What we can feel, we can heal…

You may like to listen to Chris Germer, clinical psychologist and lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and founding faculty member at the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, talking to Tami Simon about the power of self compassion at Soundstrue.com. Many voices, one journey

The discussion is about how to practice mindful self-compassion, which requires three things—to be aware, to know that we’re not alone, and to act with self-kindness. Chris Germer also talked about how people with chronic back pain can use the practice of mindful self-compassion, and how working with key principles such as “what we resist persists” and “what we can feel, we can heal” is leading to impressive results in the new research that’s being done in this area. He further talked about how he and Krisitn Neff found that mindfulness, which is a kind of balanced spacious awareness, adds a quality of equanimity to compassion training. Chris Germer referred how he worked with the underlying early shame to overcome anxiety with public speaking anxiety instead of targeting the anxiety. Finally, he discussed working with men and research findings done on self-compassion and veterans, which show that self-compassion is a very powerful factor on whether or not people develop post-traumatic stress disorder when they return home.

Extracts

‘When we practice mindfulness, it’s like holding a camera but you have to hold it steady. Sometimes the camera is just shaking. What does it take to stabilize a camera? What does it take to stabilize our hearts? That’s where compassion comes in. Compassion is more relational; it’s about sentient beings’.

‘…. there’s a cultural element to this. I’ve been teaching self-compassion all over the world and it seems to me that in countries, or parts of the country, where there’s a lot of competition where the sense of self is highly contingent on where you stand in the social hierarchy, in the pecking order. Then a person’s sense of self becomes unstable. It depends on how we’re doing. Self-compassion is more about having a quality of a secure base inside oneself and I believe that in cultures that are more collectivist and also stable, that people have a more stable sense of self’.

‘I think our sense about personal secure base is eroding and as a result, I think we just need more self-compassion. Mindfulness appears to be a perfect response to the fast pace of society and the fragmented attention spans that we have with electronic media. Compassion, in my view, is a healthy response to the ways our sense of self is eroding in this environment and also in increasingly competitive circumstances’.

‘One pathway is through physical touch. Another pathway is through language like I described but some people just don’t have that kind of language. Another pathway is behavioral… Self-compassion activates the mammalian care giving system. We all know what this is like. For example, if you have pain and somebody puts their arm around you and really loves you then inside you have a feeling like, “Ah.” They didn’t just do surgery on your lower back but your whole relationship to yourself and to your back changes. In other words, there’s a relaxing, there’s a letting go. This is what’s called regulating emotion through affiliation, through a sense of connection, through a sense of care’.