Self-Compassion Is A Pathway Into Our Wisdom
Self-compassion opens the hidden, overgrown, seemingly impenetrable door to a living, organically instinctive, intuitive, deeply caring, fiercely courageous life rooted in a phenomenon we call ‘wisdom’.
And if ever there was a time we need wisdom, personally and collectively, it is now during a global unravelling in this pandemic.
Wisdom is not a cognitive knowledge. Wisdom is a living phenomenon, and part of all that we call ‘life’, being human. Wisdom includes empathy, compassion and places us into an ethical orientation towards one another and our planet home. Wisdom is a call and a way of being. It brings us into a feeling relationship with the beings we share this planet with, sharing a wisdom-in-life, a fabric of community to which we all belong and reciprocate in.
Marsha Linehan (2020), a courageous and rigorous psychologist who developed Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT), speaks of DBT helping people to access ‘wise mind’. Self-compassion is key ingredient for this possibility. She argues that it is this wise mind that is capable of “building a life worth living” – the title of her biography recently published.
Self-compassion helps us to ‘be the change’
“Be the change you wish to see” (attributed to Mahtma Ghandi) is meaningless if I have not embodied this within my own personal life. This awareness is one that was and is deeply present in the fabric of Indigenous peoples across the planet. Tragically, this awareness has often been nearly entirely severed through the pervasive, destructive colonization of globalized ‘western’ zeitgeist and culture.
However, with time, patience, lots of nature, and this internal self-compassion practice, I can allow my mind to settle better, to open more to feeling with my heart, my body out amongst the tree beings and waters of life, this connectedness a felt sense, that of ‘fabric binding us together’ slowly becoming something I can imagine and feel more often now. It has galvanized me to an ever deepening and active mobilization to make changes in my life for the sake of others and our planet-home. I believe the path of self-compassion as heart-mind practice and way of life has helped.
During this pandemic with so much impact on every aspect of our lives, globally, we have collectively had a good look at the existential bedrock of our all too fragile, human lives. It’s likely most of us have faced what the twentieth century existential philosophers have given us eloquent names for: angst, dread, loneliness, mortality, meaninglessness, hopelessness – and many have discovered the terror (experienced in the body as acute anxiety) that can rise up within when we confront these, often masked, layers of our psyche beneath the busyness, the routines, the identities we sourced from the various aspects of ‘life as it was’.
We’ve seen how precarious even the material basics can be – home, food, social connections, that many may have thought were relatively secure – all upended by a tiny, invisible virus.
Self-compassion in a global pandemic
Far from being an irrelevant luxury in a time such as now, February 2021 - almost one year on from the day the WHO declared a global pandemic, I find that self-compassion remains a key, central, even crucial dimension of my work with my clients in psychotherapy and, indeed in my own life. Far from leading to greater selfishness and self-absorption, we must remember that Dr. Neff and Dr. Germer (2018) have shown from their research that in fact, self-compassion fosters greater compassion for others, not the opposite.
Self-compassion is not a recipe for more narcissism and self-centredness. It is, in fact, the antidote to these all too prevalent traits in our society that have been most hauntingly revealed. It’s hard sometimes not to be overwhelmed by the unmasking of a globally viral problem of, well - basically greed - through the politicizing in most countries of how to handle unimaginable numbers of deaths and witnessing, daily, the cold bare facts that hardest hit are consistently, and still a year on, those who are most vulnerable – the people who are systemically oppressed, marginalized, and people who live precariously in this world, physically and materially. We can no longer claim to not ‘see’ the deep, politically-systemically structured sickness at the heart of our world.
Self-compassion remains, for me, one practical and yet potent way to do something about it.
Self-compassion is a powerful anti-dote to scapegoating - it heals the divides, it begins within
Self-compassion is the key for ending the projection of our own inadequacies and lurking feelings of ‘guilt’ onto others as they are simply too painful to live with. It can mobilize a sense of hope – for oneself first, that just maybe, there’s a life worth living – mine, yours and then, just maybe, that a life lived as if it is worth living, will truly make a difference to others and our world. Once that tap root of self-criticism, the ‘shame-mongerer’ in our heads is identified for what it is as: “not my voice” this narrative of criticisms, ‘should’s’, ‘ought’s’, shaming, blaming narrative within one’s head is recognized as incepted and not innate and self-compassion applied, daily as the remedy, then transformation can truly happen personally, and collectively. We cease to be crippled and inwardly immobilized by pervasive guilt and hopelessness.
I often remind clients (and myself on the tougher days) that no baby is born with that inner critic fully formed in their heads. It gets put there, over time through all manner of environments – and beware – even those that seem aimed at promoting our best interests and our ‘wellness’ are often still subtly predicated upon a premise that somehow, you are still not quite ‘right’ or ‘your best self’.
This, is what deep down, we humans need. To feel that I, you, we, do truly make a difference…for the better.
Self-compassion helps us to access what Jung called ‘the Self’ within us, our wisdom-compass
I also find self-compassion is a path to connecting with a deep, living wisdom within our psyche, a central force that can rise up to meet life’s tensions, and find a wise way through. I’ve witnessed this over and over again in my practice with clients, and in my own life. It is the central tenet of Jung’s insights into the human psyche and its structure (Jung, CW 8, 1960). He called this wisdom the Self, not the “I” self, but a deep in-dwelling unnameable living Self, rising from our own unique nature, personality, and the wisdom in life around us in this planet-earth-home. It is, Jung argued, this inward, calibrating, nourishing Self which is more of an experiencing within, a knowing rather than an ‘it’ or a ‘knowledge’ that is our capacity capacity to make something of our small, precious lives that feels worthwhile.
This capacity to find a wise way between being pinned on the horns of a dilemma and despair, a third way, Jung called the Transcendent Function (Jung, CW 8,1960).
It is an indwelling capacity to find a wise way, a wise response, a uniquely personal response to life and its struggles – with the fertilizing nutrients in our lives that allows for us to access this within. Self-compassion is one such nutrient.
It helps us to stop falling into a burial mound beneath the overwhelming feelings and endless self-recriminating voices, fears, judgements, anger, and pain, in order to hear that whisper, feel that inner nudge to ‘go this way,’ or to ‘do nothing’, ‘offer this’, or ‘walk away’.
Whatever we hear, it comes from a place deeper under the emotions’ waves, from a feeling-body-knowing. A gut thing. And then, it’s simply a leap of faith to trust it.
Wisdom is never perfect clarity; that doesn’t exist in our human, limited space-time continuum. Life’s muddy and messy, always, but you follow that inner knowing, and somehow, looking back, you realize there was perhaps some kernel of wisdom hidden in it all along.
Self-compassion sources hope
As each generation, probably throughout history, has faced a crucial collective moment we perhaps are facing ours, now. I imagine throughout time humans as a group or society faced defining historical moments for their culture and generation. Humans have, every generation, had to grapple with finding what a meaningful hope looks and feels like and show what hope actually means for their collective struggle, whatever form it took, in order to give something to next generation that gave enough for their children and grandchildren a reason to keep grow up and keep trying, keep living.
So now, we must find ways to source from deep within, perhaps deeper than ever before, a sense of hope in today and a strong, muscular hope for the future. Hope is critical for mental well-being and our children are watching us. The teenagers of the pandemic were already asking of our society what is life for? Now, the question has become critical – what is the future we want because this time, it’s radically uncertain and it is today that we are creating it.
We have a collective task, a shared responsibility to buffer ourselves from hopelessness and a key, key ingredient for this, is the practice of self-compassion which can meet our feelings of despair, distress, angst, dread, hopelessness and say, “It’s ok. I know that’s such a painful feeling. I’m so sorry it’s so hard. Here – let’s take today one step at a time. You’ll get through it. Tomorrow is a new day.” Baby steps, kindness, validating the feelings, all of them, a wise kind best friend to ourselves, within - these are healing elements self-compassion practice offers us. When we stir ourselves to hope, we can practice solidarity which must, in these times, mean something beyond a word.
Hopelessness is an insidious road to despair and despair forecloses a sense of possibility in life (Solnit, 2016). Never more than now, do we need to, individually and collectively, find a sense of possibility in life if we are to keep up a sense of solid hope for the future and for the next generation as they live through this pandemic.
Hope is not a luxury – it’s a bedrock necessity for getting out of bed.
Self-compassion gives us the tangible, very practical and mightily potent way to find hope stirring within and support ourselves to keep putting one foot in front of the other on those days when hope is a long-lost relative who went missing.
Self-compassion is a ‘wizening’ process
Wisdom is perhaps more accurately rendered visible to us if we think of it as a verb, ‘wisdoming,’ rather than as a noun. Wisdoming or perhaps ‘wizening,’ is a way of being, a way of trusting, a way of finding deeply grounded hope in the darkness of unknowing – an unknowing which, as humans, rattles our existential bones: that truly none of us really have ‘the’ answer to what life is really about and what lies beyond it. We can believe, we can intuit, but we can’t grasp it in the dark nights or sobs of grief in loss – it is in those moments when we confront the truth that we are always living in a horizon of unknowing and feeling scared.
Self-compassion provides access to that deep wisdom dwelling within and around us, the wisdom that knows that nevertheless, somehow, it can be ok. We are ok. A way can be found, hope waits around the corner, this too shall pass, life can bring along surprising serendipities because it always has and this moment, this heartache, this struggle, is part of it all.
Self-compassion has taught me that sometimes if I wait, hold, stay patient, reserve responding until I feel clearer, wisdom finds its way. Other times, it has been a deep instinctive response that has acted without overthinking or even much thought at all, and I look back and wonder at the courage that rose up in that moment and ‘who’ it was that responded. That a way can and will be found is a comforting rudder that gets me out of bed in the morning. It is then self-compassion that gets me through the day and on into the next.
There is no school for wisdom other than the life you are living, now
Wisdom is also our human birth right, and life lived is our school.
Wisdom is not a place of an ‘arriving’ where one day you magically discover you are ‘wise’. In fact, a truly wise person will rarely see their own wisdom except perhaps dimly intuiting it might be there and sometimes with the clearer perspective we gain with time passed. It’s called a ‘wisdom bias’ by world renowned experts who study ‘wisdom’ research. I found this in my own doctoral study with women exploring their perspectives on the phenomenon of wisdom as they lived with ovarian cancer. Each interview started with the person saying, “Well, I don’t think I have much wisdom to offer,” and yet each one offered rich, moving wisdom on their lived experiences and ways of navigating life with the illness.
Rarely do wise people claim they are wise and often, if told they are, still cannot claim it for themselves. It’s the nature of wisdom to be elusive and only allows itself to be seen if it all, in hindsight - sometimes long after we’ve gone.
I like the idea of ‘wizening’ – wisdom in life working upon us, into us, forming something in and through us.
Yet wisdom doesn’t come cheap or easy. Ever.
Wisdom is not equal to ‘growth’
Wisdom is more of a distillation process than a ‘growth’ process. Growth tends to slip into the ‘more’, ‘better’ and ‘ideal's’ narratives that are already inscribed into our psyche’s distorting our sense of being human. This was a key finding in my doctoral study and in the discussion I questioned, based on my findings, the tendency to equate ‘wisdom gained’ with a growing field of research in ‘post-traumatic growth’. None of my participants equated wisdom with personal ‘growth’. We can certainly claim strengths and see our grit and metal surviving trauma. Hopefully we do. Yet, wisdom cannot be commodified and cannot, I personally believe, be taught. It was the one thing we must wrest out of lives ourselves with our own blood, sweat and tears – or else it is one more cliché. When we hear people speak, we instinctively know and feel the difference.
Musing on past forks in our road, or painful amputations, losses of loved ones, jobs, situations that were gutting at the time, difficulties our children face, unbearable situations that bring us to our knees, we sometimes get this glimpse, years on, of having gleaned some life wisdom from it all, something we instinctively pass on to others in their struggles and suffering that does provide some comfort in their dark hours.
Most often, this wisdom passed on is more felt, in a person’s presence, the quality in their listening, the odd phrase that just stays with us, like a compass throughout our lives than in many words. Looking back in our own struggles, we see that somehow strength was found, though we had no idea we could find it within ourselves at the time. When we catch glimpses of this hard-won nugget of life wisdom, when we cannot find a good ‘reason’ for something to have happened but, nonetheless, some thread pulled through out of the mess that took us forward, through and beyond into the fabric of the rest of our lives, then we see something else so very clearly – that wisdom is hard-won, costly, and thus most precious; it is uniquely ours.
Wisdom cannot be seen as a trophy or achievement. It bucks that whole system. Wisdom, or its verb wizening, seems to be more of a ‘saging’ process, one who is becoming a sage or who is ‘sage’.
We realize that all the struggle and suffering we experienced was the very crucible from which this wise one (ourselves), who seems to have been becoming wiser through it all, was born. As Helen Reddy sang in her emblem song for women marching for the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States, “I am wise, but it’s wisdom born of pain….”.
Wisdom is therefore not an ‘achievement’ we can hold out for ourselves or others as a ‘good’ we must acquire. It is a process more akin to the seasons unfolding, to our human experience of birth-death-rebirth patterned into life stages, distilled through experience and our embodiment of working out the meanings of faith, hope, and love through our own ways of being in life.
This is what Jung meant by ‘individuation’ – becoming you, humbly, without apology; not twisting yourself into knots ‘for’ the world, for parental voices in our heads, for achievements, for ‘social capital’ (Habermas’s concept) and extrinsic rewards. Being simply you. Me. Contributing what we can, as best we can, with kindness first and foremost to our own hearts and beings. Then this love can flow to others with easefulness.
Self-compassion whispers all we long and need to hear, about ourselves
Neff & Germer (2018) remind us over and over in their book that self-compassion requires us to turn inwards to ourselves as friend, a best friend, and to bathe ourselves in the same truthful, grounded, kindness as we would, in a heartbeat, offer that dear friend. It is deceivingly simple. Yet anyone who begins this practice discovers the journey is indeed the destination, that it takes time, patience, often guidance and support, to begin to remember and to keep learning how to provide ourselves with alternative narratives about ourselves, to turn that harsh inner voice into our greatest, kindest ally.
As this change begins to happen within us, in our relationship with ourselves, with critic turned friend and ally--almost imperceptibly at first, but steadily--we find ourselves responding, pausing, calming more often than reacting. We find a strength to resist sinking into depressive despair. We find ourselves rallying, taking hold of this precious life and truly living it, warts and all.
Likewise, until we truly love ourselves, not in any sentimental idea of love but with muscle, body, strength, honesty – without the pit of shame swallowing us up – humbly but without self-erasure – then we cannot truly know love at all--from another, or from whatever faith in a higher power we may hold. This is a central premise in self-compassion.
When we turn inwards with self-compassion--robustly, diligently, kindly--then somehow, from our conscientious efforts comes a sense of calming, soothing, healing, and a softening towards our own fragility, wounds, vulnerability, angst and dread. From this soothing comes something more deeply nourishing; a way of being that our life, our new-found wisdom, tries to direct us towards.
With self-compassion first, as a daily practice--though sometimes hard to manifest and maintain, then over time, as a way of life--we feel a stirring of something best described as deep hope: a rooted, anchored faith in life, a newfound capacity for genuine, muscular faith in oneself, and an opening towards a profound reverence for the nameless, hallowed ground dwelling of our lives.
Self-compassion grows the seed of inner strength that can rally us, even just a little, to live this day from the sense of ourselves as worthy, able, lovable, acceptable; self-compassion cultivates hope and trust in ourselves and in life, just for today, into tomorrow.
Self-compassion stirs real and genuine hope
As each generation, probably throughout history, has faced a crucial collective moment we perhaps are facing ours, now. I imagine throughout time humans as a group or society faced defining historical moments for their culture and generation. Humans have, every generation, had to grapple with finding what a meaningful hope looks and feels like and show what hope actually means for their collective struggle, whatever form it took, in order to give something to next generation that gave enough for their children and grandchildren a reason to keep grow up and keep trying, keep living.
So now, we must find ways to source from deep within, perhaps deeper than ever before, a sense of hope in today and a strong, muscular hope for the future. Hope is critical for mental well-being and our children are watching us. The teenagers of the pandemic were already asking of our society what is life for? Now, the question has become critical – what is the future we want because this time, it’s radically uncertain and it is today that we are creating it.
We have a collective task, a shared responsibility to buffer ourselves from hopelessness and a key, key ingredient for this, is the practice of self-compassion which can meet our feelings of despair, distress, angst, dread, hopelessness and say, “It’s ok. I know that’s such a painful feeling. I’m so sorry it’s so hard. Here – let’s take today one step at a time. You’ll get through it. Tomorrow is a new day.” Baby steps, kindness, validating the feelings, all of them, a wise kind best friend to ourselves, within - these are healing elements self-compassion practice offers us.
When we stir ourselves to hope, we can practice solidarity which must, in these times, mean something beyond a word. Hopelessness is an insidious road to despair and despair forecloses a sense of possibility in life (Solnit, 2016). Never more than now, do we need to, individually and collectively, find a sense of possibility in life if we are to keep up a sense of solid hope for the future and for the next generation as they live through this pandemic. Hope is not a luxury – it’s a bedrock necessity for getting out of bed.
Self-compassion gives us the tangible, very practical and mightily potent way to find hope stirring within and support ourselves to keep putting one foot in front of the other on those days when hope is a long-lost relative who went missing.
Self-compassion is a medicine for our world
It is said in some Buddhist teaching something I remember as, “the wise one walks in the room and everything changes but noone knows through what or who created the change.” The fruits of a deep inner self-compassion practice are sometimes noticed by people around us. They may not name the changes they perceive, but these changes nonetheless have a subtle influence on everything around and within us. Changes in others seem to happen, too – perhaps our eyes have changed, or perhaps there is quiet influence emanating outward from our own inner hard work to find greater compassion for ourselves. Regardless, we discover a different ‘me’ showing up in relationships, activities, work, choices, and sometimes, somehow, greater peace, a being at ease with oneself, settled kindly into one’s own messy humanity.
May Sarton (1973) in Journal of Solitude quotes from a letter a dear friend wrote to her about the significance of being a rigorous guardian of her well-being and the ‘self’ that she was, the person who wrote so many published poems, novels and journals that nurtured the hearts and lives of so, so many. Kot calls us today through Sarton’s personal journal to remember:
I want you to be aware of what you call your ‘steel,’ and what I call your wisdom, things you do, never forget that there is your ultimate wisdom that must keep you safe and whole….
(Sarton, M., 1973, Journal of Solitude, Norton & Co.,p.123).
This quote from her friend’s letter strikes me deeply as central to our task, as human beings, our task being to tend, fiercely and tenderly to our own unique, imprint of wisdom as ‘being wise’ and ‘becoming wise’ throughout our lives such that our legacy left, in those last breaths is a life that is at peace with itself. My aim and the guiding wisdom I’ve raised my children to hold onto is that a life worth living is one’s own “life made by hand” (Pinkola-Estes, 1996, p. 252) out of our own hard-won wisdom. I’ve worked hard to show them that on reflection, life is indeed worth living, and we all have the capacity to leave a legacy of the kernel of ‘hand-made wisdom’ personally forged, through our own struggles and joys.
I deeply believe in my bones that Koteliansky’s reminder is as true for each of us now as it was for May Sarton in the seventies. He calls her (and us) to a task of tending to our wise and precious being that remembers and lives from a knowing of our wholeness. For me, a practice cultivating a habit of self-compassion at every possible level in our minds, our hearts and thus shaping our lives into one lived from wisdom and compassion, is the key game-changer for our well-being in a very off kilter and indeed, frequently toxic society.
As a quote I noted a long time ago which is attributed to Krishnamurti, a revered philosopher in India says, “It is no measure of health to be adjusted to a profoundly sick society”. Perhaps more than ever, 2020 has revealed just how sick ‘western society’ and the collective human psyche has become and the impact on our planet is rising up with overwhelmingly stark evidence.
Let us thus heed May Sarton and her friend’s call to tend to remembering our wisdom thaht keeps us safe and whole by integrating self-compassion into our lives and thus for each other and our planet-home.
I invite you to continue a dive into some of the practices that Dr. Neff and Dr. Germer (2018) in their Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook have developed and distilled over time, to begin or deepen and continue your journey into a profoundly life changing relationship – the one you have with yourself.
Citations
Jung, C.G., M.D. (1960). The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Collected Works, volume 8, Bollingen Press, Series XX.
Neff, K., PhD & Germer, C., PhD. (2018). Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook. Guildford Press.
Pinkola-Estes, C. (1996). Women Who Run With Wolves. Ballantine Books.
Sarton, M. (1973). Journal of a Solitude, Norton & Company.