Self-Compassion and the Bottomless Pit of Self-Loathing

I recently watched the rock-climbing documentary Free Solo. You may have seen it. Essentially, it’s about a dude who, with his bare hands, decides to scale a 3,000-foot vertical granite rock formation, moving up through a complex system of cracks. Other climbers, other friends of his, have plummeted to their deaths doing this climb. His friends think he’s crazy. He’s doing this epic, extraordinary, dangerous climb with no ropes, all by himself, no support—that’s why they it a free solo. And the camera is spinning around this giant rock in Yosemite and he’s there holding onto this little nub.

And at one point they ask him, What is your inspiration for doing this? And he says, “I have a bottomless pit of self-loathing in me and nothing I do is ever good enough and that’s why I do these climbs.”

I noticed a lot people had the reaction to this movie of, “This guy is a latter-day explorer! He’s pushing the limits of human potential, he’s a super-person doing this incredible feat!” And I’m like, Maybe. But honestly, watching the movie, what I got out of it was like, These are the lengths we will go to avoid practicing self-compassion. In this guy’s mind, it’s like, OK, sheer wall of 3,000 feet of glass, complex crack system on the one hand; meeting my experience with a tender, non-judgmental awareness on the other. Hmm, what am I going to choose?

And he chooses the rock wall. It actually feels less risky and uncomfortable to him to do a death-defying 3,000-foot solo rock climb than to meet his experience with a tender and open-hearted awareness. It is that frightening in the culture.

I admit that at first, I felt kind of judgy of this guy. Like, Open your heart, man! Feel your feelings. And then I had to ask myself, Well, what about all the ways I avoid self-compassion? I, too, am part of this culture and was conditioned in this way. Lately, I have had quite a lot of family loss and difficulty. In the last year, my partner’s mom died unexpectedly, and my dad died after a two-year illness which involved multiple visits to the east coast to help out. Honestly, over these last couple years I have been indulging a lot in my own preferred extreme sport: catastrophic thinking. And this mode of thinking does have a quality of, “OK, if this happens, I’m gonna do this and then—Oh my God but what if this happens! Then I’m gonna get to this pitch then I’m gonna jump here.”

But the truth is, I feel sad. I feel powerless. I feel touched by the impermanence and fragility of life. And I feel afraid. And I would rather scale 3,000-feet of imaginary catastrophes than actually turn into my heart and feel it.

Another story. When Buddhism was starting to get some traction in the West and more and more practitioners were starting to explore mindfulness and meditation practices, a group of American and Western Buddhists had a conference and they invited the Dalai Lama. They had a Q & A and at one point, somebody raised their hand and they said, “A lot of us in the West who practice, our biggest struggle is self-hatred. As the world’s preeminent master of meditation, how would you recommend we work with self-hatred?” And the Dalai Lama had a one-on-one with his translator, like, I don’t really understand the question, they’re going back and forth, he’s asking questions. Then according to the story, there’s a moment when the Dalai Lama’s face changes—and he starts weeping. And he’s like, “Oh no. Self-hatred? That is a terrible mistake. We don’t have that in Tibet. This is a cultural problem and it’s even hard for me to wrap my head around how you guys could have gotten into a predicament like this.”

There are aspects we don’t necessarily think of as influenced or shaped by a culture. But one of the things a culture teaches us is how to relate to suffering. How do we respond when unease, discomfort and pain arise? And in America culture, we learn, “If you’re suffering, it’s probably your fault. You probably did something wrong and it’s your job to fix it by yourself and especially, don’t tell anyone about it. No one else has this problem and you better not let them know that you have it.”

So as a result, a lot of us have this secret torture chamber or inner dungeon in the consciousness where we prosecute our mistakes and try to change ourselves with shame. When you throw trauma in the picture, your body is endlessly looping and revisiting the experience of chronic suffering in activation, and then you have the inquisitor in the dungeon telling you it’s your fault and you’re alone—no one else is going through it.

Can you imagine a different cultural response? Suppose, just hypothetically, that you had a culture that said, “Oh, you’re suffering? Maybe it’s because you’re being failed by a system of dehumanizing value-extraction driven by a delusion of infinite material progress. Of course you feel messed up by that.”

Alternatively, you could have a culture that says, “Oh, I see you’re suffering. I know. We get it. A certain amount of pain, it’s kind of just built into our very existence. The pain of impermanence, sickness, aging, desiring, wanting, appetites. It’s actually not a mistake at all. It’s a sign you’re part of the fabric of life and this suffering itself is a passport to connection with all beings who are in this together with you. Man, that would be a very different experience.

Alas, that is not our culture. But we have the ability to cultivate in each of us the possibility of offering such a different response. That’s where self-compassion comes in.

The definition that I love for compassion, which I heard from the teacher Beth Sternlieb, goes, “When the loving heart meets suffering, and stays loving.” From that place, what arises out of this loving, caring, quality, is a wish to help, to alleviate the suffering, to respond as a friend.

Compassion, including compassion for ourselves, is a universal energy, capacity and potential, and even skill. We may have lost access to it, but it’s innate. It’s actually hardwired biologically. We can reawaken our responsiveness, our ability to offer compassion to our own experience with these practices of kind attention, kind words, kind touch, common humanity.

So self-compassion has three primary components. This comes from the work of Kristin Neff, who has studied the effects of self-compassion. Mindfulness, Kindness and Remembering our Common Humanity. It all starts with mindfulness: if we want to respond to our suffering with kindness, we have to know that we are suffering. Interestingly, we don’t always know, at least not consciously. That’s why we’re up climbing the rock wall, or going off in the mind, or doing all these other kinds of strategies. Sometimes it’s because the suffering is there and we’re not even aware of it. We don’t always see the self-criticism, the judgment, the lack of friendship, the persecution. We do it so often we think, Oh, that’s just reality. But in mindfulness practice, we get to see, how do we relate to our body, how do we relate to our mind, how do we relate to our heart when things are challenging?

There’s an incredible relief in discovering that just by tuning into a larger, more spacious, caring awareness, we begin to heal. Just that act of attunement, in and of itself, without judgment: taking a step back from the enthrallment to whatever is the content of the mind and looking, How am I relating to it? Whatever the content is, that simple act, that willingness itself, begins a transformation that is a kind of alchemy on the suffering.

If you’d like to explore these practices experientially, check out the guided meditations on the Watch & Listen page.

(Photo Credit: National Geographic Films)

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