Sit upright in a comfortable stable position where you feel supported and your back,
Your neck and your head are straight but not stiff.
Allow your eyes to gently close or allow your gaze to settle with a soft focus on a spot on the floor one to two metres in front of you.
Take three slow deep breaths to bring yourself to the present moment and begin the process of feeling more peaceful and centred.
As you breathe,
Breathe into the belly so that it expands as you breathe in and contracts as you breathe out.
And see if you can allow these few breaths to have a longer exhalation than inhalation.
Now take a minute or two to mentally scan your body for any areas where there's tightness,
Tension or soreness.
And when you find such an area,
Imagine that you can breathe your warm oxygen filled breath into those areas.
In this session,
We'll rehearse a simple reflective practice you can initiate next time you find your inner critic kicking in.
To do so,
We'll work with one of those situations where you notice you're more critical of yourself than you need to be.
So bring to mind a situation in your life that's difficult,
One that causes you stress or challenges your peace of mind and ideally one where you tend to feel that the difficulty is driven by some shortcoming in you.
A situation where you might be harder on yourself than you might be on others.
Now on a difficulty scale of one to ten,
Please for the sake of this practice,
Don't pick a ten.
Aim for something that feels like a four,
A five or six.
Bring that to mind now.
Sense into your body and see if you can locate where any emotional discomfort associated with this situation might be showing up in the body.
And if you identify it,
Bring a sense of curiosity and openness to it,
Just recognising its existence,
Not trying to change it,
Not trying to improve it.
When you feel you've brought that situation clearly to mind and are beginning to have some sense of where it shows up in your body,
Gently say to yourself,
I'm being too tough on myself.
Or you might say,
Hey,
Here's that inner critic again being tough on me.
Or perhaps even,
Ooh,
There's that inner critic again.
Just notice it without indulging it.
And then as a second step,
Recognise your common humanity with other people,
Saying to yourself,
Other people sometimes come down hard on themselves just like this.
Or other people are also hard on themselves.
It's normal.
It's a common thing in humanity.
Or even,
I'm not alone in this,
Everybody is hard on themselves from time to time.
So the first step is,
Phew,
I'm being tough on myself.
This brings some mindfulness to the moment.
That second step is,
Other people do this,
That's OK,
It's quite normal,
Which is simply bringing attention to your shared common humanity that everybody does this from time to time.
Now place both of your hands over your heart.
Notice the warmth of your hands on your chest for a moment.
And as you do so,
Just say to yourself,
How can I be kind and best support myself in this moment?
Or you might even say,
What do I need from myself in this moment?
This third step is the self-compassion component of this reflective practice.
Sit with that sense of being kind and compassionate with yourself for a moment,
Allowing it to feel normal and natural.
Now take a slow,
Deliberate deep breath.
And as you exhale slowly and gently,
Return your attention to the room as you begin to open your eyes,
Seeing if you can bring some of the sense of self-compassion out of the practice and back into your life.
Knowing that in the future,
Anytime you find yourself being unnecessarily hard on yourself,
You can return to this simple,
Reflective practice.
