first of these components is kindness. More than just warm feelings, kindness looks for specific actions that you can take toward yourself. This lovingkindness is an antidote to the harsh, judgmental responses you make to actions that do not reflect your best self. The second component is realizing your common humanity. This is a stance where instead of blaming yourself, you find ways to experience how your struggles are ones that every human being experiences.
The third component of self-compassion is mindfulness. According to Neff, mindfulness “refers to the clear seeing and nonjudgmental acceptance of what’s occurring in the present moment…The idea is that we need to see things as they are, no more, no less, in order to respond to our current situations in the most compassionate—and therefore effective—manner.”
It is not uncommon to feel emotional, even physical, pain in response to a bad decision.
When you feel pain, you decide that something is wrong, and it makes sense that you might want to avoid or get away from this pain. Mindfulness invites a different response to your emotional pain. You turn towards the pain. You hold it. You stay with it just as it is. Why is this mindfulness so important to self-compassion? Well, if you want to respond with kindness to your actions in a way that brings lasting change, you need to know exactly what those actions are. You need to be honest with the thoughts and feelings that well up inside you in response to your actions.
And when you can just let them be there, in a welcoming and accepting way, you are able to experience your thoughts as thoughts and your feelings as feelings. They are not necessarily real and true, in the sense of defining who you are. This mindful acceptance keeps you from getting caught up in stories from the past and the future. When you make a bad choice, your mind can go back to the past and create a narrative about all the ways you have failed in the past. Your mind can also go into the future and create a narrative about how you will fail in the future because, well, this is just who you are.
Neff says that your suffering “stems from a single source—comparing our reality to our ideals.
When reality matches our wants and desires, we’re happy and satisfied. When reality doesn’t match our wants and desires, we suffer. Of course, we have about a snowball’s chance in hell of our reality completely matching our ideals 100 percent of the time. That’s why suffering is so ubiquitous.” So, quite often the suffering you experience is not in response to a painful situation; it comes from your efforts to resist the painful situation.
Imagine a simple moment like getting a flat tire. You can get upset with the person who left the debris in the road. You can get down on yourself for not seeing the debris. You can worry about how this flat tire is going to mess up your schedule for the whole day. You are not suffering because you had a flat tire. You are suffering because of all the thoughts and feelings that you are having about the flat tire.
When you make a choice that is hurtful to others, you can get down on yourself and call yourself a variety of names. You can tell yourself that this is just one more example of how you are failing in life, and things will never get better. That creates a lot of emotional suffering, but your suffering does not come from the hurtful choice as much as what you are telling yourself in response to that hurtful choice.
There are a variety of mindfulness practices that can help you with the thoughts and feelings that go with actions that you regret.
Instead of getting caught up in the thoughts and feelings or trying to push them away, you imagine that they are like the clouds floating in the sky. These thoughts and feelings come and go, but you—the sky—are still there. Or you imagine these thoughts and feelings are like leaves floating slowly down a stream. In fact, you can imagine taking each of these thoughts and feelings, placing them on a leaf, and then watch it float down the river until it is out of sight.
When you are able to practice mindfulness in response to these hurtful choices, it is easier to get enough psychological distance to choose ways to be kind to yourself and to see how you are just like everyone else trying to do the best they can in life.
Expressing self-compassion can be difficult if you are struggling with depression, because it is easy to be harsh and judgmental towards yourself. My depression treatment specialty page offers more information about how counseling can help you develop a different relationship with your depression.