[Part of a series, this essay continues our exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.]

Most of us who are more or less healthy have no problem extending compassion to — recognizing and engaging with the suffering of — others. Many of us, however, when it comes to our own suffering, struggle to offer compassion to ourselves.

Kristin Neff, in her book, Self-Compassion, writes that compassion “involves the recognition and clear seeing of suffering….feelings of kindness for people who are suffering….[and] recognizing our shared human condition.”¹ Self-compassion, then, asks us to be mindful — so we can recognize and clearly see our own suffering. It asks us to extend kindness towards ourselves so we might help ourselves alleviate our suffering. And it asks us to recognize and remember our shared human condition — our common humanity — which includes, but need not be defined by, pain and suffering.²

Consider for a moment the importance of Scott Peck’s idea of balancing — of disciplining our discipline — so that we might avoid an overly rigid, narrow, and impossible-to-maintain set of standards, and learn to relax into the prospect of not having to be perfect, accepting our full humanity, and accepting ourselves in all our beauty and blemish. This balancing is a manifestation of self-compassion, which means self-compassion can be an essential part of our self-discipline.

So, the next time you find yourself facing pain, suffering, or both, practice self-compassion.³ Any one of these three, in any order, can help. Each of them invites the others:

• Slow down and express care and kindness for yourself.
• Remember that pain and suffering are part of our common humanity. You’re not in it alone, even if it feels that way sometimes.
• Hold whatever comes up — sensations, thoughts, and emotions — in mindful awareness.⁴

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1. Kristin Neff, Self Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind, (William Morrow, 2011), 10. For some guided self-compassion practices, see her site: https://self-compassion.org/category/exercises/#exercises
2. Ibid. 41.
3. The language of pain and suffering can get a bit slippery. For the sake of this post, pain arises from difficult events and circumstances — we break a bone; we lose a loved one; we have a difficult argument, etc. Suffering arises from how we respond to the pain we experience. If we respond to the pain with anger, denial, or blame, we tend to suffer more (similar to the idea of dirty pain. If we respond to our pain with acceptance and understanding, we tend to suffer less (similar to clean pain).
4. Neff, Self-Compassion, 102–103.