How easy it is to think that you must be hard on yourself to make progress. If you are your own worst critic, it will stop anyone else judging you. Right? There can be a quiet aggression at the heart of self-improvement, that can reinforce messages of ‘broken’, ‘needs fixing’, ‘not good enough’. Mindfulness for self-compassion is the antidote. When you practice for your self-care, accepting yourself without judgement, you create a nourishing and sustainable practice.
Mindfulness is not about fixing you, making you ‘better’. It is about knowing yourself more deeply and being your self more fully. Regular practice takes perseverance – and that is much easier when what you are doing comes from a place of care and joy.
Research into self-compassion in midlife women indicates that life satisfaction goes up, and depression, anxiety and stress are reduced, when you adopt a kinder attitude towards yourself. The psychological aspects of the menopause, such as anxiety and depression, have a more negative impact on your sense of wellbeing than the physical symptoms, such as hot flushes. Studies suggest practicing self-compassion weakens the impact of the physical symptoms. You still get hot flushes and night sweats, but being kind to yourself, rather than critical, lessens their impact on your daily life.
Using mindfulness for self-compassion
Accepting yourself as you are, letting yourself be, are at the heart of mindfulness. This does not mean you stop living your values and working towards goals. But you act from a perspective of self-love. Mindfulness helps you to:
- Rein in your inner critic. Notice the harsh, judgemental inner voice, and tell it to shut up. This does not mean you do not learn from mistakes. It means you stop believing that you need a tough inner critic to be motivated. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone fails. Acknowledge your own mistakes and failures, learn what you can, then move on. Try the letting go, forgiving faults practice.
- Practice loving kindness, a style of meditation that puts its emphasis on health and wellbeing for you and for others. Meditation becomes an act of self-care, rather than a way to fix what is wrong.
- Cultivate an inner voice that celebrates your successes, undo the thought patterns that you are ‘not enough’, ‘not there yet’. Learning to abide in a place of wholeness and calmness is the true meaning of healing. The word ‘healing’ comes from roots that mean ‘to make whole’.
- Be consistent. Regular practice is important to making progress, but the more you judge yourself, the less likely you are to persevere. Doing what you do from a place of love is more supportive.
- Balance acceptance with challenge. The best coaches do both – meet you where you are and push you to be your best. Under-pinning your practice with self-compassion means you can be your own best coach. The compassionate self practice can help.
When you replace the burden of judgement and self-criticism with greater acceptance, you also cultivate patience and trust in yourself which is integral to resilience.
Self-compassion in action
Hands up who is their own worst critic?
Who judges themselves far more harshly than others would?
I might have made a mistake this week. Note the ‘might’. I do not actually know, as the situation has not played out yet.
But I already have my ‘beat myself up’ inner dialogue going on. Sometimes.
But then there is another voice. The one that can acknowledge that I have done my best. That I made the decision with the best of intentions and based on the information I had to hand.
Mindfulness has helped me let go of some habitual patterns of thinking. And introduce a kinder voice.
I can sometimes let go of what I thought should happen and be OK with what is.
The more I can forgive myself, the easier it is to forgive others.
Changing the thinking habits of a lifetime takes time. And patience, and persistence. It is easier to be consistent if you are also kind. Here is a guided meditation on cultivating compassion, to help you develop mindfulness for self-compassion. The practice is 13.5 minutes long.
Mindfulness tip: be consistent, regular practice, five days out of seven.
