The Foreign Concept of Self-Kindness
How foreign is the concept of self-kindness to you?
It’s something I’ve been learning for myself since sobriety, and something I still see so many clients, loved ones, and even strangers struggle with daily.
I was asked the other day, what exactly is self-compassion? How does one actually practice it?
None of us were born with the ability to speak. Words were taught to us. The meaning behind them. How to use them in phrases we heard over and over again. Words become some of the first habits that we ever form.
And our brains love habits. Habits allow us to perform tasks, including thinking and speaking, without much effort. Before we know it, this forms what we know as “personality,” or character, or as some like to say, “just how I am.”
We develop ways that we habitually treat ourselves. The ways we eat, dress, move. The way we think - i.e. how we speak within our thoughts, and our mind. And for a lot of us, the phrases we heard growing up were critical, belittling, doubting. These behaviours become as much a part of our story as the history of our lives, where we believe we come from, why we believe we are the way that we are.
The thing is, the beginning of our story wasn’t written just by us. Before we learned how to speak, read, or write, our stories were told and written by others. And while we can’t go back and change what’s happened beyond our control, many of us have learned enough skills to start to be able to write the story in any way we like from here.
Yet so many of us don’t.
For some reason, there’s some belief around carrying on the theme and trajectory of the story as it was told by others, as if there was some rule against changing the plot.
Plot twist: there isn’t.
If the tone of the story has always been despair, you get to change it to hope. If the theme of the story has always been pain, you get to transform it into strength. If the heart of the story has always been cruel, you get to shift it to be kind.
The past few months have seen a lot of change, both within and without. The move to Mexico helped me see how environment plays such a huge role in my habits. Because the weather was nice, I took up running in the mornings again, something I wouldn’t have done in a Canadian winter. Which led me to decide to train for a marathon, something I’d thought was no longer in the books for me, due to my fears around my past injuries. Because there was so much access to fun, fast food (taco, marquesita, and frozen yogurt stands everywhere), my diet and eating habits changed and I put on some weight. When we moved to Peru, the access to fresh fruit and vegetables was much more available and common than junk food, and the weight started to come off. My pace slowed in Mexico. No one was in a hurry. My breath is deeper here in Peru. I watch the ocean every morning. Every crashing wave is telling me, “You are never the same.”
I’m really enjoying the newness of each place. How it requires me to be flexible, adaptable. How my brain is challenged to form new pathways. How I’m not on autopilot. And at the same time, I’m comforted by the things in my routine that I can bring with me everywhere I go. How it provides me the sense of stability and safety I need. I know I can trust myself to take care of myself when things feel uncertain. That uncertainty doesn’t have to mean anxiety. How I get to witness my faith being renewed again and again in the kindness of strangers, the peace of my surroundings, the gentleness that is available in each moment when I offer myself a little bit more softness in my perspective.
Phrases I hear me saying to myself now: “It’s okay, there’s time.” “It can wait.” “Of course you can.”
Perhaps when self-kindness and compassion seem too foreign at the beginning, we can just start with noticing when we’re being unkind to ourselves. And then noticing if that’s still the story that we want to tell. Or if there’s a slight change to the tone, theme, or plot now.
It’s your story. Nobody gets to write it but you.
