To Practice Self-Compassion

Self-compassion has been on my mind these past few months. The stretch between February and April each year is always a hard one for me and my family; these are the months that my daughter, Eliana, lived. We grieved her from the day she was born: the life that we wanted for her and eventually her death. Each year, around this time, my husband and I experience waves of grief, which now feel compounded by the collective losses that we are all experiencing due to COVID-19. These experiences provide ripe opportunities for connection, with my husband, and now, with most everyone, regarding these losses. Yet this connection is not possible without self-compassion: the seed from which the flowers of meaningful and courageous connection bloom. Midway through our tough months, this past March, my husband asked me for a bit of grace in our day to day (“Like we gave each other when she was alive,” he reminded me). Knee-deep in life four years later I had forgotten what this felt like: how nurturing this practice could be for us as individuals and for our marriage. I remembered, then, that I could not give him the space that he needed without first giving it to myself.

Our ability to connect with others depends on our ability to first be compassionate with ourselves. Self-compassion researcher Kristin Neff says that to practice self-compassion is to be kind to ourselves, to recognize our shared human experience, and to engage with our thoughts and feelings with mindfulness. Neff writes: “Having compassion for oneself is really no different than having compassion for others.” Yet it is essential to our ability to do so. Brené Brown identifies two essential components to connecting with others – compassion and empathy – both of which require that we acknowledge (like Neff’s second element) our shared human experience. Brown writes that “compassion is possible for anyone who can accept the struggles that make us human – our fears, imperfections, losses and shame. We can only respond compassionately to someone telling her story if we have embraced our own story – shame and all. Compassion is not a virtue – it is a commitment.” I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t) (New York: Avery, 2007), xxv-xxvi (public library). Empathy, in turn, which Brown says is the “most powerful tool of compassion . . . is the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes – to understand what someone is experiencing and to reflect back that understanding.” Brown at xxv. But, as Brown observes in this short video, empathy is “vulnerable” because “in order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling.” Grounded in the practice of self-compassion, both empathy and compassion require that we turn inward before we turn outward.

“How did you get through?” Someone asked me this the other day regarding my relationship with my husband. “Gentleness and grace,” I responded, though it felt vague and unsatisfying. We lived moment to moment (in what felt like dog years) through the rollercoaster of her life in the NICU and after she died. When she was alive, I lived on adrenaline and hope, however fading, that she would live; my singular commitment to being present for my daughter meant that I could let everything else fall away. At home and at the hospital, my husband and I lived by being gentle with each other. Which meant that we ignored a lot of things that would otherwise annoy or cause conflict; we leaned in even when it felt hard (for example, checking in each day by sharing a high and a low moment or feeling of the day); we asked for and respected each other’s requests for space; we sat with each other as we cried or raged or zoned out. Gentleness came from the practice of giving each other grace to be; we tried to meet each other where we were that day without trying to fix or dismiss or ignore. Giving each other grace became our life preserver in the torrential storm that was our grieving, allowing us to ride its waves alone, together.

Through all of this, we could not be gentle with each other without first being gentle with ourselves by practicing self-compassion: giving ourselves the same grace that we gave each other to feel, to fall apart, to let go, to be. Self-compassion encourages me to turn inward, to listen, and to respond with understanding. And it is an ongoing, imperfect, practice, rooted, in many ways, to the process of grieving my daughter. I try to make space for and hold the hard emotions, those that feel antithetical to happiness, by allowing myself to feel sad or angry or afraid without trying to fix. I give myself permission to let go (not sweating the small stuff of sorts) and in doing so, acknowledge that my time and resources are finite, my abilities, limited. Finally, I try to name my vulnerabilities and the brokenness I find in the world. Acknowledging our own imperfections and failings (as well as general challenges in life) is to practice self-compassion (see Neff); we do not work towards perfection, but instead, towards growth, by accepting “who or what we actually are, our capacity and our limitations.” Brown at 196, 201-02. Through the ongoing practice of self-compassion, I believe, we each give ourselves the grace to be human: to make mistakes, to operate in a broken world, to hurt and be hurt. We forgive. We let go. We acknowledge that we are enough today. And, through this, we connect with each other.