The slowness of self-compassion
The development of love and compassion is a wide, round curve that can be negotiated only slowly. It’s not a sharp corner that can be turned all at once, it comes with daily practice.
I heard this Dalai Lama quote on Joseph Goldstein’s Insight Hour podcast while driving. I had to frantically write it down in my little pocket notepad while stopped in traffic (not recommended driving practice, especially while negotiating an actual, real life corner, even at snail’s pace).
What struck me about this quote is that it applies equally to self-compassion.
Self-compassion is a wide, round curve I’ve been negotiating for the past several years.
In that time, I’ve taken a series of what have always seemed like such small, surely-too-small-to-be-meaningful steps. It’s only looking back that I realise just how much of the corner I’ve turned.
We often have a go at ourselves for not being more self-compassionate. The irony doesn’t make this any less painful.
So what does a daily practice of self-compassion look like? I’ll share some of where I’ve got to with this myself. But first a detour through a messy, imperfect attempt we made to create just that - a daily practice in self-compassion.
A good idea we weren’t ready for yet
Back in 2019, Honor and I were deep into an arts-based-business accelerator program for Big Feels Club, where among other things we spent more than 100 hours on the phone to club members.
We asked people, what’s the hardest thing about life with big feelings?
One answer we heard a lot was this:
I know what I’m supposed to do, the little things that help. But it’s so hard to keep them up, every, damn, day.
The single biggest thing most Big Feelers were struggling with was their Inner Critic. One answer we came up with was a simple little support program, ‘daily guided audio sessions to help calm your Inner Critic’.
Little steps around the wide, round curve of self-compassion, you could say. We made and tested a prototype, called it Kinder Mind.
The whole thing was jerry-rigged together using just a podcast mic and email campaign software. We had over five hundred people through the course, with a whole heap of brilliant, funny, moving email responses from people who did it.
It was exactly the kind of ‘experiment in collective feelings’ this club is all about.
But despite the strong positive feedback, something didn’t feel quite finished about the content of what we were offering. To me at least, something was missing.
Jerk Cat
One of the stars of the original Kinder Mind was a character named Jerk Cat. Jerk Cat is one name for the voice in your head that keeps telling you how bad you’re doing at everything.
Imagine your Inner Critic as a really jerky cat. He’s knocking over drinks on your coffee table, all while looking you square in the eye…
Oh my
So one of our daily exercises was this: when a familiarly harsh, criticising thought pops up in your mind, you can try saying simply and matter-of-factly: Thanks Jerk Cat, thanks for your input.
It was inspired by similar CBT or ACT-type techniques - where you sidestep rather than engage with the distressing thought.
We still get people referencing Jerk Cat in emails today. It clearly works really well for some people, as a little reminder to not take those critical thoughts to heart. The fact that it’s funny is a big part of it - it’s a joke we can share with others who ‘get it’. That’s really what we were going for with Kinder Mind after all, less about the techniques themselves, more about the community of fellow travellers.
But the thing is, there was something about the idea of Jerk Cat that never totally worked for me.
‘I don’t want to call my Inner Critic a jerk’
Where many people found Jerk Cat a useful tool, this one piece of feedback we got summed up my discomfort:
I don’t want to call my Inner Critic a jerk. I know it can *seem* like a total jerk sometimes, but I feel like it’s just trying to do its best to look out for me?
At the time, I couldn’t really take this feedback on board. We had come off the back of some real burn-out territory - including having just slogged our hearts out making this program as good as we could.
There’s even a section later in the course on ‘Compassion for Jerk Cat’, which encourages you to explore - as this feedback suggested - the ways your Inner Critic is just trying to look out for you. But it wasn’t a fully developed idea yet, and I knew we hadn’t really done it justice.
So even though I felt there was way more depth and nuance we could explore if we developed the course past the prototype, neither Honor or I had anything left in the tank to take it any further just then.
We put Kinder Mind on the shelf, always meaning to come back.
And in the end that was kind of perfect, because in the years that followed I’ve discovered a whole new world of thinking on the subject of self-compassion, exploring how my very discomfort about Jerk Cat could be a kind of gateway…
Criticising the critic
I have a lot of time for techniques that help sidestep distressing thoughts. I have a lot of time for anything anyone finds useful, even if it’s only temporary.
But if we only ever sidestep our distress, what might we miss?
Describing the way most therapies or meditation techniques treat the Inner Critic as a problem to be overcome or ignored, Ann Weiser Cornell writes:
“No matter what kind of inner work they do, at some point people always encounter an experience that can be called the Inner Critic. This is often (but not always) a voice, often (but not always) harsh and attacking, that often seems to come when the person is close to some positive new steps, or touching on an inner vulnerability.
This so-called Inner Critic seems to delight in crushing the small, the tender, the new and positive. No wonder that almost every method I have ever heard of treats the Inner Critic as something to be conquered, pushed away, perhaps even belittled or criticized in its turn.”
I first read these words just a few weeks back (in Weiser Cornell’s book, The Radical Acceptance of Everything). I noticed immediately a kind of guilty feeling come up. I thought of poor old Jerk Cat.
‘A part that is criticising right now’
Her phrasing (“this so-called Inner Critic”) is key here. Because Weiser Cornell refrains from even calling it the Inner Critic.
Instead, she calls it ‘a part that is criticising right now’. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but here’s her reasoning:
“We want to use our language in a way that opens to the possibility of change. Yes, criticizing parts can change - I’ve seen it happen plenty of times. So let’s call it ‘a part that is criticizing right now.’”
She says, with this simple shift in language, we might even find ourselves getting curious about what’s getting it so critical, what it’s worried is going to happen to us, perhaps.
“We have made a crucial shift, from seeing this part of us as essentially critical, by its very nature, to seeing it as in a temporary state that has come about for a good reason.”
The feeling beneath the criticism
By “good reason”, she isn’t suggesting its criticisms of us are justified. What she means is, a part that is criticising is most likely doing so out of fear and worry. (Hence, the often magnified nature of its insistence that we have, for instance, ruined our life irrevocably.) If we can find a way to really hear this fear and worry, we can perhaps understand where ‘the part that is criticising’ is coming from, even if we still don’t agree with its assessments of us.
Weiser Cornell gives the example of a mother calling out to her child who’s leaving the house without a jacket: “You’ll catch your death of cold!” It’s not that the mother wants her child to get sick. It’s just that she’s worried, and she’s afraid her child won’t listen.
In the same way, Weiser Cornell says, a part that is criticising us might feel like it’s never been listened to, and in turn its message can grow harder and harder to hear.
Spending time with a part that is criticising
Spending time with a part that is criticising is no small feat, especially when other parts of us might feel deeply hurt or scared by that very criticism.
In my experience, to truly turn toward a criticising part requires the support of some kind of technique or practise. This can be anything that helps me stay grounded and in-presence even when distressing thoughts and feelings come.
It might be mindfulness, or tools from mindfulness-based therapies like ACT. It might be therapy modes that deliberately explore different ‘parts’ of your inner world, like Internal Family Systems.
For me, this past year or so, it’s been a type of inner work called Focusing, which Ann Weiser Cornell helped develop. Focusing offers a deceptively simple process for how to slow down and spend time with whatever’s going on inside, including the parts we tend to push away or wish weren’t there.
As my Focusing teacher Jo Kennedy says, there’s a big difference between feeling something and acknowledging that you’re feeling it.
Putting the techniques aside though, consider this shift, from pushing away some part of your experience, to getting curious. From labelling to listening. What might that look like, day to day?
An evolving daily practice
Back to the Dalai Lama and his wide, round curve of compassion. What little steps have I been taking, to slowly round that corner these past few years?
For me, increasingly it’s whatever I can do to bring just a little more softness and curiosity to my own inner experience, including the parts I would once have labelled ‘bad’, or thought of as obstacles to get around: anxiety, upset feelings that ‘don’t make sense’, anger or critical thoughts.
It’s hard to describe these directly. They’re not really techniques, not steps in a recipe so much as steps in a dance. Things I’m noticing, more than doing.
It’s the gesture of a hand on my heart when I notice a big feeling.
It’s the phrase “Yes, I see you there”, to that big feeling, whatever it may be.
It’s even a soft toy koala that sits just off-camera in my Zoom calls - especially formal work meetings, where a part of me is often feeling overwhelmed, unsafe, convinced it doesn’t belong. The koala reminds me that my soft parts are allowed here too, even if I don’t always show them to anyone else.
The exact rituals keep changing lately, but it’s the attitude of slowly increasing friendliness that is the throughline. Tiny steps around the wide, round curve.
Going slowly
I’m realising that slowness is the key for me here, in two senses.
Not only because tiny steps slowly add up, over a long period of time, but because of the slowness of the rituals themselves.
More and more, when I’m feeling discomfort and distress, what I inevitably find when I check inside is that something is moving too fast for me. Something within is feeling rushed, pressured to hurry up and feel different. To calm down. To stop worrying. To just relax and get on with things.
The simple act of stopping and acknowledging that feeling can make such a difference - oh, you’re feeling rushed, yes I see you there. To borrow another of Jo's phrases, it's like slowing down to catch up with myself.
An ongoing relationship
In the past, I’d often try things like this, small gestures of friendliness to my inner experience, and they’d feel a bit good in the moment, but they wouldn’t make the difficult feeling go away. So I’d stop doing them.
But that’s not why I’m doing them more regularly these days. It’s more like this:
Therapist and Buddhist teacher Bruce Tift says: whatever big feelings I experience most often - anxiety, upset, feeling attacked - if I'm going to feel this way on and off for the rest of my life, I might eventually need to consider what kind of relationship I want to have with those feelings.
For my part, these last few years, I’ve decided I want this relationship to be one of care and curiosity.
This is how I want to live with myself, with emphasis on the word ‘with’. Keeping my own experiences company, as best I can.
(And when I fall short of that high bar, hello to that too. Hello to something that isn’t feeling patient and compassionate today. Yes I see you there.)
Compassion for the fact we’re all making this up as we go along
If I was to have a go at the next evolution of Kinder Mind, I’d start by more clearly acknowledging this to myself: no single technique or daily practice will be ‘the answer’ to turning that wide, round corner of self-compassion. And nor will my answers look like your answers, month to month, year to year.
It’s the attitude itself we are cultivating, of curiosity for whatever is here today. Including a part that thinks those little steps I take are embarrassing or too simple to help someone as desperate and in pain as me, and so on.
(Hello to this too.)
If many of us already know what helps, but struggle to keep it up every day, maybe what we most need isn’t just new suggestions of things to try (though these can be helpful too) but encouragement and connection on whatever healing path we’ve chosen at any given point. In truth, I think that was our purest aim with the prototype of Kinder Mind, and what it did best, based on what people told us about feeling less alone while doing it.
As Weiser Cornell says, a part that is criticising you “seems to delight in crushing the small, the tender, the new and positive” right when you’re trying to be vulnerable. So no wonder it’s hard to keep up tender new things all by yourself.
I’d do my best to make Kinder Mind: The Next Generation a supportive, friendly voice that gently reminds people to say ‘yes, hello to you too’ when parts of them inevitably rebel against whatever new or tender steps they are taking to feel better. In short, I’d want it to be a reminder that we are each of us bigger than any one part of our experience - no matter how overwhelming it might feel. And that, at the same time, even the smallest parts of our experience need space, time, and listening.
How would I do all that exactly? I’m not sure yet. Part of me thinks I can’t do it. (Hello to that!) And part of me is curious what it might look like…
— Graham
