A Path of Self-Compassion
‘No amount of self-improvement can make up for a lack of self-acceptance’. Robert Holden
You have perhaps heard of a project called Letters of Note. Now published as a book by Shaun Usher, this started life as an Internet collection of ‘correspondence deserving of a wider audience’. It’s a great idea, collecting letters written by many interesting and sometimes famous people over the centuries. Many of the letters can be seen online in their original form and they are also transcribed for ease of reading. I went to this website to check the quote I wanted to start this address with – Aldous Huxley, writer and philosopher, did indeed say in his last few days (according to a letter written by his wife Laura) “It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘Try to be a little kinder.’”
And that’s what this address is all about – the value of us trying to be a little kinder, starting with ourselves. Kindness and compassion could be described as core human values that help form the moral foundation of human relationships and human society. I’m going to explore today the idea that if we discover within ourselves a lack of self-compassion then there is vital repair work to be done, because if we cannot be kind to ourselves then how can we hope to create a compassionate society. And even if we ourselves are radiant examples of self-compassion then perhaps we can turn our loving attention to those around us, because I believe we live in a world that is shaped and distorted by damaging self-criticism. It is not easy to probe into each other’s minds so I do not know if all of us have this inner judging dialogue running through much of our day. But over the years I’ve heard enough from others to suspect that there’s ‘a lot of it about’.
I remember being with a friend in her car when she reversed into a lamp post. It was a minor bump – we, the car and the lamp post all lived to tell the tale. But what we talked most about afterwards was her reaction: at the moment of impact, the harsh words ‘You stupid woman’ came out of her mouth. It didn’t sound like her and I had never heard her speak about herself in such a way. But it was a voice she knew well as part of her self-talk – the inner voice that provides so many of us with an inner running commentary on our lives. On reflection, my friend remembered how often she had heard her mother say a similar thing. We wondered where her mother had learnt to speak so harshly to herself and what effect that must have had on her life and on the life of her family.
Working with troubled teenagers years ago I came to realise that beneath the bravado of some of the youngsters who behaved most badly was a terrible sense of their unworthiness. Deep inside they were deeply ashamed of themselves and their behaviour, deep inside they regarded themselves as worthless. We started to work with what at the time was called self-esteem, encouraging them to think more highly of themselves and to build up more positive self-images.
Looking back I’m not sure how successful we were – because I now realise, that one of the problems about people’s lack of self-compassion is just how deep its origins lie. Another friend spoke to me recently about a Biblical passage that has stayed with her since childhood. It is the origin of the saying ‘the writing on the wall’, meaning that a doom laden future is foretold and cannot be escaped from. The Jews have been captured and taken into exile in Babylon. At a drunken feast the Babylonian ruler Belshazzar commits the sin of using the stolen sacred cups from the temple to drink alcohol from. A finger appears and writes on the wall but only the righteous Daniel can interpret the writing as saying ‘weighed and found wanting’. Belshazzar has been judged by God and indeed found wanting, not up to the mark. He does not live to tell the tale but rather meets an unfortunate end that very night. How often do we judge ourselves harshly for far more minor misdemeanours? How often do we act as both judge and jury in our own lives? How often do we weigh our own life and find ourselves wanting?
I felt moved by this passage written by Henri J.M. Nouwen:
“Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, ‘Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody.’ … [My dark side says,] I am no good… I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the ‘Beloved.’ Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.”
How can we learn to look with eyes of loving compassion upon ourselves and upon our lives? Derek Walcott’s poem ‘Love After Love’, that we heard in full as a reading earlier on, describes this possibility:
‘The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome’
Last autumn I had the good fortune to spend a day at a conference on Compassion and Empathy in Society here in London. There were many good things about that conference and the organisation that hosted it. But my favourite is that the talks given by various speakers are now all freely available on the Internet – I’ve written the website details at the end of this address. The day was introduced by Karen Armstrong, whose book ’12 Steps to a Compassionate Life’ we studied here at Essex Church a couple of years ago. One of the steps in that book is Compassion for Yourself. The chapter starts with a moving true story of Rabbi Albert Friedlander who explained the importance of the Biblical injunction ‘love your neighbour as yourself – first found in the Book of Leviticus. He emphasised the importance of the second part of this – ‘as yourself’, because if we cannot love ourselves we cannot love others. As a Jewish child in Nazi Germany he was deeply affected by the anti-Semitism that surrounded him. One night he lay in bed and started to list all his good qualities to counteract the terrible negativity that he was experiencing. At that young age he vowed to use those qualities to help create a better world.
In recent years, developments in neuroscience have helped us to understand more about how our brains work. When we are judging ourselves or others harshly it is because an ancient reptilian part of our brain is being activated – the amygdala, which deals with our most basic of needs, the need to survive. Our harsh inner critic is trying to help us avoid making dangerous mistakes but it is not as useful in the modern, complex world we now live in. The more we can temper that basic survival response with a more measured thoughtful reflective response – based here in our pre frontal cortex, the more compassionate we can become. At the University of Derby, Professor Paul Gilbert is working on what he calls compassion focused therapy, having long studied the negative effects of shame. Increasingly we are coming to understand that being ashamed of our behaviour does not always encourage us to behave better, it can oft times make us feel worse and that can have a brutalising effect. Shame can lead to worse behaviour when we feel unable to stop ourselves doing something wrong. This week here in Britain three care workers were jailed for gratuitously tormenting patients with dementia and throughout the National Health Service there is a growing concern that greater compassion needs to be encouraged in patient care.
The other speaker at the conference who impressed me was Professor Kristin Neff who has created an excellent website on self-compassion, complete with a test for you to find out just how self-compassionate you truly are. Her website also includes meditations, articles and videos, all freely available. Kristin Neff writes about three aspects of self-compassion – self- kindness, an awareness of our common humanity – a sense that we are all in this thing called life together, and mindfulness. She works from a Buddhist perspective and encourages people to develop a practice of mindfulness to counter-balance our human tendency towards reactivity. She emphasises that self-compassion is not self-pity and nor is it self-indulgence, but rather a healthy and loving way to live in relationship with ourselves, with others and with our world.
I already knew Kristin Neff’s name because she is mum to an autistic child whose life changing journey to Mongolia is written about in an inspiring book and a film, both called The Horse Boy. At the conference Kristin told us how self-compassion had helped her to parent her child. On one occasion the two of them were on a long-distance flight and her son would not stop screaming. This kind of tantrum like behaviour might be understandable in a toddler but her son was a large four year old, who kicked as he screamed. Kristin felt embarrassed that she was unable to calm her child on this night flight where people were trying to get to sleep. In desperation she carried him to the bathroom, hoping a change of scene might distract him but it only made things worse and after the long walk down the aisle of the plane clutching the screaming child she found that the bathroom was occupied. As she stood in the cramped vestibule waiting, she suddenly realised how powerless she was and how truly dreadful she felt. At that point she turned her attention from her son to herself and started to inwardly soothe herself. She changed her own self-talk from a message of blame and desperation to one of calm and hope. And slowly her son calmed down and they got through the flight. There was no miracle in this story, but what impressed me when I heard it was that realisation for all of us that the quality of our inner dialogue does have an effect – it has an effect on us, it has an effect on others and it has an effect on our world. It is clearly worth becoming more aware of, and reflective upon, what is going on most of the time in most of our heads.
Within this story is I think another important lesson for us all. Just as Kristin at that moment was unable to do anything to soothe her troubled child, so we in life need to understand the limits of our powers. We are not as in charge of most things in life as we would oft times like to be. We are frail, wounded, imperfect beings living less than perfect lives in a less than perfect world. But what each of us can do is strengthen our relationship with our self through loving compassion and acceptance of how we are and who we are. And knowing that we are all in this together, perhaps we can all benefit from being a little kinder to ourselves and then to others.
Rev. Sarah Tinker
Sermon – 12th January 2014
For more information:
Kristin Neff: self-compassion.org (her website has many articles, meditations, exercises and a test you can take to show how self-compassionate you are.
Empathy and Compassion in Society: http://compassioninsociety.org/videos-main (2013 conference talks – particularly recommend talks by Chris Irons and Kristin Neff).