Three Entries To Self-Kindness

Self-kindness is the foundation of growth and well-being. Yet self-kindness is challenging for so many of us. In this talk we look at three different entries into self-kindness: 1) mindfulness of the inner critic; 2) the universality of suffering and of the critic; and 3) the practice of positive self-regard.

Transcript

Nazruddin decided to start a flower garden.

He prepared the soil and planted the seeds of many beautiful flowers.

But when they came up,

His garden was filled not just with his chosen flowers,

But also overrun with dandelions.

He sought out advice from gardeners all over and tried every method known to get rid of them,

But to no avail.

Finally,

He walked all the way to the Capitol to speak to the royal gardener at the Sheik's palace.

The wise old man had counseled many gardeners before and suggested a variety of remedies to expel the dandelions.

But Nazruddin had tried them all.

They sat together in silence for some time.

And finally,

The gardener looked at Nazruddin and said,

Well,

Then I suggest you learn to love them.

I'm dedicating this recording to the topic of self-kindness.

This may be the most important topic that I ever teach.

The cultivation of true self-kindness can have the effect of turning an entire life around.

Rumi says,

Don't turn your head.

Keep looking at the bandaged place.

That's where the light enters you.

And what he means by this is that our healing and our spiritual growth come from leaning in to the places that are difficult for us,

Into the places that bring us pain and suffering.

I liken this to when we break a bone.

We first immobilize it,

But eventually,

In order to heal,

We must start working the atrophied and damaged muscles.

It's painful,

But by enduring the pain a little at a time,

We can exercise the muscles and heal.

Similarly,

If we are experiencing hurt,

Pain,

Suffering,

Stress,

Dukkha,

The way we heal is by bringing mindful attention and wisdom to the places where we experience pain.

We notice the contours of our suffering,

Where we feel it in the body,

What beliefs we have about it.

And every time we touch or look at the bandaged place,

We heal a little bit.

The issue is that if we are to lean into the places that pain us,

We must bring self-kindness.

Too often,

We layer our suffering with a sense of guilt and self-recrimination.

We make the suffering worse by adding more pain.

With so much pain,

Of course,

We don't want to look at our bandaged places.

We tend not to want to stay with our difficulties.

The only way we can stay and be mindful of our suffering is to bring a heap of self-kindness with us.

One of the primary authorities on self-kindness is Dr.

Kristin Neff.

Dr.

Neff talks about three entry points into self-kindness.

1.

Friendly self-regard.

2.

Mindfulness.

And 3.

Recognition of the universality of suffering.

I'd like to speak to each of these.

Let's begin with friendly self-regard.

This is what we usually think of when we speak of self-kindness.

And for many of us,

It is also difficult to engage in.

Many,

If not most of us,

Carry some degree of self-loathing.

We are very aware of the aspects of ourselves we don't like.

Perhaps we were given messages when we were younger that we were not lovable or did not measure up in some way.

Perhaps we experienced some degree of trauma,

Either a great trauma or certain minor traumas that,

When experienced at the right time and the right way,

Feel very large.

These messages and these experiences stay with us,

Often at a subconscious level,

And affect how we view ourselves.

The result is that we may feel unlovable or deserving of criticism or blame.

Self-kindness is the last thing we think we deserve.

How do we develop friendly self-regard under these conditions?

When I was in my 20s,

I participated in group therapy.

My particular issues were with social difficulties.

I had a hard time making friends and I was very shy with women.

I longed for a relationship but was at a loss at how to enter one.

One of the exercises my therapist had me do was to sit in one chair with another empty chair facing me.

In the first chair,

I was to be my adult self,

Addressing my own inner child.

Once my adult self had a chance to speak,

Then I would switch to the other chair and allow my child self to speak.

And this would repeat until both parties had their full say.

Old Stan started by expressing great frustration with Young Stan.

Young Stan could not be trusted to be on time or to stay organized.

Young Stan was often afraid and kept Old Stan from engaging with women either in conversation or in asking them out on a date.

Young Stan was overwhelmed by people and preferred to stay alone,

Making it hard for Old Stan to make friends.

Old Stan was experiencing substantial anger for being held back by Young Stan.

When it was Young Stan's turn to speak,

He expressed great hurt.

He felt berated by Old Stan and felt berated unjustly.

He was just doing the best he could.

How could he be less afraid?

How could he be more organized?

He expressed an innocence and a simplicity of emotion.

He needed Old Stan to stop punishing him.

When it was Old Stan's turn again to speak,

Everything had changed.

Old Stan realized that he was getting angry at a child,

Expecting him to do things that adults do.

Old Stan realized that Young Stan was doing the best he could.

Old Stan started to see all the qualities of Young Stan that Old Stan admired and needed.

Young Stan held all the creativity.

Young Stan held the enthusiasm and excitement with life.

Young Stan held all the curiosity and the joy.

And most importantly,

Old Stan realized that Old Stan and Young Stan were both Stan.

They shared the same vessel.

And if any progress were to be made,

Old Stan had to accept and love and nurture Young Stan just as he was.

This exercise was one of the true turning points in my life.

At one level,

Nothing had changed.

I was still shy with women.

I still had trouble with groups and with making friends.

I was still disorganized.

But I had started to make friends within myself.

I stopped being at war with myself.

When I would get afraid of talking with a woman,

I would accept that fear.

Sometimes,

If I stayed with the fear,

If I had kindness for myself in the fear,

The fear would subside enough where I could act anyway.

And sometimes the fear was too great,

And with kindness,

I accepted inaction as the appropriate response at that time.

Carl Rogers says,

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am,

Then I can change.

And this is exactly what I found.

Old Stan had learned to love and nurture Young Stan without trying to make him different,

And when that occurred,

Young Stan started to mature.

I started getting less afraid of women and social situations.

I started getting more organized and timely.

I started taking reasonable risks.

This happened naturally as I started befriending myself.

So one way to develop friendly self-regard is to consider the young,

Innocent parts of ourselves.

When Old Stan realized that all he had was Young Stan,

That Old Stan could not go anywhere without Young Stan,

And that Young Stan carried all the juicy parts of life,

How could Old Stan regard Young Stan with anything else but friendliness?

Just as we would give kindness to an innocent child,

So too does a child live within each of us.

And that child,

That innocent part that loves and experiences joy as well as fear and sadness,

Is just doing the best he or she can.

If we can contact that part of ourselves,

Friendly self-regard will flow more easily.

Even if we have taken actions that we feel are unforgivable,

That innocent part of ourselves is still there.

We may need to work through our pain and guilt,

But we deserve to give ourselves enough kindness to allow ourselves to come to terms with our experience.

We are all just doing the best we can,

Navigating a difficult and turbulent world.

The second entry point to self-kindness is mindfulness itself.

There is a story that after the Buddha became enlightened,

Mara came to visit.

Mara is the embodiment of all the temptations,

Self-doubts,

And feelings of unworthiness that the Buddha had to struggle with.

On the night of his enlightenment,

It was the armies of Mara that challenged the Buddha's right to awaken.

The Buddha dissipated Mara and his armies at the time with his lion's roar and became enlightened.

And yet,

Here was Mara again,

Visiting,

Even after the Buddha's enlightenment.

The Buddha's assistant and cousin,

Ananda,

Asked if he should send Mara away.

The Buddha replied,

No,

Send him in and I will have tea with him.

So what can we make of this story?

It seems that even after becoming enlightened,

The Buddha would experience doubt and negative emotions.

Yet how did he handle Mara?

He invited him to tea.

He sat with him.

Even Mara did not have any power.

Our self-reproach is only potent in secret when we're not aware of it.

When we become mindful of the ways in which we think negatively of ourselves,

These thoughts lose their power.

Even after the reconciliation of old Stan with young Stan,

There were still many challenges along the way.

This was not a relationship that worked seamlessly.

Sometimes old Stan would become again frustrated with young Stan.

And sometimes this anger went on in secret,

Beneath any awareness.

I recall one time in a therapy session,

When asked to pay attention to my body sensations,

I noticed there was a kind of stabbing feeling in my heart.

And as I became aware of the body sensations,

I recognized an image of some part of myself reaching around from behind my back and stabbing me in the heart.

Before I recognized the image,

The stabbing,

Representing a kind of self-attack,

Was going on without my conscious awareness and caused me to experience Dukkha.

But once I brought mindfulness to this image of this being attacking me,

It lost power and could no longer attack.

It acted as if to say,

Oh,

You see me,

I guess I have to stop.

Using mindfulness to bring awareness to the ways in which we attack and criticize ourselves is one way into self-kindness.

When I brought to awareness the being stabbing my heart,

When I was able to say,

I see you,

It lost its power.

So mindfulness,

While it may not feel like self-kindness,

Acts in a way that is similar to self-kindness.

It reduces self-criticism and takes out some of the sting of the difficult emotions.

Miraculous of our self-criticism also allows us to evaluate.

Many of our self-criticisms have little bearing in truth.

They are simply interpretations and habits of mind.

So we can begin to look critically at the veracity of these statements.

We can also begin to look at the usefulness of them.

As I tell myself self-critical statements,

I might ask,

Is this helpful?

Does this make things better in any way?

And if not,

Perhaps choosing to begin to abandon the self-critical talk.

The third entry point to self-kindness is the realization of the universality of suffering.

We are all in this together.

Everyone experiences difficulties.

Everyone alive has experienced failure.

Many,

Many people have experienced immobilizing fear.

Everyone either has experienced or will experience loss.

There is no shame in these.

And the difficult emotions we experience in association with these life events are the body's natural way of handling them.

Grief,

Fear,

Depression,

Anger.

These are universal responses.

If we recognize our common human condition as natural,

We can bring kindness and stop being at war with ourselves for not measuring up.

The three meditations on this recording are meant to help to engender and to cultivate the feelings and experience of self-kindness.

The first meditation is a meditation of which we practice bringing kindness to ourselves and practice experiencing the felt sense of kindness.

The second meditation is a very similar meditation with the one exception that there's an added emphasis on the deservingness of self-kindness.

It is my belief that you and every other being is deserving of self-kindness.

However,

Some people feel that that is very difficult to enter into.

And so I offer two different meditations,

One with the expression of deserving of self-kindness and one without.

The third and final meditation is one where we examine the critic.

Here it is very similar to the meditation I did,

The exercise I did in my therapy where we are sitting opposite a part of ourselves,

Allowing the criticism to come forward so that we see it,

And then sitting in the opposite chair and expressing what it's like to receive that criticism and moving back and forth so that we can begin to find a place of wholeness.

Kindness can be something that is difficult to cultivate.

At times it may feel like it's very awkward.

Nevertheless,

As we practice,

We find that we are able to cultivate the sensations and the experience of kindness to a greater and greater degree.

And we learn to relax the critic,

Learn to bring ourselves greater and greater friendly self-regard.

I wish you well on this journey,

And I hope that these meditations and this talk help guide you to a greater sense of kindness.

Reviews

Amazingly good

Very nicely explains and illustrates Neff‘s facets of self-compassion

Having benefited hugely from Inner Child healing, I loved this enlightening talk which includes a wonderful healing exercise. Thank you for sharing Stan 🙏

I really appreciated this talk and it was really needed today ❤️🙏 thank you 🙏