Tami Simon: Welcome to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. My name’s Tami Simon. I’m the founder of Sounds True and I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the new Sounds True Foundation. The Sounds True Foundation is dedicated to creating a wiser and kinder world by making transformational education widely available. We want everyone to have access to transformational tools such as mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion, regardless of financial, social, or physical challenges. The Sounds True Foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to providing these transformational tools to communities in need, including at-risk youth, prisoners, veterans, and those in developing countries. If you’d like to learn more or feel inspired to become a supporter, please visit soundstruefoundation.org.
You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Dr. Shauna Shapiro. Shauna is a professor, author, and internationally recognized expert in mindfulness and compassion. Nearly one million people have watched her TED talk called “The Power of Mindfulness,” rated one of the top ten talks on mindfulness.
With Sounds True she has written a new book called Good Morning, I Love You: Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Practices to Rewire Your Brain for Calm, Clarity, and Joy, where she brings alive the brain science behind why we feel the way we do about ourselves, each other, and the world, and she explains how we get stuck in thinking that just doesn’t serve us. What I loved about talking with Shauna Shapiro is that here she is, a scientific researcher, PhD clinical psychologist, and she helps us understand the brain science behind how a very simple act, an act any of us can do each morning and say to ourselves, “Good morning, I love you,” might be one of the most powerful acts we can take on a regular basis.
What we practice grows stronger. Good morning, I love you. Here’s my conversation with Shauna Shapiro:
To begin with, Shauna, your new book, Good Morning, I Love You is so warm, friendly, and it does something that I think is rare: it’s both very accessible and deep at the same time. So congratulations.
Shauna Shapiro: Thank you.
TS: I wanted to begin right in the beginning of the book. You reveal the “secret sauce” of mindfulness—that’s what you call it and I think you’re actually really onto something here, so go ahead. Tell our listeners right here, right at the beginning, the secret sauce of mindfulness.
SS: The secret sauce of mindfulness is self-compassion. It’s learning how to treat ourselves with kindness and it took me a really long time to figure that out. And it’s still a practice that I need to continue to grow but that was kind of a radical shift in my practice and in my understanding of mindfulness.
TS: And let’s make that something that’s visceral, that people can really feel because I think sometimes people think, “Mindfulness, well that’s one thing. Self-compassion, oh, that’s that other thing where I put my hand on my heart and I say nice things to myself.” But you’re saying that self-compassion is actually embedded in mindfulness in some way, so can you explain that?
SS: Exactly. It’s really part of mindfulness, and the model that I created of mindfulness is a three-part model that has to do with your intention, your attention, and your attitude. And this attitude has to do with kindness and compassion and curiosity, where it’s like the feeling tone of your attention matters. I think a lot of people associate mindfulness with just paying attention in the present moment, but if we’re paying attention in a critical, judgmental way, what we’re practicing is judgementalness and criticism. So it’s really essential that we practice mindfulness with this attitude of kindness and openness and welcoming of our experience.
TS: Now, one of the questions I have is if we’re practicing mindfulness with a certain specific type of attitude, even one that’s welcoming and warm—I’ve heard some people describe it as a kind of affectionate gaze when we practice mindfulness. But isn’t that an overlay, if you will? Like don’t we want to just be with what is without injecting it with any of our own—like, it has to be warm and welcoming and friendly and affectionate.
SS: It is a great question and I think it’s pretty nuanced. This doesn’t mean that we need to feel warm or we need to be happy all the time or that we need to always be nice. What it means is that there’s a certain allowing and welcoming of our experience. And so we’re not changing our experience but we’re adding this container of kindness. In mindfulness they talk a lot about metacognitive awareness. It’s this awareness of our experience or our awareness of our own thoughts and I like to think of mindfulness as these kind of warm, welcoming arms of awareness that welcome our judgmentalness or welcome our anxiety, or welcome our fear. We’re allowing our experience, we’re not trying to change it, but we’re infusing it with a warmth.
TS: In your own practice of mindfulness, tell me how engaging with this secret sauce makes it different. Maybe you could give an actual concrete example so people really get it.
SS: For me, it changes everything. That when I’m practicing mindfulness and there’s a certain striving, there’s a certain controlling, trying to get it right, whether it be during my meditation practice or in my life—the moment I become aware of that and soften, even if it’s just five percent more, just relax the grip a little bit and bring a certain kindness, a certain, “Oh, sweetheart, you’re doing the best you can.” It just changes the whole experience and for me it’s really about remembering, that just remembering that I can pause in the experience and shift. And one of the teachings that for me at first sounded really hokey but has been incredibly powerful is smiling, to allow just a soft smile while I’m practicing. And I remember reading that when you smile, it signals the nervous system that everything’s OK, that it can relax, that you don’t need to be in fight-or-flight stress response.
And if you try it right now, and those of you who are listening to just allow a gentle smile on your mouth, you can kind of feel how it shifts the entire physiology. So that’s kind of a concrete, physical way of shifting into this attitude of welcoming and safety.
TS: Now I have to say, and maybe this is just because of the kind of tortured soul I am that has made me host these interviews now for almost 10 years, upwards of 600 of them. I have this split response: like part of me, I’ve heard of this practice, the inner smile before. I’ve heard about it in the context of Qigong practice and I can tell that it works. Do you know what I mean? I can just, I put on a little smile and I do feel happier. I do feel better. I can feel the—this is not the technical scientific term, but like the positive drip of happy chemicals going through my body. I get it. But another part of me is just like “No, you know, I just want to be with what is. I don’t want to walk around with like a zombie like little smile on my face.” What do you think about that Shauna?
SS: Well, first I really appreciate it. I appreciate your directness and your honesty and I completely agree. So what I would say is that this is kind of skillful means, and there’s a time and a place for different practices and that’s one practice. So for me that works when—just to, as a reminder. Just like sometimes I’ll soften my shoulders or I’ll kind of remind myself that I can be at ease and still have laser-like attention and be present.
And I think there are times when that smile maybe feels so inauthentic that it’s not really possible, but I have to say, I remember even one point in my life going through a very, very difficult time and I remember being on the phone with one of my teachers and he was having me just experience the sadness and the grief, and it was just tears pouring down my face, pouring down my face. And then he invited me to do a practice of opening to that with love and even though I didn’t feel a ton of love, I remember all of a sudden there was a space between me and the tears and it shifted something.
And while I agree that an inner smile practice can for some people feel inauthentic, I believe that we all need to try these practices because there’s been so many of them that—for example, I remember when I was pregnant and Jack Kornfield said I should start practicing lovingkindness meditation and I was so resistant. I was like, “No, I’m a Vipassana practitioner. This is what I study.” And I had been studying then in Vipassana and I felt that metta or lovingkindness was too soft. Yet he knew that it was the right practice for me and the right practice for me to help kind of, that transition to becoming a mother.
So I think in past days, we all had individual teachers that helped us tailor our practice based on our blind spots and based on what we needed, and today, so often we’re alone practicing. So I think it’s helpful to stretch and maybe if you think the smile’s hokey, maybe that’s really your practice.
TS: I love it. Thank you. Now as someone who’s done a lot of research into mindfulness and as a clinical psychologist, what can you tell us about adding in this open compassionate perspective, this secret sauce in mindfulness? What does the research say about how this makes a difference?
SS: Yes, it’s a great question actually. I just read a study that was done with Shinzen Young and I was so impressed because I was writing a paper about the different apps that are now coming out, which is kind of the new trend in mindfulness teachings, and one of the things that they did is they looked at bare attention versus attention with this attitude of acceptance and openness and the app was not effective unless it was taught with this attitude of kindness, openness, acceptance. It was a really elegant study because it was so well controlled. It’s difficult to create research designs that are that well controlled and so I really appreciated that.
I also think Kristin Neff’s work on self-compassion has been really helpful, really pioneering the level of rigor that she’s brought to it. And there was one study that showed that for people who are highly self-critical and judgmental, which often leads to depression, for those people it was more effective to start with a lovingkindness or a self-compassion practice before introducing a kind of bare attention practice; that when you just introduce mindfulness in the way that it’s often taught, which is just about paying attention, it actually was in some ways detrimental because these people didn’t have—they had practiced so much this pathway of self-judgment that when they paid attention, it just continued to groove that pathway.
And I think that was my very first experience with meditation and mindfulness was when I was in Thailand and that was really what the monk was explaining to me is that I was sitting there trying to focus my mind and I couldn’t and it kept wandering off and I was judging myself and impatient and frustrated. And he said, “You’re not practicing mindfulness. You’re practicing frustration and judgment and impatience.” and then he said, “What you practice grows stronger.” And those five words have really stayed with me. Whatever we’re practicing is growing stronger, so if we can practice paying attention with kindness then we’re starting to cultivate those pathways.
Hopefully that answers the question, but this practice of kindness and self-compassion and this attitude, it’s not just something nice to have. It’s not just kind of a side note to mindfulness like, oh, because it maybe feels better or it’s sweet. The science behind it is quite compelling. Some of the research that I’ve talked about is how this attitude of kindness and curiosity really turn on the learning centers of the brain and they increase our motivation and they create more of an open perspective; whereas when we’re stressed or we’re shaming or judging ourselves, our attention narrows, right? That’s the stress response. And we actually shut down the learning centers of the brain so that it actually inhibits us from having insights or making changes.
TS: That’s very powerful. What are the learning centers of our brain?
SS: Well, the parts of the brain that can actually absorb information. When we get stressed, what happens is we shuttle resources from learning and being open and receptive to survival pathways. So we go into fight, flight, freeze, or faint, and we certainly can’t learn when we’re in that situation, Really, I mean it comes down to this basic understanding of how we learn, which I think our educational system and our parenting system and many systems have failed is that we learn when we feel safe and we feel interested. And that’s the kind of internal environment I want to help people create for themselves.
TS: Beautiful. Now, someone’s listening right now and maybe there are little moments. I felt it in our conversation so far where there was a softening and just a kind quality towards our experience right here in the moment, even in this conversation. And you offered the practice of a slight smile as something we can try. What else can people do right here, right now, who want to access more of this feeling of kindness towards their experience right here as they’re listening to this conversation?
SS: Well, I want to thank you. That just helped me kind of relax a little bit and bring a little more kindness. I think just bringing awareness to it, just setting that intention helps direct our compass. But in terms of actual practices, I mean one thing I talk about in the book that has helped me tremendously is what I call the five percent principle where I just try softening five percent. Maybe I can’t be totally relaxed or totally kind or totally at ease, but I can soften five percent more and I can relax my body five percent more, or bring five percent more warmth to my experience instead of trying to do it perfectly.
I think this myth of perfection locks a lot of us in into patterns and I think it prevents us from really beginning, taking that first step toward change. I think just trying to make micro-changes is a really helpful way. So right now as people are listening, to just see if they can soften five percent more and bring five percent more kindness to whatever is happening. And then for me, I’m very somatic in terms of my learning and so I always put my hand on my heart. My poor son always rolls his eyes because I do it a lot, not just when I’m meditating, but it calms my nervous system down. It really soothes me and just allows me to know that I’m on my own team.
TS: Which I think does bring us, interestingly to the title of your book. Good Morning. I Love You. Interestingly, I think people probably have all different kinds of responses to the title. I know, even here at Sounds True, there are people who—the book, it’s on their desk and they’re like, “I just want to see that Good Morning. I Love You.” You know? And I’m sure there are other people who maybe—they don’t talk about it, but they might have more of an attitude like your son. Like, “Really? That’s the title, Good Morning, I Love You?” So, how did you come up with this title?
SS: Oh goodness. Well, I have to tell you. The book’s coming out in the United Kingdom in two months and I got a message last week that said, “Just want to get your OK on the new title and the new cover of the book,” and it’s called Rewire Your Mind. There’s no “Good Morning, I Love You.”
TS: Right. Yes.
SS: And there’s not even compassion in the title.
TS: The Brits can’t handle it. It’s not going to fly for them. Yes.
SS: Good Morning, I Love You did not translate into British, that was clear. I agree, it’s definitely a title that’s going to appeal to some people more than others. For me, it felt like the most authentic title because it was that practice that cracked open my heart and really changed everything for me.
TS: Can you tell our listeners the full story, go into the background? It’s so beautifully told in the book and very powerful and I want them to hear it.
SS: So, some years ago I was going through a very difficult divorce, and in my family marriage is sacrosanct, so you don’t get divorced. My grandparents were married for 70 years and my parents are still married [after] 50 years and everyone in my family. And so it was something I really valued and so when we realized it wasn’t going to work, it was an incredibly painful time, and there’s a lot of self-judgment and shame that I couldn’t make this work and a lot of fear around our son and what was going to happen. So one of my teachers suggested I start practicing self-kindness. She said that she noticed how much I was judging myself and what you practice grows stronger, and so she suggested that I say, “I love you Shauna” every day.
I definitely was very resistant to that instruction and she saw my hesitation and she said, “How about just saying, ‘Good morning, Shauna’?” And then she said, “How about putting your hand on your heart when you say it? It releases oxytocin, it’s good for you.” She knew the science would win me over. So the next morning I woke up, put my hand on my heart, and said, “Good morning, Shauna,” and it was kind of nice; instead of the avalanche of shame and fear and judgment, I just treated myself with kindness. And I continued to practice and continued to practice for many months, and it became just this very beautiful ritual of greeting myself.
Then some months later I was down at Esalen Institute in Big Sur and it was my very first time ever going there. Such a beautiful and magical place. And it was my birthday and it was my first birthday without my son, without my husband, I was alone. And I remember waking up and kind of sliding out of bed, going down to the mineral hot springs, and I was sitting in the tubs all by myself and I put my hand on my heart, and before I knew it I was saying, “Good morning, I love you Shauna. Happy birthday.” And it was like this dam around my heart broke: I could feel my grandmother’s love, I could feel my mother’s love, I could feel my own self-love. And I don’t know if I’d ever experienced that before and it’s this profound experience of being on your own team and having compassion for yourself and loving yourself as you are in the middle of the mess and the imperfection.
And it’s continued to be a practice. It’s continued to be such a powerful practice, which I’ve done every day since then. And some days I do it and I feel kind of lonely and raw and some days I do it and I feel really awkward, and a lot of days I do it and I feel tremendous love. And as it’s evolved, it’s really become a practice not just for myself, but starting to kind of spread it out. I remember when my son was little and he’d be at his father’s house and I’d be missing him a lot in the morning, I would say, “Good morning, I love you, Jackson,” and there was a way I would connect with him. And then I would start to think about all the people I loved and kind of like a metta practice, to start sending this is good wish or this blessing out to them.
And sometimes it would be funny; I remember one morning the garbage truck went by really early and I kind of said a “Good morning, I love you” out to them. And the ripple effect of this practice has been profound. I’ve been so inspired and touched by all the people who have began practicing it, many of whom I don’t even know because of the TED talk. I’ll receive letters and emails and incredible stories of people sharing how this practice has changed their life.
TS: It’s interesting because in some ways, it’s such a simple practice. I mean, it practically couldn’t be simpler; I mean, you can explain it in a few sentences. And yet it is incredibly powerful. As you said, it’s catching on, “Good morning, I love you, ” almost like a movement of people simply being kind towards themselves. And it’s interesting, Shauna, because I know here you are, you’re a PhD researcher and you could be leading with something so much more kind of complex, and I’ll use a word that’s not a word, brainiacal. But you’re not, you’re leading—I mean, this is what really has moved you the most, “Good morning, I love you, Shauna.”
SS: It’s true. I mean, I have to remind people that I’m a scientist [Laughs] because they’re always like, “Oh you’re so sweet and your voice is so soothing and I feel so loving,” and I’m like, “And this is based in science.” For me the most revolutionary finding, the most incredible discovery in the last couple of hundred years is neuroplasticity, and the recognition that it’s never too late to rewire our brain. That no matter what we’ve done, no matter what mistakes we’ve made, that we can begin again. I think as a scientist I needed to know that, and I think that’s what allowed me to really pick up the pieces of my life and begin again. It’s because I knew it was possible.
I knew that I could actually shift the pathways in my brain that felt like I wasn’t good enough and I was unlovable and I would never find love again. And it took a long time but I trust my good heart now and I’m so grateful. I’m so grateful to these practices and I think that’s why I’ve worked so hard to share him with others, is because I have seen how they work.
TS: When you say that, “I trust my good heart now,” because it’s a powerful statement. What do you mean by that?
SS: I think for a long time, I think I was so critical and so perfectionistic and so judgmental of myself that there was a way in which I didn’t even trust myself. And there was an incredible moment—I remember being on a meditation retreat where the teacher said, “Reflect on why you’re here. Reflect on the purity of your intention for being here. You’re not here to learn how to steal or cheat or kill. You’re here because you want to cultivate your wisdom and your compassion and your sense of connection with all beings.” And I remember I just started to cry. I was like, “That’s so true. That is why I’m here. It is a good intention. I do have a pure heart.” And that moment just, I don’t know, it just relaxed some things in me where I don’t need to be perfect, but I just need to trust my pure intention.
TS: Now, you mentioned—it’s beautiful. You mentioned that the discovery of neuroplasticity, this idea that we can change at any age, we can rewire our brain at any age, and there’s also, of course, the old adage “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” I’m curious because is it really true that you can change your brain at any age, or maybe only some parts of our brain in some ways?
SS: It’s interesting because a lot of people, because I’m a clinical psychologist, they say “Well you, you see that people don’t change. You work with people, you see in the literature that the best predictor of our future behavior is our past behavior.” And it’s true. Often people get stuck in behaviors that it’s very hard to change. You look at the addiction literature, it’s right there to be seen. But I think the reason that people don’t change isn’t because we can’t, it’s because they keep practicing the same patterns, and if you don’t shift what you’re practicing, you’re going to keep strengthening those pathways.
How I like to explain to people, is I say we have these superhighways of habits, and we have been practicing those for decades and that’s kind of our automatic reactive thought, emotion, behavior. And what mindfulness allows us to do is start to carve out these country roads of compassion or patience or impulse control, whatever they might be, and they take a little bit of work. There’s all these bushes and brambles and we’re kind of carving out the pathway and it’s not as slick and smooth as the superhighway.
But eventually what starts to happen—and our brain is really miraculous—is we begin to prune the pathways that we’re not using and we begin to grow the new ones. So every time I make a choice to do something different, to do something in a healthy direction, I’m not only carving out that pathway, I’m pruning the negative pathway.
TS: I like that metaphor a lot. Do you think there are certain superhighways or grooves that have been established that are really some of the hardest to change?
SS: Of course, of course. I mean, anything that was established during a traumatic moment or in early childhood in our first seven years, there’s been research that shows that these are entrenched in a deeper way and they’re harder to reach. They’re harder to become aware of. I think that is where somatic work is so important.
I’m not trying to say that this is easy to change. What I think I’m saying is it’s possible, and that no matter what has happened and no matter what mistakes we’ve made, that all of us have this possibility of change.
TS: One of the interesting areas you talk about in Good Morning, I Love You is what’s called our “set point of happiness,” and this question of, can we actually change how happy we are as people? There’s a theory that says, no, we can’t actually change. I think a lot of people I’ve heard this before, that even when you win the lottery, you’re happy for a while, but then you go back to your set point. What do you think about that in light of practices like good morning, I love you? If I do this long enough, will it change my set point of happiness?
SS: Absolutely, and I think that is what I find so hopeful, is you’re right, there’s been decades of research replicated again and again that shows that our happiness set point is relatively set. You win the lottery, you go back to your baseline. You get into a tragic accident and become paralyzed for life, and one year later you’re back to your baseline level of happiness, which is quite surprising. So what this shows is that really external changes in our life don’t really shift our happiness long term, but what I think this new research is showing is that internal changes can—that as Richard Davidson says, happiness can be trained because the very structure of our brain can be modified. So we can begin to grow these pathways of joy, of happiness, and I really have been impressed with Rick Hanson’s work in this area of positive neuroplasticity and teaching people how to encode their positive experiences into their long-term memory so that it actually becomes part of our chemical soup.
Normally what happens is a positive experience happens and we just—it kind of flits by and we don’t pay much attention to it. Whereas we focus so much on the negative and this is referred to as the negativity bias, and evolutionarily we needed this. This is how we survived. We are descended from our anxious ancestors who, when there was a rustling in the bushes, they ran, they were terrified. We’re not descended from the ones who were kind of sweet and lollygagging around and checking in the bushes and wanting to pet the pretty kitty. Those aren’t our ancestors. Shat we’re learning now, though, is that this negativity bias is really harming us. It’s creating chronic stress, chronic focus on the negatives. So what these practices can do is start to balance that and help us begin to focus on the positive, on the beautiful, on what we’re grateful for and to really cultivate these states of mind.
TS: OK. You mentioned that people are familiar with the research that supports this notion of the set point of happiness, and here you’re letting us know that actually we can change our level of happiness. Is there research that’s measured that how we can change our level of happiness and that these practices do result in that?
SS: Absolutely. I mean, what the research shows, there’s been plenty of research looking at the impact of mindfulness practices on depression, on anxiety, on well-being, on satisfaction with life, on happiness. So there’s absolutely research that these practices increase your happiness. Now, we don’t have the same longitudinal studies of decades and decades of research that they do for the happiness set point with the lottery winners and the people who are in accidents, and so are these changes maintained over 20 years? We don’t have that research yet, but from what the basic science says is whatever we practice grows stronger. If we’re continuing to engage in these practices that are growing these resources in our brain, then it makes sense that we would continue to be happy.
TS: Now I’m going to circle back for a moment, Shauna. We were talking about how when we can bring kindness and curiosity to our experience, it opens up the learning centers of our brain. And you mentioned that if we get in a loop of self-condemnation or shame, that actually can block our ability to learn and grow. Can you help explain just more concretely for people how shame, self-criticism, how that blocks our capacity to learn and grow?
SS: Absolutely. This is something I’ve been so interested in because so often when we make a mistake or we’ve done something wrong, we feel like we need to beat ourselves up because we want to change. So the self-judgment and criticism in my experience, it comes because of our good hearts, because we actually want to change. We don’t want to do—I don’t want to yell at my son again, and so when I’m judging myself, it’s because I want to change. So that’s really the sad part of it, is that it’s coming from a good place, but what it’s doing is when we feel shame, the amygdala triggers this cascade of norepinephrine and cortisol. It floods our system and it basically puts us in this fight-or-flight mode where we can’t learn. We can’t learn new information, we can’t change our behavior. So if you think of a parent who is yelling at their child and then goes and shames themselves, or someone who’s late-night binge eating, that when we shame ourselves, we’re locking ourselves in those behaviors.
The other thing that I think shame does that I—is that when we feel shame, it’s so painful, it’s so uncomfortable that a lot of times what we do is we just ignore the situation or we ignore what we need to change or we ignore our mistakes. So I think that this attitude of kindness and self-compassion, it also gives us the courage to look at those parts of ourselves we don’t want to see, to really allow us to go into the shadow areas that otherwise it would just be too painful to look at.
TS: One of the parts of Good Morning, I Love You that I thought was just so gorgeous is the story that you told of working in a veterans’ hospital in Tucson, Arizona and your experience, your exchange with a soldier in that group. And I wonder if you can share that story with our listeners.
SS: Yes. It still stays with me. It was one of my first experiences working in the veterans’ hospital. I was actually still doing my internship while I was getting my PhD and I was entirely unprepared to be working in that setting. I had just never experienced that level of suffering before, and also was inspired and overwhelmed by the level of compassion. I was teaching a group for men with post-traumatic stress disorder and there was one man in the group who never said a word for about two months. He never spoke.
And then one day he raised his hand and he said, “I don’t want to get better, which is something I’d never heard a patient say before, I don’t want to get better. He said, “I don’t deserve to get better. What I saw, what I did in the war, I don’t deserve to get better.” And then he proceeded to tell the group what he had seen and what he had done, and you could feel his shame and self-judgment and a sense of being locked in the past that he could never change, that he wasn’t worthy of living a meaningful, healthy life.
And what was remarkable is that as he looked up and witnessed to the other men in the group, what he saw was compassion. That there was no judgment— even though everyone in the room knew what had happened was wrong, there was no judgment on who he was as a person. They were able to see who he truly was and not judge him based on his past behaviors. You could feel how in that moment, something in him began to shift and began to thaw, and there was this recognition that that change was possible and that he didn’t have to live locked in his past. And as the months went by, you could see him opening and shifting and recognizing that he could let go of the judgment while still feeling the remorse and still feeling the pain of what had happened, but allow himself to begin living his life.
TS: It also seems that there’s some illustration in this story of the power of the group, the power of other people.
SS: Absolutely. I mean, that has been one of the greatest recognitions I’ve had is that we’re never just practicing for ourselves and we’re never practicing alone, and that when we recognize our inner connection and our interdependence with each other, it completely transforms the practices and their effects. What I’ve seen is that yes, it’s been very helpful to start cultivating self-compassion, but it’s also so powerful to receive that compassion from others and to really feel what it feels like to be on each other’s team. It’s one of the things I love, actually, about Kristin Neff’s work on common humanity, that she has the self-compassion practices include a step where you recognize your common humanity, where you recognize that you’re not alone in your suffering, that there are other people in the world who have breast cancer or who are getting divorced or who are struggling with their children. I believe that sense of not being alone is incredibly healing.
I was just teaching a group and one of the things I said that really I watched it have an impact was, I know that I’m never practicing alone; that there’s always someone else in the world who’s practicing. And there’s a sense of like, we’re doing this together. We’re doing this inner work so that it has echoes in the world.
TS: Now, this notion that shame in and of itself is not actually the best motivator for us in our lives, is not actually a useful or skillful motivator—I think that’s really interesting, but I don’t think most people really understand that and know that. And I’m going to give you a personal example just to kind of make this all really real. Just earlier this week for the first time in 35 years, the meeting that I lead for the whole company—used to be every month, now it’s every six weeks—I call this meeting, I lead this meeting. I missed the meeting. I missed it, first time in 35 years. And my first response was to feel a sense of humiliation. “Oh my God, how could I miss the meeting?” And I think there’s this thought, “Well if I really sit there and I just feel humiliated, that’s what will get me to make sure that I never miss the meeting again.”
How would just being kind—saying, “Tami, good morning, I love you. You missed the meeting. Humans miss meetings all the time.” How is that going to help me make sure that I attend the meeting the next time? How does that self-compassion approach actually get me to make sure I’m at the meeting next time?
SS: Thank you. Yes. I really appreciate you bringing this up because this is probably the number one comment I get. Whenever I bring this idea of self-compassion, that’s the first thing people say: “But I want to change. I don’t want to keep doing this.” And so two things. One is if you look at the literature, people who are self-compassionate are more effective at making changes. So people who are trying to lose weight—you would think that shaming yourself, beating yourself up, really trying to understand would work. What actually happens is that makes people do worse on their diets or on their healthy living or on their exercise. People who are more compassionate, they actually are able to make greater changes.
The most clear example of this is the addiction literature. People who have addiction issues, they do not feel proud of it. They are trying so hard to change, but the shame locks them in because the things that they are willing to do for their addiction are so out of alignment with their true values. I think it’s a mistake to think that by shaming yourself, you’re going to make a change and I think that what people need to do is actually try.
Because what happens is not just self-compassion, it’s also the courage to see clearly, and that’s why for me mindfulness and self-compassionate are completely intermixed. They’re like two sides of the same coin. That if you’re just being compassionate and kind but you’re not seeing clearly, I don’t think it’s effective; but if you’re just thinking clearly with this laser-like attention but you don’t have the kindness and the compassion, I don’t think it’s effective. You really need both.
So in your situation, what I would invite is the first step would be to just name how you’re feeling. “Wow, Tami, I’m humiliated. This hurts. I’m frustrated.” To just kind of name those out loud without condemning yourself. There’s this famous study at UCLA, “Name It to Tame It,” where they found that when people name their emotions, it down-regulated their physiology. Just labeling it. And then to bring some compassion. “Sweetheart, you’re really hurt right now. You’re really frustrated right now, or you’re really angry at yourself for forgetting,” whatever it is. And that starts to calm the nervous system down, settle your physiology so that you actually have the ability, then, to make a strong commitment to not have it happen in the future. I think that’s your best chance of not missing another meeting.
TS: Now, Shauna, in your own life, what’s been the area where practicing this combo of mindfulness and self-compassion—the secret sauce of mindfulness as you describe it, self-compassion—where’s that been the hardest for you? And can you share with our listeners a bit about your journey in that part of your life?
SS: Hmm. I think it’s definitely been the hardest for me in relationships. I think that’s where my greatest wounds have been and also my deepest hopes and longing. And so I think that’s where I would often struggle and feel like I wasn’t good enough or judge myself a lot or not be willing to see things clearly. I think this practice over and over again of having the courage to see things clearly but also bring kindness and compassion because otherwise it would just get too painful and overwhelming.
And I think also the belief that change is possible. I think after you go through a painful divorce and then enough other painful relationships, you start to believe there’s something wrong with you or change isn’t possible or love is out of reach. And I really believe that this practice of self-compassion and learning how to love and accept myself and to trust myself, it’s what it took for me to actually find love in my life.
As I was writing the book, I think a lot was being healed because it was being integrated and synthesized and it was really—as I wrote, I was completely immersed in the teachings. I wasn’t just writing them; they were part of me. And right when I finished the kind of last draft of the book, I met the love of my life, and I really believe that happened because I had finally come to a place of self-love. And we actually just got engaged to be married now, so it’s official and for me it feels like a miracle. It’s as miraculous as our brain.
TS: Well, congratulations on your engagement.
SS: Thank you. Thank you.
TS: At this point, Shauna, I’m wondering if you could lead our listeners through some type of short practice that could become a touchstone for them when there’s a moment when bringing in mindful self-compassion is exactly what’s needed.
SS: Absolutely.
TS: Can we just do a practice together right now?
SS: Yes.
TS: Let’s do it.
SS: Yes. Just to begin, if it’s possible for people to let their eyes close, that always helps me kind of turn inward. And then for me what’s always helpful as I begin to just relax my body five percent, soften anywhere you can five percent. And then just try placing your hand on your heart and see if you can become curious of what it feels like to make this gesture of self-kindness. I always think it’s interesting because sometimes it feels really soothing and sometimes it actually will bring tears because I’ll realize I haven’t been being very kind to myself. So it’s just opening to and allowing whatever you notice with this touch.
And here’s really where mindfulness comes to our rescue no matter what we’re feeling is that it welcomes everything with this attitude of kindness and curiosity and says, “Oh, interesting. What are you noticing?” And then noticing the breath. I always feel like the breath and my heartbeat, that they’re allies. They’re taking care of us all the time. The breath is always breathing. My heart’s always beating, I don’t have to remember to tell it to beat, and the heart is sending oxygen and nutrients to all the trillions of cells in the body. There’s this sense of always being taken care of no matter what’s happening. The breath breathing, the heart beating. So just taking another moment to receive your own nourishment: feeling the breath, feeling the body, maybe softening five percent more.
And then I think it’s helpful to just take a moment to think about one thing you want to remember from this practice, and I call it a gold nugget. One thing that you really want to take with you and encode in your long-term memory. You might come up with a word or a phrase. And then as you’re ready, you can let your eyes open. What do you notice?
TS: I particularly liked the five percent, and I noticed each time you said it, I relaxed five percent more, five percent more. It was just that little bit had a profound impact.
SS: It’s true. It’s so amazing. Just a few degrees has such a significant impact on our state of being. And I think that’s what’s so helpful, especially when people are really caught in something, to say, “Can you just bring five percent more kindness here or five percent more ease,” and there’s a shift.
TS: Shauna, one of the things I wanted to hear from you has to do with how to bring this type of attention that is both intentional and with this attitude of kindness, how to apply that at work and what the impacts can be at work. Sounds True’s launching a new program called the Inner MBA, and our thesis is that when we change how we treat ourselves at work, it can actually have a profound impact on our ability to realize our goals and relate differently with people in the workplace. I’m curious if you have research to back that up and what your thoughts are.
SS: Absolutely. There’s actually a lot of research that is happening currently. We just published a book chapter in a book, [Mindfulness at Work], that was from Oxford University Press kind of summarizing some of the literature, and what’s really interesting is as we begin to be more present with ourselves and be more compassionate with ourselves, it spreads out; and so you see decreased conflict interpersonally, you see increased interpersonal connection, you see greater loyalty to companies. Turnover is a huge problem because they train people and then they leave. You see much greater loyalty after mindfulness intervention. And you also see a greater capacity for innovation and creativity.
So a lot of times when I’m speaking with corporations, what’ll talk to them about is this is going to make your employees happier and healthier and make them more effective. I think that’s really the beauty of mindfulness is that it’s supporting us in being our best selves on every level.
TS: To end, Shauna, I want to circle back around to the “Good morning, I love you” practice, and dare I say the “Good morning I love you” movement, a movement that I think is being spurred on by the release of your new book. Somebody says, “Wait a second. ‘Good morning, I love you.’ Are there two of me? Like what’s going on here? I love … who’s the I? Who’s the me? This is a little confusing.” What would you have to say about that?
SS: You left the hardest question for last. Well done. So, “Good morning, I love you.” It is a really interesting thing and I think this paradox comes up a lot in all meditation practices, because part of what we’re doing is we’re learning how to be with this kind of unique individual personality and self that we were born into this body; and then also part of what we’re doing is recognizing that we’re not really ourselves, that we’re not really separate, that our understanding of who we are is much, much greater.
So this practice, “Good morning, I love you,” in a way is kind of including all of it. There’s the witness, the awareness, and there’s ourself that also exists; and so there’s this capacity to hold ourselves with this loving awareness and to recognize that this loving awareness is always already here so we don’t have to go manufacture it. It’s really just about kind of flipping that awake switch and recognizing both.
TS: Shauna Shapiro—she’s the author of the new book, Good Morning, I Love You: Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Practices to Rewire Your Brain for Calm, Clarity, and Joy. Thank you so much and thanks for—here you are, a research scientist, clinical psychologist coming out strong. Good morning, I love you. Thank you.
SS: Thank you Tami.
TS: Thank you for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at soundstrue.com/podcast, and if you’re interested, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app. And also if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I love getting your feedback, being in connection with you and learning how we can continue to evolve and improve our program. Working together, I believe we can create a kinder and wiser world. SoundsTrue.com: waking up the world.
