Simple Self-Empathy in a Challenging Moment
My students often say they have more difficulty with self-empathy than empathy for others. Of course, the limits of compassion you have with yourself impacts how much compassion you can express for others. Offering yourself presence and acceptance generates a sense of peace and coherence in you that others sense and benefit from through energetic connection and nervous system co-regulation. Self-empathy is the foundation from which your contributions flow.
What do we really mean by self-empathy? Self-empathy is the process of offering a warm, compassionate presence to your experience. It requires a willingness to pause and give challenging emotions and states your full attention as well as regular check-ins with your needs, intentions, thoughts, beliefs, and visions. For now, let’s look at the structure of pausing for self-empathy in a challenging moment.
Choose to give challenging moments your full attention.
When you are experiencing aversive emotions or reactive states, a strong impulse to seek relief will arise. If a bigger part of you knows that reactivity is just a habit and has no meaning, shifting focus by engaging in a satisfying or fun activity may be enough to offer you relief.
But if a larger part of you believes the thoughts and beliefs that are triggering and being triggered by the painful feelings, your full attention will be the most expedient path to relief.
Giving your full attention to a challenging moment requires sitting down in a supportive, quiet space and setting your intention to observe. Begin by naming as many body sensations and feelings as you can in a neutral way. Then name associated thoughts, “I am telling myself that…” If you are able to maintain the observer position, you will feel relief within a few minutes. The longer you consistently remain in the observer, the more relief you will feel.
Once you feel a sense of relief and expansiveness, look through the needs list and identify what the reactive thinking was attempting to care for. Name five ways that need is currently being met in your life. Here, the original trigger might return, and there might be a temptation to return to previous reactive thinking. This is a key moment to allow grief for the need not being met with your preferred strategy. You can do this simply by saying to yourself, “I feel sad that this need is not met by….”
Unless you have a consistent meditation practice, it will likely be very challenging to hold your attention in the observer position. In this case, writing or doing an audio recording of all we named above will support focus.
This practice can be as short or long as you want to or feel capable of doing. If you are surrounded by others, even three minutes of focus on a bathroom break can bring relief and self-connection.
Practice
Set your intention now to pause the next time a difficult feeling or reactive state arises. Imagine exactly where, and for how long, you will pause. Make sure that your plan is really doable, that there is a sense of ease and confidence rather pushing toward an ideal.