The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion

by Christopher K Germer

  The student can also document his or her own progress to see if the practice is effective. Have you had moments of unexpected happiness since beginning self-compassion practice? Has your inner dialogue become more benign? Are you becoming more sympathetic to the plight of others? Have old relationship conflicts begun to ease up? The next chapter will go into the matter of “progress” in greater detail.

  BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

  The practice of mindfulness and self-compassion will gradually reshape your personality. That means that your usual ways of handling problems will become less automatic and you’ll have the freedom to choose how to respond to a given situation. Other people may say that you’ve changed, but you may just be feeling more and more like yourself.

  To recap, the first step toward inner transformation is mindful awareness that you’re feeling emotional discomfort. The next step is self-compassion. That’s mostly what’s required to alleviate emotional suffering. With consistent practice, you’ll develop a habit of sensing uneasiness in your emotional landscape and make shifts in attitude and attention without even being consciously aware of it. It’s a new relationship with yourself that feels like having a loving companion by your side all day long.

  FACE Your Challenges

  There will always be times when conscious intention is required to deal with difficult emotions. The following four steps—F-A-C-E— can help you meet such challenges:

  Feel the pain.

  Accept it.

  Compassionately respond.

  Expect skillful action.

  Step 1, feel the pain, refers to mindfulness: knowing what you’re experiencing while you’re experiencing it. You can’t work with pain if you’re hiding from it. Mindfulness of pain means we actually feel it, not just keep it at a distance.

  Step 2, accept it, means active, nonjudgmental embracing of experience in the here and now. Acceptance reverses the impulse to fight discomfort and thereby make it worse.

  There are a host of ways to meet emotional difficulties with mindfulness (Step 1) and acceptance (Step 2). Some techniques emphasized in this book are softening, allowing, and labeling, described in Chapters 2 and 3. “Softening” refers to accepting the bodily manifestation of stress. “Allowing” means accepting the emotional experience of discomfort—letting it be just as it is, free to come and go. “Labeling,” or naming how we feel, helps us disentangle from it.

  Step 3, compassionately respond, means bearing witness to your own pain and responding with kindness and understanding. To do this, you can use the loving-kindness phrases or any of the other pathways to self-compassion mentioned in Chapter 5 or in Appendix B. The more we suffer, the more self-compassion we need, but sometimes that’s the hardest step to remember.

  Step 4, expect skillful action, means you’ll be in the right mind-set to tackle even the trickiest dilemmas when you’re mindful and compassionate. This could mean getting out of an abusive relationship, changing your job, or letting go of your resentment and accepting someone’s shortcomings. Maybe you’ll want to apologize to someone and ask for forgiveness. The behavioral options are unlimited.

  Facing Back Pain, Insomnia, Stage Fright, and Difficult Relationships

  The conditions described in Chapter 1 of this book have their root in resistance to emotional distress. For example, Mira herniated a disk while doing yoga. It hurt physically, but, more than that, it signified to her the end of her vigorous lifestyle. That was a shocking and unacceptable possibility for Mira, so she became obsessed with the problem, blamed herself for her misfortune, and reduced her level of physical exercise, which led to tighter muscles and increased pain. The healing path began after Mira learned how fighting her condition only made it worse. Her progress went from Step 1, feeling the pain rather than trying to resist it; to Step 2, accepting what was happening to her; to Step 3, not beating up on herself emotionally; to Step 4, intelligently caring for herself with massage therapy and moderate exercise.

  Insomnia treatment follows a similar pathway, assuming you’ve ruled out physical and environmental causes of insomnia. Rather than ruminating all night long about the consequences of not sleeping, which can keep the nervous system on high alert, you need to recognize how much emotional distress you feel in the very moment of ruminating (Step 1). Then you accept your sleeplessness as a fight you can’t win (Step 2) and respond with kindness (Step 3). One friend related the following incident when his wife had a cold and shifted about restlessly in bed beside him: “When I stopped wanting her to be more still, I started rubbing my head, got up to read a magazine, and, of course, quickly fell asleep in 5 minutes. If I kept ‘griping,’ I would have laid awake in bed for hours in frustrated resentment.” His acceptance of the situation led to a self-compassionate response—rubbing his head—which eventually led to falling asleep.

  If you still can’t fall asleep when you accept your sleeplessness, it may be that the mind is troubled with overstimulating thoughts. You should then gently steer your attention to less energizing topics. One such exercise is simply to feel the sensation of each outbreath— mindfulness of breathing—and to recite a metta phrase with each exhalation. The loving-kindness phrases will take the edge off your struggle, and the boredom of repeating the mental exercise over and over will help you drift off to sleep, as long as you’re practicing this exercise for its own sake and not keeping yourself on edge by doing it to fall asleep.

  Managing stage fright follows a similar trajectory. Let yourself be anxious, feel it in your body, expect that fear is a natural human response to speaking to a large number of strangers, give yourself some love for being in that uncomfortable position, and then, perhaps, refocus on what you have to say. Dedicating yourself to benefiting your audience with a few good ideas removes the “self” that feels the worry.

  Treating the Addictions

  Self-compassion is no stranger to substance abuse treatment. When an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) member says at a meeting, “I’m an alcoholic,” he or she is speaking from a larger frame of self-acceptance—nothing to hide. Resisting the idea that one is an alcoholic, or becoming engulfed in shame when a relapse occurs, can be obstacles to staying clean and sober.

  Alan Marlatt and colleagues at the University of Washington created a “mindfulness-based relapse prevention (MBRP)” program for alcohol and substance use disorders. It’s an 8-week program that combines Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness training with cognitive-behavioral techniques. Participants are taught about craving; they identify triggers for substance use—feeling, thoughts, and situations—and they learn to “urge surf.” Key features of the MBRP program are accepting one’s experience, seeing thoughts as just thoughts, taking care of oneself, and finding balance in life.

  Another approach was developed by Kelly Avants, Arthur Margolin, and colleagues at Yale University School of Medicine: spiritual self-schema therapy (3-S+). It is intended for addiction and HIV-risk behavior in people of all faiths, although it’s based in Buddhist psychology. In this 12-session, manual-guided program, participants learn to move from the addict schema (“addict self”) to the schema of abstinence and harm prevention (the “spiritual self”). Metta meditation is taught in session 6 to increase awareness of harm caused by anger and hatred and to increase compassion. A research study designed by Zev Schuman-Olivier at Harvard Medical School showed that the 3-S+ program resulted in decreases in impulsivity and intoxicant use and greater motivation for abstinence compared to a standard care comparison group. One participant responded in the following way to a question about what she found helpful: “The meditation. That people deserve to be happy and free. My breathing, taking time out for myself, treating myself to something good sometimes.”

  Finally, difficult relationships necessitate that we drop first into our own emotional pain, validate what we’re feeling, and then listen with kindness and understanding to what the other person has to say. We all have vulnerabilities that make us pull away from one another. In the episode described i
n Chapter 1 involving Michael and Suzanne, they witnessed how their vulnerabilities had pulled them apart (Michael pursuing his workaholic ways and Suzanne reacting with panic about their marriage), they felt the pain of disconnection from one another, accepted the pain as a sign of wanting to be closer, gave themselves credit for trying so hard to support the family, and learned to speak with one another in a less reactive, more positive manner: I miss you!

  Mindful Self-Compassion Meditation

  Sometimes we need a “time out” to disentangle from the automatic thoughts and feelings that rule our daily lives. I practice the following meditation in my own life, and I teach it to distraught clients in therapy. It takes only 5 minutes once you’re familiar with it, and it synthesizes much of what you’ve already learned in this book. You can also stretch this meditation to 30–45 minutes, as you like.

  TRY THIS: Mindful Self-Compassion Meditation

  Sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes, and take three deep relaxing breaths.

  Open your awareness to the sounds in your environment. Come into the present moment by simply listening to whatever presents itself to your ears.

  Form an image of yourself sitting in the chair. Note your posture as if you were seeing yourself from the outside.

  Next, bring your awareness inside your body. Note the world of sensation occurring there in this very moment.

  Now feel your breathing wherever it’s most obvious to you. Pay special attention to every out-breath. (Use a different anchor for you attention if you feel more comfortable doing so.)

  Replace your out-breath with the loving-kindness phrases. For the next few minutes, slowly repeat the phrases, returning now and again to an image of yourself sitting in the chair.

  Gently open your eyes.

  Facing Emotional Pain in Meditation

  The following example illustrates how we can work in meditation with mindfulness and self-compassion to establish a new relationship with ourselves and the world in which we live.

  Natasha is a single 32-year-old family physician who began practicing mindfulness meditation to help herself relax. She is the daughter of hardworking parents who desperately wanted her to become a successful doctor. Natasha learned to value achievement just as much as they did, which also meant she hardly found the time to socialize or unwind. It didn’t really matter to Natasha until recently, when she discovered her friends were getting married and having children. Natasha just seemed to be getting tired.

  Mindfulness meditation worked very nicely for Natasha at first, especially the calming effect of focusing on her breath for half an hour each morning and taking conscious breaths throughout the day. After a few months, however, Natasha noticed that focusing on her breath was making her anxious. She worried that breath meditation had stopped working for her, or worse. Sometimes Natasha found herself taking deep breaths—gasping for air—during her meditation.

  Natasha consulted with her meditation teacher, who suggested that she was focusing too hard on her breath and she should open her awareness to other sensations that were occurring in the body. This helped, and Natasha discovered that her breath became a refuge again whenever she returned to it. She took the lesson to heart and broadened her informal practice to include the feeling of her feet on the floor. She especially liked this mindfulness exercise when appointments piled up near the end of the day and she was running from one examining room to another.

  Natasha decided to go on a silent, weeklong retreat to deepen her practice. She chose a combination mindfulness/metta retreat. Natasha woke up at 5:15 A.M. and diligently attended every 40-minute meditation session for the first 3 days. Then she heard that teacher interviews were scheduled to begin on the fourth day. To her surprise, Natasha found herself stricken with fear about the interviews: “Will the teacher think I’m a good meditator? Will she like me?” Natasha meditated, hoping the fear would subside, but the more diligently she meditated, the worse it became.

  Feeling broken and exhausted from fighting her fear, Natasha dragged herself to the meditation hall on the fourth morning. The morning meditation instructions were on loving-kindness meditation, especially metta for oneself. When Natasha sat down to practice metta meditation, it struck her like a revelation: “I don’t have to concentrate, I don’t have to be mindful, I don’t need to apply more effort, I don’t even need to calm down … all I need to do is love myself because I’m in such a miserable state!” Natasha stopped using her breath as the anchor of her meditation and switched to the metta phrases. As she began ruminating about the upcoming interviews, she said to herself, “May I be safe. May I be free from fear. May I live my life with ease.” Her body relaxed, and she found a tear trickling down her face. It no longer mattered what the teachers thought of her, or even what she thought of herself—she was okay just being who she was.

  During the lunch break the same day, Natasha wondered to herself why she was so afraid of the interview. After all, the purpose of a meditation interview is to be supportive and helpful, not to judge. Natasha concluded that she was a perfectionist—self-critical and never good enough. She was the daughter of parents who desperately wanted her to be successful and financially secure. No matter how many A’s she got on her report cards, her parents could never let up. Natasha internalized the message that she needed to strive relentlessly in order to prevent catastrophe.

  Natasha decided it was time to live her life in a new way. She could hardly recall the last time she had taken a vacation. The dreaded interview eventually arrived, and Natasha shared with her teacher all that had occurred over the previous day. The teacher advised Natasha to cultivate a “preference for the present moment.” The present moment is always a mini-vacation from striving—there are fewer worries because there’s no future in the present. Natasha took this message to heart and started skipping sitting meditation sessions to walk in the woods, listen to the birds, and smell the earth. As she walked, she said to herself, “May I be safe. May I be happy. This moment, this beautiful moment.”

  When Natasha returned to her sitting meditation, she blended loving-kindness into her mindfulness practice. She used her breath to quiet her restless mind, she opened up to body sensations when she felt her breath shortening, and she used metta phrases when she felt disturbed or overwhelmed. Natasha learned to inhabit her body in a new, more loving, way.

  During the remainder of the retreat, Natasha remained particularly vigilant to the hindrances of “clinging” (to calmness) and “aversion” (to fear). She recognized when she slipped into the “workhorse” or “perfectionist” mode. She labeled “striving” as it arose. Natasha also uncovered deeper feelings when she stopped striving— feelings of loneliness, fear, and emptiness—and she brought kindly awareness to these as well. Natasha had learned on her retreat to allow each moment to be just as it was—to simply sit.

  Back at work, Natasha was surprised to notice how happy she was to see her patients and how carefully she listened to them. She had dropped an invisible layer of struggle—the struggle for approval—and she felt more at ease with others. Natasha also discovered she had more sympathy and understanding for her parents and the struggles they had gone through as she was being raised. She had found them in herself and knew the pain they unwittingly passed on to her. Natasha resolved not to transmit the same struggle for achievement to her own children, should she ever have the privilege of having kids.

  Natasha’s personal transformation might have eventually occurred in daily life, but retreats can generate deep changes in a relatively short period of time due to the absence of ordinary distractions. In Natasha’s case, she saw how her intolerance of feeling fear magnified anxiety into an intense situation. The only approach that helped Natasha was self-compassion. It opened her to further insights, such as underlying feelings of inadequacy and her fear of being left alone without anyone to rely upon if she faltered or failed. As Natasha validated herself with loving-kindness, her need for approval from other people began to subside. N
atasha experienced a wholly unexpected sense of connection with others, including her patients and her parents. What had begun as an exercise in stress reduction evolved into a new, more compassionate way of life.

  You now have the essential concepts and tools to cultivate self-compassion. The challenge, of course, is to practice them. There are so many pressing concerns and responsibilities in daily life that self-compassion is easy to forget. What does it take to maintain a practice over time? The next and final chapter will show you how.

  9

  making progress

  Suffering doesn’t disappear from our life, but into our life.

  —BARRY MAGID, psychiatrist

  If you think it’s hard to measure your progress on the path to self-compassion, you’re right. That’s because the practice is paradoxical: we change by accepting ourselves more and more, bad feelings and all. Since our usual standard for measuring progress is feeling better, how do we know when we’re on the right track? With self-compassion, bad feelings can be a good sign—perhaps you’re opening up because you have the confidence and skill to handle them? Or if you’re frustrated by the tenacity of self-critical thoughts, maybe you’ve finally become aware of your mental chatter? Or if you feel that you’re a hopeless case and have no self-compassion, perhaps it reflects your growing desire to treat yourself well? This chapter will explore what we mean by “progress” and offer suggestions for assuring that progress is indeed made.