Mindful Self-Compassion, Fall 2023
Week 8: December 19, 2023
“Embracing Your Life”
If you're looking for an ongoing drop-in self-compassion group, check out the Circles of Practice. These are free weekly groups that meet most days of the week, led by a certified MSCteacher. Joel leads the Thursday morning group (9am Pacific time). https://centerformsc.org/circles-of-practice-for-msc-graduates/
For a deeper dive, consider the Community of Deepening Practice, which explores all the MSC sessions in-depth, taking 8 months to go through the program. https://www.befriend-yourself.com
The CMSC website also has information on retreats and workshops, a database of teachers and programs worldwide, and information on how to become a teacher of MSC (https://centerformsc.org/teach-msc-latest/).
Cultivating Happiness
Over the past nine sessions, this course has focused primarily on negative experiences and on the potential of mindfulness and self-compassion to transform these into something positive. After all, compassion is a positive emotion.
However, life is a mixture of good and bad, bitter and sweet. This session focuses on how to get the most out of the positive experiences in our lives, and our positive qualities, so that we can enjoy all the moments of our lives more fully. It is also necessary to savor the good in our lives in order to sustain the energy and optimism required for compassion training.
As discussed in Session 3, the mind is evolutionarily predisposed to focus on problems. Remember that the default mode network in the brain is always searching for problems in the past and the future.
The psychological term for this tendency is the negativity bias (Rozin & Royzman, 2001). As Rick Hanson (2013, p. xxvi) has quipped, we are “Velcro for bad experiences and Teflon for good ones.”
Negative emotions, such as anger or fear, narrow our perceptual field—help us focus us on survival threats—and positive emotions such as love or joy broaden our awareness to notice new opportunities for food and shelter (Frederickson, 2004).
Helen Keller (1929/2000, p.25) wrote, “When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.”
Because of our negativity bias, we need to intentionally pay attention to positive experiences to accurately perceive our world and ourselves.
In this session, we will discuss 3 ways to correct the negativity bias:
Savoring
Gratitude
Self-appreciation
Savoring
Savoring is mindfulness of positive experience. It refers to recognizing pleasant experience, allowing oneself to be drawn into it, lingering with it, and letting it go.
Research indicates that this simple practice can greatly increase happiness and life satisfaction (see Bryant & Veroff, 2007; Quoidbach, Berry, Hansenne, & Mikolajczak, 2010).
Savoring (of positive memories) has also been shown to increase activity in brain areas (striatum and medial prefrontal cortex) associated with positive emotions and resiliency (Speer, Bhanji, & Delgado, 2014).
Two examples of savoring have already been introduced during the MSC retreat— the Sense and Savor Walk, and Savoring Food. In both of these practices, the instruction was to “give oneself permission” or “allow” oneself to enjoy the experience, rather than “trying” to enjoy oneself. The simple pleasure of lingering with positive sensations and emotions can be a radical discovery for hard-driving mindfulness and compassion practitioners.
Gratitude
Gratitude means appreciating the good things that life has given us. If we just focus on what we want but don’t have, we’ll remain in a negative state of mind. Ample research shows that gratitude practice enhances wellbeing (Dickens, 2017; Emmons & McCollough, 2004; Wood, Froh, & Geraghty, 2010).
Research shows:
Keeping a gratitude diary for two weeks produced sustained reductions in perceived stress (28 percent) and depression (16 percent) in health-care practitioners.
Two gratitude activities (counting blessings and gratitude letter writing) reduced the risk of depression in at-risk patients by 41 percent over a six- month period.
Counting blessings at the end of the day for 2 weeks reduces the impact of daily stress and incrases overall wellbeing (Krejtz et al, including Pawel Holas, MSC teacher, 2014)
Writing a letter of gratitude reduced feelings of hopelessness in 88 percent of suicidal inpatients and increased levels of optimism in 94 percent of them.
Gratitude is related to 23 percent lower levels of stress hormones (cortisol).
Practicing gratitude led to a 7-percent reduction in biomarkers of inflammation in patients with congestive heart failure.
Grateful people have 16 percent lower diastolic blood pressure and 10 percent lower systolic blood pressure compared to those less grateful.
Gratitude is related to a 10 percent improvement in sleep quality in patients with chronic pain, 76 percent of whom had insomnia, and 19 percent lower depression levels.
Retrieved February 5, 2019 from https://health.ucdavis.edu/welcome/features/2015- 2016/11/20151125_gratitude.html
Gratitude is a wisdom practice. One component of wisdom is understanding the complexity of a situation, or how every event arises interdependently with other events (Olendzki, 2012). When we practice gratitude, we are acknowledging the many factors, large and small, that contribute to our lives. We can say that gratitude is the texture of wisdom—how wisdom feels.
Gratitude is also a relational practice or a connection practice. The joy that arises from gratitude may be attributed, in part, to freedom from the illusion of separateness.
Self-Appreciation
Self-appreciation is the third practice for cultivating happiness in Week 10. The first two—savoring and gratitude—provide a foundation for self-appreciation. Appreciating our good qualities means that we have the capacity to savor them, and we need gratitude toward those who have helped us in order to appreciate our strengths without feeling vulnerable and alone.
We can be grateful for many things in our lives, large and small, but we are rarely grateful for positive qualities in ourselves. We tend to criticize ourselves and focus on our inadequacies, and take our good qualities for granted. This gives us a skewed perspective of who we are.
Ordinarily, when we receive a compliment, it bounces right off us, but when we receive the slightest negative feedback, we fixate on it. It feels uncomfortable to even think about what’s good about ourselves.
Why is it so hard to celebrate, or be grateful, for our good qualities?
Possible reasons are:
We don’t want to alienate friends by seeming to brag.
Good qualities are not problems that need to be fixed.
We’re afraid of falling off our pedestal.
It may cause jealousy
It makes us feel more alone
There are two insights that allow us to feel less separate and alone, and thereby more able to appreciate our good qualities:
Common humanity - Everyone has strengths and good qualities- acknowledging that I have some good qualities doesn't mean that I am superior to others. "I might be better at this and you are better at that."
Interdependent causality - Our strengths and good qualities are due, at least in part, to multiple factors outside ourselves, including the beneficial influence that others have had on us. By recognizing the contribution of others, we can continue to feel connected even as we recognize our own strengths.
Furthermore, if we apply the three components of self-compassion to our positive qualities (as well as our negative ones!), we can appreciate ourselves more fully.
Mindfulness - We need to be mindful of our good qualities rather than taking them for granted.
Self-kindness - We need to be kind to ourselves by expressing our appreciation.
Common humanity - We need to remember common humanity so we don’t feel separate from or superior to others.
Self-appreciation is not selfish—it provides the emotional buoyancy and self-confidence needed to give to others.