The Importance of Self Compassion
I went on my first silent meditation retreat about 10 years ago. Fairly new to meditating, I was nervous for many reasons, but my friend encouraged me to come along with her and I nervously accepted her challenge. I’m glad I did, because at this retreat I learned my first pivotal lesson on the importance of self-compassion.
When you get to the retreat center, the first thing you do is hand over your electronics like your phone, tablet, laptop, etc. This was *incredibly scary* for me. At the time, my dad was ill, and I made arrangements with my mom that she could call the retreat center if anything came up that I needed to know about. But the idea of disconnecting in this way made me feel like the ground was about to fall out from under me.
The other aspect of the silent retreat is the silence. I expected the meditation aspect, and it was enough to be worried about meditating for 5 days straight. But being in silence for many days with a large group of strangers was totally foreign to me. (I actually ended up loving the silence way more than I ever would have thought. I loved sitting in a room full of conscious self-aware meditating people, occupying my own thoughts but sharing the space. It’s amazing how supported and comforted I felt around these contemplative folks in silence.)
One unanticipated effect of the silence is that if you miss an instruction, you can’t turn to your neighbor and say “What time is lunch again?” The day began at 5:30 with a gong to wake us all up, and we started out with hot lemon water. We had our first morning sit and then went off for our morning break before the late morning sit. On day 3, I was going about my business during our morning break. I went back up to my cabin, brushed my teeth, changed for the day, and headed back down to the dojo (meditation room), perfectly in time–early in fact–for our 10:30 AM late morning sit.
…Or so I thought. When I arrived at the dojo door I entered and started diligently removing my shoes and placing my bag in the cubby, only to look up to see an entire room full of meditators deep in silent meditation. Panicked, I locked eyes with our meditation instructor, who slowly and deliberately waved his chin left to right, back and forth, a universal signal meaning “no.” His facial expression was entirely neutral, but he continued to wave his head left to right, indicating that I must leave the dojo, which meant returning only for the afternoon meditation.
The blood drained out of my face in humiliation and a wave of unanticipated shame washed over me. My head smacked violently with thoughts like “ I am bad,” “What is wrong with me?,” and “Why can’t I figure it out like everyone else?“ I bolted outside as if running from a demon, and noticing tears welling up behind my eyes, sprinted away from the dojo. When I finally felt far away enough I crumpled down on a wide flat rock and wept.
A strong reaction to a simple headshake, you might say, but by day 3 of the meditation retreat, I was feeling raw and vulnerable, with emotions hovering close to the surface (if you’ve ever been on a meditation retreat, you might relate). But this reaction, I did not expect. I sat there weeping, feeling like I was 5 years old getting yelled at by mommy for being bad. In that moment, I was that frightened 5 year old girl.
Hours later, I was finally able to have a one-on-one with the meditation teacher and share with him what had happened for me. This is when he told me about “planting the seed of self-compassion.” For him this was a neutral moment. I didn’t make it to the meditation on time and so he indicated, silently, through a headshake, that I had to come back later. Contrastingly for me, this moment was dripping with shame and I regressed to my 5 year old self.
By planting the seed of compassion with ourselves, he explained, we could be kind to ourselves. We all mess up sometimes. I listened to the instructions wrong and I showed up at the wrong time, and so I had to go and come back later. Neutral. This was not the way that I learned to deal with mistakes growing up, but boy was it refreshing.
The value of planting this seed of compassion is not only so that we are kinder to ourselves. When we are hard on ourselves and lack compassion for ourselves, this extends to how we treat and see others. So it’s likely that if I judge myself so harshly for making a mistake, that I do the same to others. How tender and important it is to learn to speak to ourselves with greater kindness so that this can extend to how we treat others. It’s so easy to go into criticism and judgment of others, when it's how we talk to ourselves and assume others think about us too.
This lesson in self-compassion has stayed with me a decade later and I imagine will forever. We must learn to be kind and compassionate with ourselves, and this extends to how we see and treat others. If we are critical and judgmental of ourselves, you can bet that we have a tendency to be harsh and critical of others and to come down on them when they don’t meet our high expectations.
I hope that by sharing it here with you, you are able to be even just a little bit more compassionate with yourself today. We all make mistakes, it’s normal, it’s part of life. It doesn’t mean anything about your value, who you are, and the kindness that you deserve.
Sending love and kindness to all <3
Becky
P.S. If having compassion for yourself has been difficult, one of our Root to Rise Therapists can help you cultivate this skill. Contact our Client Care Coordinator today to see which one of our therapists would be a good fit for you.
