Self Compassion is an ongoing practice

Over the past month or so, I’ve been talking about self-compassion,how it helped me and how I hope it can help others. Self-compassion is a practice,a practice that takes time and can feel odd to start with because it goesagainst most of what society wants us to focus on, a good example of a slowchange for me  was when it comes totrying to change the way I  talked to myself.For me I didn’t immediately go from having a strong inner critic to being ableto talk to myself in a way that reminded me of my good friends. This took agood amount of practice maybe even years and it is something I still work on tothis day but I wanted to share some resources that will be helpful to anyonewho is looking to start or dig deeper into their practices of self-compassion.

Self-compassion has mostly been developed by Kristin Neff(https://self-compassion.org/)who has two books available on the subject, her first and probably the bestintroduction to the subject of self-compassion which is  called Self Compassion: The Proven Power o f Being Kind to Yourself. This is also available as an audiobook which then guides you through a lot of the practices. Another way to access these toolswould be through the app Insight Timer (https://insighttimer.com/) which isavailable on the either the App Store or Google play for free and has a huge range of free guided meditations available. Kristin Neff’s Working with   Difficult Emotions in the Body which explores the Soften, Soothe, Allow technique is onethat I go back to often on difficult days. Another of my favourites is the Compassionate Friend guided meditation by Christopher Germer.

The most important thing about developing any practicethough it is to find what works for you, because if something is difficult for you that is going to add another layer of resistance. Don’t worry if something doesn’t work for you, give yourself permission to explore and find something that works for you or even play around and develop your own thing. I would love to know your thoughts over on Instagram.

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