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You’re listening Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Dr. Chris Germer. Chris is a clinical psychologist and lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He learned about mindfulness meditation in Sri Lanka in 1977 and his interest in mindfulness was rekindled in 1985 when he joined a study group in Cambridge that later became the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy where he is a founding faculty member. This interest led him to author several books including The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion.
Along with Kristin Neff, Chris Germer has created an eight-week course on The Power of Self-Compassion, which will be launching at soundstrue.com on October 16th. Chris Germer is also a featured presenter in Sounds True’s Self-Acceptance Summit along with such presenters as Elizabeth Gilbert, Tara Brach, Parker Palmer, Marianne Williamson, Rick Hanson, and many others. Chris will be teaching on “Overcoming Shame with Self-Compassion” at Sounds True’s Self-Acceptance Summit, a free summit, broadcasts from September 11th through September 20th and you’re most welcome to join us at soundstrue.com.
Today, Chris and I spoke about how to practice mindful self-compassion and how the practice asks us three things—to be aware, to know that we’re not alone, and to act with self-kindness. Chris also talked about how to apply mindful self-compassion in difficult situations like when we make a mistake or feel flooded by a sense of shame. Chris also talked about how people with chronic back pain can use the practice of mindful self-compassion, and how working with key principles such as “what we resist persists” and “what we can feel, we can heal” is leading to some pretty impressive results in the new research that’s being done in this area.
Finally, Chris talked about how to adjust the language around mindful self-compassion when he’s teaching men in order to invite men into the conversation and how important this is. Here’s my conversation on “The Power of Self-Compassion” with Dr. Chris Germer.
TS: Chris, you and Kristin Neff established the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion in 2012 and since then have trained upwards of 15,000 people in mindful self-compassion and have also trained more than 500 teachers worldwide. Right here at the beginning of our conversation, I’d love it if you would summarize for our listeners the approach, if you will, of mindful self-compassion.
Chris Germer: Yes, sure. Yes, thanks for asking. We’re also amazed at the interest in self-compassion throughout the world. Compassion is the capacity to recognize a person’s struggle, and to feel that person’s struggle, and also the wish and the effort to alleviate it. Self-compassion is really doing the same thing for ourselves. It’s just compassion turned inward and that’s what we are teaching the Mindful Self-Compassion course. We are teaching people how to respond with kindness and understanding when things go wrong in their lives. When they suffer, fail, or feel inadequate.
That’s the self-compassion side but the program is called Mindful Self-Compassion and mindfulness is really important in self-compassion training. Mindfulness brings a quality of balance or equanimity to compassion’s training, a kind of spaciousness. Both Kristin and I have been practicing, personally, mindfulness for a long time before we got interested and involved in self-compassion trainings. For us, it was the foundation but we also find that mindfulness is a necessary foundation for compassion trainings.
This program has a combination of both but definitely an emphasis on the self-compassion side of things—how to treat ourselves with kindness when we suffer, when we fail, when we feel inadequate, because that’s not what usually happens. Usually, when things go wrong in our lives, we are self-critical, we isolate ourselves, we ruminate. Self-compassion is the opposite. Instead of being self-critical that we have self-kindness, instead of isolating ourselves we have a sense of calm and humanity, and instead of ruminating or being absorbed in our troubles there is a quality of mindfulness, which is a kind of balanced spacious awareness. This requires a little bit of training. It’s not instinctive for most of us.
TS: One of the things that I discovered myself is that, often when we train in mindfulness, it doesn’t necessarily translate into this quality of self-compassion that you’re describing. I found an interesting quote from an article that you wrote, Chris, and I wanted to read it about why we need more than moment-to-moment awareness. Here’s the quote, “When we’re overwhelmed by intense and disturbing emotions, such as shame, just noticing what’s happening is often not enough. We need to embrace ourselves.” I wanted to talk here about this next step, if you will, that’s even beyond, or contained you could say, within mindfulness but often, we don’t take it, this embracing of ourselves.
CG: Yes. That really is the nub of the matter, what you’re describing there, Tami. Both Kristin and I, in our mindfulness practices, eventually came up against difficulties that could not be worked with very well simply with warmhearted awareness. For Kristin, she has an autistic child and that has all the stresses and strains of a special needs mom. For me, it was an encounter with, 20-year encounter with public speaking anxiety. What we both realized is that sometimes we just have to hold ourselves in a loving way, much like others we would like others to hold us when we’re struggling.
Sometimes, we just need to hold ourselves before we can hold our experience. In order to be able to address shame, for example, it’s really hard, so to speak, to do it alone. We need to have a sense of being held and we can actually do that with self-compassion. Actually, we can hold ourselves in a way that we can address shame and it becomes workable—not just shame but other difficult emotions like dread, despair, grief. These kinds of emotions, they just manage to overwhelm us.
When we practice mindfulness, it’s like holding a camera but you have to hold it steady. Sometimes the camera is just shaking. What does it take to stabilize a camera? What does it take to stabilize our hearts? That’s where compassion comes in. Compassion is more relational; it’s about sentient beings. It’s about me and you or a part of me relating to another part of me. It has that personal relational aspect, which sometimes in mindfulness practice can slip away. What we’re hoping to do with self-compassion training is just slip it back in. Not forget, sometimes, the practitioner needs a little extra love.
TS: Now, when you talk about the relational aspect of self-compassion, I think what comes up for a lot of people is that it’s really easy for me to be compassionate with other people when they’re suffering or feel like they’ve made a mistake but, “Oh, my. It’s not easy to bring that to myself,” as you say, “me and me.” Why is it so hard for people to bring compassion to me and me instead of offering it to someone else?
CG: Yes. Well, that’s the million-dollar question and we don’t really know for sure. I have a little personal theory about it, I’m happy to share.
TS: Sure.
CG: That is that when we feel threatened from the outside, the body very quickly goes into a fight, flight, or freeze but when we’re threatened from the inside, we kick into self-criticism, self-isolation and self-absorption. In other words, freezing is like getting stuck in our heads, fleeing is abandoning ourselves, and fighting is self-criticism. I think it’s actually an instinctive reaction. It’s part of the evolutionarily adaptive threat defense system but when you don’t have anything external to deal with, we go after ourselves. I think that’s the main reason.
I also think, Tami, that there’s a cultural element to this. I’ve been teaching self-compassion all over the world and it seems to me that in countries, or parts of the country, where there’s a lot of competition where the sense of self is highly contingent on where you stand in the social hierarchy, in the pecking order. Then a person’s sense of self becomes unstable. It depends on how we’re doing. Self-compassion is more about having a quality of a secure base inside oneself and I believe that in cultures that are more collectivist and also stable, that people have a more stable sense of self.
That’s actually what self-compassion is about. Self-compassion is about when we suffer and struggle rather than trying to adjust ourselves in the social hierarchy, we actually respond by bringing kindness and understanding to ourselves. It’s kind of a portable way of enhancing self-worth. I think that’s more necessary nowadays in the age of Facebook and as people are migrating into cities and constantly comparing themselves with one another. I think our sense about personal secure base is eroding and as a result, I think we just need more self-compassion. Mindfulness appears to be a perfect response to the fast pace of society and the fragmented attention spans that we have with electronic media. Compassion, in my view, is a healthy response to the ways our sense of self are eroding in this environment and also in increasingly competitive circumstances. This is all speculation, Tami.
TS: No, but you mentioned that you’ve been teaching mindful self-compassion in lots of different cultural contexts and I know you teach it all over the world. I’m curious, in different cultures, how does the teaching flow differently?
CG: Well, it flows, actually, pretty much the same. This is the amazing thing to me. Different cultures have different ways of relating in workshop situations. What I found is that the tendency to be critical with oneself when things go wrong is universal. This is why I believe that it’s something instinctive in us. This fight/flight/freeze response turned inward. It seems to be pretty universal. It’s fascinating to teach different cultures, teach in different cultures because I get to know the culture a little bit but when you get to know the individuals, I have to say we’re so much more alike than different and this quality of self-compassion is being enthusiastically received everywhere we go. It’s remarkable to me.
It’s also an incredible gift to be able to go to so many different places and to be able to engage people at such a fundamental level deep in the midst of our vulnerability. I have to say, the places that we’re vulnerable, they’re mostly the same. They’re about losses and failures. We’re a lot more alike than not alike and I think that self-compassion is a common factor in the emotional well-being that seems to be received everywhere pretty enthusiastically.
TS: OK, Chris, let’s say someone is listening and they say, “You know, I’m really hard on myself. I need more self-compassion. Chris, what are the core elements? How can I develop it?”
CG: Yes. Well, so, the very first step has already been accomplished and that’s saying, “Oh, I need more self-compassion.” What that means is that there’s a sensitivity to struggle, a sensitivity to suffering. There’s an awareness of pain. That’s really the start. Like, “Oh, this hurts,” and like, “Oh, I beat up on myself, that hurts,” so that’s the first step and that’s mindfulness, just being aware of the way things are. The second step is to know that when we’re struggling—for example, struggling by beating up on ourselves, or struggling with some kind of loss or misfortune—to know that you’re not alone. This is really important that people, this is a key factor about self-compassion that often people don’t quite—it seems more elusive.
This quality of common in the humanity, I’m not alone. In other words, a sense, Tami, of, “Oh, this is what people feel in a situation like this,” rather than, “Oh, this is unique and I’m the only one in the world who feels like this.” No, no, no. Struggle is a part of living. This is one of the kinds of struggles that people get into and this is how they feel. That’s a quality of common humanity. Knowing that we’re not alone when we struggle, this is a very important part of self-compassion.
The third part is self-kindness. The third part is, we could say in a simple way, treating ourselves as we would treat somebody who we really care about. In other words, asking yourself the question, “If I had a really good friend struggling right now in this way, what would I say to this person or what would I like somebody to say to me right now?” Then, asking yourself, “Can I say that to myself? Can I offer myself that kind of kindness? Can I treat myself in that way, the way that I would like to be treated or the way that I would instinctively treat somebody who is struggling who I like a lot.” Those are the three parts—knowing when we’re struggling, knowing we’re not alone, and caring for ourselves as we would care for somebody whom we genuinely love.
TS: I want to focus on the third step, if you will, because, OK, I don’t think it’s that hard to be aware. I’m in a lot of pain right now. I think people will get that. Then this recognition, not being alone, that takes some of the sting out of it but it still really hurts, whatever the situation is but doesn’t feel quite so bad. This third step, actually then reaching out to myself and saying something that’s kind and caring, I think a lot of times people just don’t have that type of resource. It’s not that easy to just make that step. How do we develop, if you will, a toolkit and then how do we make the leap and do it?
CG: Yes. Well, I was about to say it is a tall order but that’s why we developed this eight-week program because it’s carefully scaffold into actually accomplish this. If I can just back up just a little bit. Often when they’re struggling, they don’t know that they’re struggling. To actually get traction with that and to open toward that experience of struggle is really important because what we’re looking for is a kind of a melting of the heart and not to just throw self-kindness at ourselves when we’re struggling because that’s like sugar coating and it’s not going to work and it ultimately just feels superficial.
Let’s assume that we’ve actually got it like whoa, this is a tough situation and I get a sense that I’m not alone—how to bring kindness to ourselves? There are many different pathways to do that, Tami. Some people, for example, are physical and, for example, we have a practice called soothing touch where people learn a simple touch on the body like a hand over the heart or something. To linger with that and just to feel the touch and the warmth of the hand is actually is a universal expression of compassion in all different cultures around the world. It actually works when we do that for ourselves.
One pathway is through physical touch. Another pathway is through language like I described but some people just don’t have that kind of language. Another pathway is behavioral. In other words, do you know when you’re struggling and can you do something physically for yourself in that moment precisely because you’re struggling.
What does that mean? People are actually quite good at this because they know how to care for themselves. They just don’t care for themselves in a nice way when they’re struggling. In other words, they start to ruminate and they beat up on themselves. What would it be like, for example, “Oh, I’m going through a tough time, what I really need to do now is to take a bath. What I need to do is to not go out this evening and just make myself a really nice dinner and play with the dog.” In other words, to be physically really kind to ourselves, I’d say behaviorally kind to ourselves, is self-compassion.
We can also be kind to ourselves by visualization processes. Some people are visualizers. You can visualize a religious figure, maybe Jesus or the Dalai Lama, and ask oneself, “Oh, what would it be like to be in this being’s presence right now, what would I like to say to this being, what would this being say to me?” In some respects, for some people, the self-kindness part of self-compassion training is almost like secular prayer. Only what we’re doing is we’re activating within ourselves what we call a compassionate part and we’re speaking to the we’re hurting part, or the wounded part, from the perspective of the compassionate part. Those are three different ways of doing it but we have many others.
TS: Well, those are very helpful. I can certainly imagine engaging in this kind of third step self-kindness when it’s not so bad. Do you know what I mean? I still have my wits about me. It was a hard day, I’m going to be kind to myself, a lot of people had hard days. I’m going to get into bath. OK, I can do that.
What trips me up is when I imagine just something really terrible happening. I backed up from my driveway and killed a new young tree or something like that. I ran over a tree in the process. At that moment in time, I just don’t think I could make the move to self-kindness. I’m too upset at that moment. Do you have any interventions, if you will?
CG: Well, speaking about the tree, I was pruning a very old rose bush in our backyard, which some of the branches had died and others hadn’t. I chopped off a main branch of this very old rose bush that I love. And my wife was gardening at the same time and she realized what I did—tthe rose bush that she loved. I just had this deep sinking feeling like oh but mostly, I just felt this sense of loss but I had also felt so ashamed that I had done this. In other words, with best of intentions, I set back this rose bush about ten years of growth by my inattention and mistake.
TS: In that moment, you’ve done a lot of training and trained others, were you able to practice self-kindness?
CG: Yes. I can tell you what happened. First of all, I could feel in my body, in other words, first there was just an overwhelm feeling like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I did this,” but then from practicing, particularly self-compassion for shame, my awareness went right down my body. I could feel in my throat, my chest, my stomach, my legs, and my feet. I could feel like a sinking feeling and then I could feel a hollowness in my gut. Then I said to myself, “Oh shame, shame. You’re feeling shame, Chris. This is really hard. You’re feeling shame. Probably if you were more attentive, this wouldn’t have happened. However, these kinds of things happen. This is not a good moment.”
Then there was even a little voice in me that said, “You’re a good man, you’re going to get through this but it’s going to be hard for a little while. Just hang in there.” You get it? There was a lot of things happening. There was a physical awareness of pain, not just in my head. This is important when we have emotions, to anchor the emotion of the body. There was a naming of the emotion. These are two mindfulness practices. Then I was really in it. Then there was a sense of, you know what, you’re probably not the only pruner in the world that has ever chopped ten years off of rose bush.
Then kindness, it flowed. The kindness flowed naturally out of that. I can tell you it didn’t put a—then every time I looked at my wife’s stricken face that was a whole other layer. Then what I actually said to her was, “I love this rose bush. I love this rose bush as much or more than you. I’ve been training this rose bush for ten years. I am so sad that this happened.” In connecting with her, in her despair, then she started to lighten up. What was interesting is that a positive cycle emerged first through self-compassion and creating some goodwill within myself I didn’t have to be defensive vis-à-vis her. I could engage her in her struggle and share that struggle. If I were just ashamed and defensive that would never happen. Then the two of us were able to just think about OK, so what are we going to do now, and we came up with a plan.
What was interesting is that it also had behavioral implications. It created what Barbara Fredrickson calls a positive cycle. By anchoring into goodwill for myself, I was able to then experience goodwill toward her and a sense of common struggle.
TS: What I was particularly touched by was the sentence you said to yourself, “You’re a good man, Chris.” That really touched my heart that that sentence was there for you in that moment. It’s a beautiful sentence and true.
CG: Well, thank you. Yes, it was there. It was there.
TS: Now one thing that I’ve noticed is that as more and more people see the value of being kind to ourselves when things like that happen, sometimes I’ve heard myself say to other people or I’ve heard people say to me, “Oh, you should really be kind to yourself right now.” Part of me feels in that moment, when someone says it to me, just giving them the finger, just to be honest.
CG: Yes, that’s true.
TS: That’s not very helpful. I’m curious, how do we help other people be kind to themselves without saying, “You should be kind to yourself right now.”
CG: Right. This particular issue comes up all the time when we do self-compassion training with therapists because what they want to do is deliver the goods. You have a pound of self-compassion and you want to spoon feed it to your clients and then everything is going to be fine.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, that’s not how it works. A lot of what I’ve done in the last few years has been really focusing on how to teach self-compassion and what we know is that the foundation of teaching self-compassion is to be compassionate. What that often means is to throw out everything that we know conceptually about self-compassion and just be compassionate. It means when somebody is struggling to feel it in your heart, to allow your heart to flutter and vibrate with that person’s heart, to really take it in. This is the foundation of compassion, taking it in the struggle and to have the courage to take it in—then to be a natural human being with another person whom you like, assuming that you like this person.
In other words, to embody, or model, compassion is the foundation of teaching self-compassion and when we do that, inevitably, people then become curious or interested in how they might be able to help themselves. If we start the conversation with you need more self-compassion, to want to give somebody the finger is a natural thing because it’s almost like we just gave them the finger. We just said, in a subtle way we said don’t bother me with your struggle. We didn’t have the courage or the strength to open to that pain ourselves.
The only person to blame would be ourselves if we’re trying to force compassion on somebody. We really need to ask ourselves, why am I doing this and often, the reason, Tami, is because we are experiencing empathic distress and we would like our empathic distress to go away. One way we do it is trying to fix another person. And we have this slick new way of fixing people called self-compassion, so we throw self-compassion at them and they are not happy. We got to get rid of all that stuff and we have to just be human, be compassionate, be kind, and then see what emerges from there.
Often people become interested in self-compassion but you can’t make somebody self-compassionate. They need to want to be kind to themselves. The main reason, as I said before, this is such an important part, is it does require a certain amount of courage. It does require a certain amount of vulnerability and we really need to understand that opening to pain is part of it. In fact, Kristin and I were, at one point, thinking maybe we should call this the “Opening to Pain Program” because this is fundamental but no one would have come.
TS: Now, in doing some research for this conversation, Chris, I discovered that you’ve looked at self-compassion and chronic back pain and that actually people who practice self-compassion can find relief from back pain. I thought that was so interesting. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that.
CG: Yes. We’re actually, this Saturday, doing a training with people who have lower back pain. They’ve already had their brain scanned, an FMRI scanner, and they’re going to have them rescanned. What we’re interested in looking at is what does the brain look like when the heart is melting? What does the brain look like when the heart is melting? In particular, one of the core aspects of chronic back pain is wishing not to have chronic back pain. In other words, it hurts and every fiber in our body says, “No.” The problem is, is that the more we do that, the more we put ourselves into what we call—we activate what we call the threat defense system in the human body and basically, the body becomes tighter and we get more pain.
What self-compassion does is it activates a different physiology in the human body. It activates the mammalian care giving system. We all know what this is like. For example, if you have pain and somebody puts their arm around you and really loves you then inside you have a feeling like, “Ah.” They didn’t just do surgery on your lower back but your whole relationship to yourself and to your back changes. In other words, there’s a relaxing, there’s a letting go. This is what’s called regulating emotion through affiliation, through a sense of connection, through a sense of care.
When people have lower back pain, the problem is that because it’s physically hurtful, initially, and then secondarily, because it becomes a social problem. In other words, people with lower back pain are criticized for being in a bad mood, they’re criticized for not being able to do everything they used to do—it becomes a social problem. Back pain then eventually becomes a shame issue. There are multiple layers of pain. It starts with physical pain, then there’s the tensing reaction to pain, and then there’s social pain, there’s so many levels of pain. What we do in self-compassion training for back pain is we learn to name all this stuff and we also learn then to know that back pain is not our fault, nobody woke up one day saying, “I’d like that chronic back pain and wreck my life.”
We know that it’s not our fault. We know that we’re not alone and we begin to treat ourselves in the opposite way that the body treats us and that others treat us. In other words, we begin to relax rather than to tighten up and we begin to give ourselves messages that we need to hear when we’re struggling, not the ones that we do hear. All of this has the underlying physiological function of shifting from the threat defense system to the mammalian care giving system. That’s what we want to see in the brain. We would like, when people experience pain, rather than fighting and resisting and becoming cranky and critical, we would like them to be able to say, “Yes, this hurts, this is not fun for me, it’s not fun for anybody who’s in pain,” and to talk to ourselves in the way that we need to be talked to. That’s what we want to see in the scanner.
TS: When you say talk to ourselves the way we need to be talked to, could I hear that voice, what that would sound like?
CG: Oh yes. Well, it depends on the person.
TS: Yes.
CG: For somebody like me it would be, “You know, Chris, this really hurts and you are not able to do the things that you want to do and it is breaking your heart. I know this. I just want you to know that you are,” maybe I would say something like this, “you are still a good man. You are still the same person and you will be able to, for now, out just do as much as you can do. You don’t have to do more than that. Let’s see how it emerges. Let’s see what happens. But for now, definitely this hurts.” I might even say to myself, “I love you. I love you even though you’re suffering like this. I love you.” I might even say that too.
TS: As I was reading, Chris, about some of this work you’re doing with self-compassion and back pain, there was a quote and I thought, wow, this is a quote that could definitely be on a post-it that I could look at again and again in my life, “What we can feel we can heal.” I thought that was so profound and perhaps you can comment on it.
CG: Well, I can’t claim authorship for that. It’s in the mindfulness community, “What we resist persists and what we can feel we can heal.” I think that quote speaks very well to back pain. That quality of constant fighting just makes things worse and that statement “what we can feel,” what that really means is opening to pain, opening to discomfort—opening to it, some people say, “Oh my God, I can’t open to it because it’s going to get worse.” Actually, it might subjectively get a little worse in the beginning but what really happens when we open to it is we get perspective on it. We get a little bit of distance not in a detached way but in a kind of warm appreciative way like ah, oh. When we say what you can feel you can heal, it refers to opening to pain with perspective and with tenderness and with kindness. A real quality of being with, a participant observer but the critical element, Tami, is not being engulfed in it, not being entangled in it, not getting swept away in the storyline. To be with it but in a new way, that’s what we mean by “What you can feel you can heal.” Really feeling—feeling with.
TS: In the same article about self-compassion and back pain, at one point you were working with a client and you directed her to ask herself, and you called it the quintessential self-compassion question, what do I need? That we can ask ourselves this question, what do I need? I thought that was also something worth bringing forward and having you comment on the power of that question.
CG: Yes. Well to think about the power of it, we can ask ourselves OK, as a child, how often did somebody sit us down, look us in the eyes with a truly compassionate searching gaze and say, “Honey, what do you need? Tell me, what do you really need?” How often have we been asked this question as children? Usually, we’re told what we need and what we should do. Then we get older. We become teenagers and we become adults. We don’t ask ourselves that question and if we don’t ask ourselves that question how can we get what we need. It’s only going to come by accident or maybe there’s a part of us that’s going to insist on it if we’re lucky but the way to be truly compassionate is to stop and ask ourselves this fundamental question, what do I need? This is also different than what do I want. Our wants are endless. We can want as many micro moments as there are on a television. We can want stuff.
We say our wants are from the neck up and our needs are from the neck down. Our needs are universal human needs. For example, the needs for health, and safety, and need to belong, need for love, need for connection, these kinds of things. Those are needs. We can name our needs in a more general way, we can—but also maybe in a more specific way, what do I need in this situation, we can give it to ourselves and that is the essence of behavioral self-compassion. If we cannot ask ourselves what do I need how can we respond, how can we respond with compassion and self-compassion. It’s the essential question.
Some people, Tami, they cannot answer the question. In other words, some people, for example, who have been traumatized or neglected that question is so strange and so foreign that they don’t know where to begin. Then, for example, in the MSE program we’re more specific. Like right now, what do you need to comfort your body or what do you think you need to feel a little more safe? What do you need to hear right now? What do you need to take that next step that you need to take? We can take that global question to be a little more specific. The question itself gets the whole train out of the station—the whole self-compassion training.
TS: Now, we’ve talked, Chris, about bringing self-compassion to ourselves when we’ve made a mistake like cutting the rose limb and even when we’re feeling experiences of shame. I want to talk about when people have a sense of fundamental unworthiness, when that’s what we’re experiencing. I just feel like a POS or I feel just worthless. I just feel worthless. How can we even approach self-compassion, self-kindness in those moments when we’re that down, if you will?
CG: Yes. That’s really a good question. I’m a therapist and I know somebody else who took very bad care of herself but she took wonderful care of the dog. The dog was like amazingly beautiful dog and she wasn’t eating very much because she didn’t have much money but she learned to say, “May Ginger be happy, may Ginger be safe, may Ginger be strong, may Ginger be free from suffering.” She learned to consciously express loving kindness and compassion for a dog. Then she started to include herself, “May Ginger and I be safe, may Ginger and I be healthy, may Ginger and I be strong.” Then eventually, she was able to say, “May I.” You follow what I’m saying? She was able to find her way back to herself through the love and affection that she naturally felt toward another being.
The irony of this whole thing, Tami, is that historically all the world religions with the golden rule, more or less, say love your neighbor as yourself. In other words, as you already love yourself, now go ahead and love your neighbor. What we’re finding in 2017 is that we need the reverse. In other words, love yourself as you naturally love some other living being. We find our way home through how we are able to love others. This is a really important point that you brought up. Thank you for doing that.
TS: I also want to circle back a moment towards the beginning of our conversation when you were talking about how you came to the practice of self-compassion. You mentioned that you had a 20-year struggle with anxiety about public speaking. I’m curious how self-compassion came into play to help you become the beautiful public speaker you are today. I can imagine someone would say that’s an anxiety problem. What does self-compassion have to do with an anxiety problem?
CG: Well, I always thought it was an anxiety problem and it didn’t help. For 20 years I suffered from public speaking anxiety and I tried everything as a clinician and also as a mindfulness-based clinician. I tried to make a lot of space for anxiety. I also tried positive self-statements and I also tried drugs like beta blockers and everything you can imagine. Exposure, I accepted every invitation I received for public speaking hoping that would desensitize the thing but nothing worked.
Once I learned loving kindness meditation, particularly starting with myself like, “May I be saved. May I be peaceful, May I be healthy. May I live with ease.” Which through most of this time that I was practicing mindfulness, I really was not interested in. I thought it was, I don’t know, sappy, clumsy, too many words. I didn’t like it. At one point I did that. I practiced basically loving kindness for myself, particularly in the context of public speaking anxiety. It created a kind of anchor, or a foundation, so that when I had to speak at a very large gathering, the terror turned to, oh gosh, it turned to love. I look out over at this crowd and usually they look like the enemy to me and after four months of practicing loving kindness meditation they look beautiful to me and the fear just went away.
Then the question I asked myself is how did this happen? What I discovered is that actually public speaking anxiety is a shame disorder. It’s not an anxiety disorder. If you lose a key, where are you going to find it? You’re going to find it where you lost it, not where the light is. I was always looking at the anxiety. I was looking at the expression of shame and trying to work with that but it never touched the problem. The problem was deep down inside I was thinking, “Oh my God, I’m giving a lecture on mindfulness and I can’t speak. That means that I don’t know what I’m talking about, i.e. I’m fraudulent. That means that I’m incompetent. That means I’m a little stupid.” These self-statements, this mental part of shame, this self-criticism and self-doubt—that I couldn’t touch. I couldn’t touch when I considered public speaking anxiety disorder and I couldn’t—no matter how much space I made for it as a mindfulness practitioner, I was not making space for shame.
What happened once I learned loving kindness meditation, particularly self-compassion, it was quite amazing. I actually didn’t even have to address the shame directly. What happened is I just started having this loving resource when I started to tremble and fear, i.e. as shame was arising, this warmth was co-arising with it, which I never had before. I could never go there before with this sort of warmth and loving kindness and compassion. In other words, I could not move out of dread from shame into care giving until I learned this resource of self-compassion.
The funny thing to me was that only after the problem kind of dissipated—and I really haven’t had much public speaking anxiety since then and that was in 2005 or 2006—what was interesting to me is that it was only after this resource had addressed the shame problem that I was even able to see it as a shame problem. You know what I mean?
TS: Yes.
CG: Sometimes we think when we feel shame we need to fix our shame. We don’t have to. I believe that’s not the case, I think we just need to build the resource, the resources of mindfulness compassion and then the shame begins to dissolve or at least becomes manageable such that we can look at it in a new way. Again, the lesson for me is sometimes we just need to hold ourselves before we can hold our experience.
TS: Chris, I just have one final question for you, which is that I know that you teach mindful self-compassion to men, specifically for men. I’m curious if you have to present self-compassion differently when you’re talking to men. Part of my interest here is that you’re one of the presenters in Sounds True’s Self-Acceptance Summit, a summit that begins on September 11th and runs through September 20th. We have lots of terrific presenters including Elizabeth Gilbert, Iyanla Vanzant, Marianne Williamson, Tara Brach, and many others, most of whom, but not all, are women but many of the presenters are women. I also have a sense that most of the audience for the Self-Acceptance Summit will be women. It’s almost as though self-acceptance, self-compassion is seen by the public, at large, as a woman’s issue, not a human issue. I wonder why that this and is it something about the language of self-compassion? Don’t men need self-compassion as much as women do? What are your thoughts about that?
CG: Yes. Well, I definitely think they need it as much as women. I think men can get a little freaked out about self-compassion. I think compassion in general is gendered. I think it tends to be more associated with nurturing but actually self-compassion is—there’s a lot more to it than nurturing. We like to say that there’s a yin side and a yang side to compassion and to self-compassion. The yin side, which is what people tend to associate it with, is all about comforting, and soothing, and validating. It’s about being with, a quality of being with in a whole-hearted loving way.
The yang side of compassion is about protecting, and providing, and motivating. That’s more commonly associated with the traditional male role but I have to say, I think we need both. I think women need to be able to protect themselves, to say no, they need to motivate themselves to get out there and do what they need to do and they need to provide for themselves just as men need—they need the capacity to comfort themselves, soothe themselves, and understand themselves better.
For example, say, veterans. There’s a study done on self-compassion where the veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. The research shows that self-compassion is a very powerful factor whether or not people develop post-traumatic stress disorder when they get home. What’s interesting is that self-compassion predicts whether a person is going to get post-traumatic stress disorder more powerfully than severity of combat experience.
TS: Wow.
CG: What this means is, is that men can be really good in terms of protecting and providing and being out in the world and doing dangerous and scary things but they also need to be able to comfort themselves, soothe themselves, validate themselves. They also need this yin side in order to recover. Another way of saying this is that we cannot spend our whole lives in the flight/fight condition. We also need to be activating care giving and we can activate that in many different ways. We can activate that by loving others. We can activate that by loving ourselves. It is essential for human nature, for the survival of the human body that we do activate care giving and that we do it in both ways in my view, both through the yin side, we need to be able to comfort and soothe ourselves and the yang side, we need to be able to protect and provide and motivate ourselves. We need both.
I think that men will, when they really understand what self-compassion is all about, they’re going to be all over this thing. Right now, we’re starting to bring self-compassion into the business world, into the medical world. There are 1200 studies out there in the peer-reviewed scholarly journals on the benefits of self-compassion. I think the more men understand actually that this is—if you want to give it a cost-benefit analysis, it’s a very good thing. The more they understand what this is and how beneficial it is in all ways in life, I think they’ll be onboard but this is just the beginning, Tami. We’ve only known about self-compassion in a strategic and scientific way for 15 years. The same thing with mindfulness—mindfulness has been around for 35-40 years and it’s mainstream and sweeping the world, men and women. I think compassion is next.
TS: Huge ROI on self-compassion. I’ve been speaking with Chris Germer. He’s the author of the book The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion and he’s one of the featured presenters in Sounds True’s Self-Acceptance Summit, which begins on September 11th and runs through September 20th. Over 30 presenters in total and it’s free when you tune in and listen to the broadcast during any 24-hour period, September 11th through September 20th.
Also, Chris Germer along with Kristin Neff has created with Sounds True an eight-week course on The Power of Self-Compassion. That course begins on October 16th. For more information about both of these offerings, you can visit us at soundstrue.com. Chris, thank you so much for all of your beautiful work and your beautiful heart. Thank you.
CG: Thank you, Tami. Thank you so much for this conversation. I really enjoyed it.
TS: Soundstrue.com. Many voices, one journey.
