Self-Compassion: The Jedi Skill We All Need
Discover why embracing kindness toward yourself might be the most powerful tool in your recovery journey
In my work, certain themes repeat themselves: grief, acceptance, community, and—almost every time—self-compassion.
As common as it is, it’s also one of the hardest things to understand and apply. We might be able to have compassion for others, but many people (including myself) struggle with having compassion for ourselves.
Before diving into tips for cultivating self-compassion, let’s take a step back and see how it all plays out. In movies or TV shows, there is often a callback to something discussed earlier in the story…let’s apply that here and recall a previous post about my inner critic. If you haven’t read it, you can do that by clicking below.
Everybody Sweats
If there’s one piece of me I could tune down from an 11 to a 4, it’s my inner critic. It’s loud, impossible to ignore, and it makes perfect sense in the moment. My inner critic is like that noise your smoke detector makes when the battery is low, but maybe 100 times louder. It chirps incessantly every 30 seconds, and you can’t ignore it. It’ll keep goin…
This real-world example shows how quickly we default to our inner critic. That voice that is so horrifically mean we can’t even say out loud what it says to us. It is a loud voice that dominates our minds. And no matter how much work you’ve done to challenge it, it still shows up. With that in mind, of course, doing something so radically opposite seems impossible.
If we think about characters, our inner critic is like Darth Vader. Dark, menacing, powerful and relentless. Darth Vader is a badass to the highest order. But who challenges that darkness, Yoda? Yoda, a small, old Jedi, stands up to the darkness to offer a different path. Trying to access self-compassion is like Yoda giving Darth Vader a tiny (but powerful) middle finger.
Self-compassion flies in the face of diet culture, perfectionism, and capitalism. Self-compassion is about pausing hatred toward ourselves and our bodies and instead asking kindest question possible:
“Am I doing the best I can with the tools I have right now?”
It’s not about the best possible outcome or doing it right. Instead, it's about understanding that, given what is going on right now, maybe this is the best we could have done, and that’s okay. Can we do better? Sure. Could we have done worse? Probably. But for right now, this is the best we could have done.
Kristen Neff is a person I find meaningful when it comes to self-compassion. One of the many things she talks about is how finding our common humanity is a powerful tool for self-compassion. Common humanity is how we connect with others when we struggle.
Our inner critic wants us to isolate ourselves and stay closed off from the world. It convinces us that sharing what we struggle with weakens us, especially for us dudes. So, instead of connecting with others, we struggle in silence.
But when we open up and share our stories, we find we are not alone. We see that others are experiencing the same thing we are. We are not broken, failures, or weak. When we can share what’s truly going on, we feel seen and understood, which is brave AF.
If there is one thing I wish for, people would stop seeing self-compassion through the lens of giving up. I wish we could see how self-compassion is the opposite of giving up. It’s diving deeper into our feelings and humanity, and it helps us grow into better humans, not just to ourselves but to others around us.
Self-compassion is not easy—it’s probably the more challenging road. It involves feeling emotions, and that is hard. But I think we can do hard things.
Imagine a life where self-compassion isn’t giving up; it’s a way to grow and connect more deeply. Let’s keep striving toward that.
How have you been doing with finding more self-compassion for yourself?
What tools do yo find most useful?
Are there times that self-compassion is more complicated to access?