Conversations on Healing

Welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renown healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole, healed, and connected.

Shay Beider Wow. I am absolutely thrilled to introduce you to my guest today. She’s a hero of mine. Dr. Kristin Neff is a pioneer in the field of self-compassion. She’s a best-selling author of the book, “Self-Compassion” tuning into how we think about self-acceptance and self-care. Her newest book, which I absolutely adore “Fierce Self-Compassion” how women can harness kindness to speak up claim their power, and thrive, focuses largely on women and uncovering our ability to balance both the fierceness within and our tenderness. Dr. Neff offers an empirically supported eight-week training program called, “Mindful Self-Compassion” to participants all around the globe. Her beautiful passion for this work is inspired by her fierceness and her mama bear energy that we talk about in the conversation. I think you’ll enjoy hearing about how self-compassion can help you. There are so many documented positive health outcomes, including increased happiness, greater health, more gratitude, a decrease in depression, anxiety, stress, and fear. So I’m really delighted that you get to join us on this journey to have more compassion for yourself and for others. And with that, let’s get the conversation going. I want to start off, by thanking you for your body of work. I genuinely feel from the deepest part of my being that the work you’ve done in the world around self-compassion and now with your new book on fierce self-compassion is important and meaningful work to have out in the world. And so, as a way of introduction, I want to thank you for being who you are.

Dr. Kristin Neff Thank you. Appreciate that.

Shay And I was thinking about where I wanted to start, you know, I’ve just finished reading your latest book, “Fierce Self-Compassion” and I love it. Absolutely love it and so I want to kind of take our listeners through a journey because I think you do a wonderful job in the book of laying out a framework. And I also really love how you’ve interwoven exercises and practices throughout the book so that people can internalize the work and experience it in a very tangible way. You start the book by talking about this concept called caring force, and I thought it might be useful for you to share a little bit about what that means.

Kristin Right? So, the book is called fierce self-compassion, but it’s really about balancing fierce and tender self-compassion or balancing yin and yang. That’s kind of another analogy I use for these two energies. So, you know maybe they’ll help just to define a little bit what these are. So, compassion is concerned with the alleviation of suffering and sometimes to do that, we need to do it with more tenderness, like a lot of acceptance, gentleness, nurturing, but also to care for ourselves and alleviate or suffering sometimes we need to be fierce. We need to stand up for ourselves. We need to protect ourselves. Say no draw boundaries or motivate change, right? So even though we want to accept ourselves unconditionally, we don’t want to accept all our behaviors unconditionally or all our life circumstances unconditionally. So it’s really this dialectic of acceptance and change of yin and yang, but it’s important. And so the term caring force is what I think of when I think what happens when we’re embodying both energies simultaneously, so we’re being caring but that caring is very powerful and that caring force can be harnessed to do good in the world and also to do good for ourselves. And I felt like it got repetitive in the book, but it can’t be said often enough because we always get off balance and it’s sometimes, we need to go left. Sometimes we need to go right. You know, the important thing is that we always have both energies available to us in our hearts open and in all ways.

Shay Yeah. I was really struck by how you hold in these sort of counterpoints Yin-Yang counterpoints of tender self-compassion and fear self-compassion and how, particularly as women, cause you’ve largely written this book for women, not, I wouldn’t say exclusively, but largely. And how critically important it is for us to be able to measure out and meter out in which moments we need which type of self-compassion.

Kristin Yes. Yeah. So the problem is, I think everyone needs both yin and yang fierceness and tenderness. So too much fierceness without enough tenderness becomes hostility, aggression kind of endless striving, but too much tenderness without fierceness may become complacency, right? So we need both. Everyone needs both, but the problem is we have gendered these things. So male gender role socialization men aren’t allowed to be too tender, right? They’re called sissies or called names. And this harms men because it cuts them off from a really powerful source of emotional intelligence. I mean the tender part of self-compassion is what allows us to heal from our wounds, it’s incredibly important. And men don’t have full access to that because of the way they’ve been raised, but similarly, girls are raised not to be too fierce, not to get angry, to be nice. You know, it all it’s like meet other’s needs and not their own and that harms women because it cuts us off from our power source. It kind of maintains inequality where we’re always helping others and not necessarily ourselves. So, the reason I wrote it for women is just that the title for men would be like tender self-compassion: how men can harness the power of like acceptance to be emotionally intelligent, to heal from their wounds. It would just be slightly different; you know but everyone I really firmly believe needs both regardless of gender identity. And how would I express this to you, it’s going to be unique. Depends on you as an authentic individual.

Shay Yeah. I enjoyed you have various tests and things that people can take as they’re going through the book and there’s one to test your level of agency and communion. I was fascinated by, so it says, that the scale is adapted from this personal attributes questionnaire that it’s one of the common ways to measure masculinity and femininity in research. And when I took the test myself and I came out as androgynous, and kind of high in both in both communion and agency, a little higher in agency actually than communion. I thought so deeply about how we have made these, we’ve leaned towards these attributes are masculine and these are feminists and oh my goodness, all the harm we’ve done. And genderizing all of this stuff.

Kristin There’s no reason to gender it, right? These are human attributes that everyone needs to be healthy and well. That’s why it has to, it’s kind of almost a political act to say, “Hey, you know, this is important for everyone”. And I really, in some ways you might say historically, it’s helped men because the fact that men can be fierce and like they’re allowed to meet their own needs, it can be agentic those kinds of help them have more power and status in society. But emotionally, I think it’s really devastated, men. You know, the fact that men are cut off from their tender emotions. So it really is something that I hope as a society that we can look at and say, these are human things. They aren’t male versus female.

Shay Yeah. I certainly agree with that. It actually took me back many years ago. My degree was from UCLA and Women’s Studies. There’s so much in this book that reminded me, even people, you quoted, you had a beautiful quote, Bell Hooks, and others. And I thought, oh, this takes back to that earlier landscape of the systems that we create collectively that become oppressive by their very infrastructure and nature and then exactly what you just said how, of course, it creates harm for the group that’s in the oppressed position, but it also creates harm for the oppressor in a whole other series of ways.

Kristin Yes. I mean, that’s one of the things I’m hoping that the tools given in this book because again these aren’t just ideas. There are actual practices to harness these different energies. But I think the whole social justice movement, I mean, there’s feminism, but also anti-racism or fighting global warming or you know, health, wealth, and health inequality that we need fierceness. We need the ability to make a change, to stand up, to be brave, to be courageous, to be energized, to take on the big problems in the world. It’s very important. That needs to be aimed both inward and outward. You know, it’s not enough just to be healthy and well sitting on our cushion if the world’s going to hell in a handbasket. Right? So it’s really about trying to again, have these different tools available for us to do our work in the world. I think it’s especially important for people doing the work of social justice cause its hard work. They need the tenderness to help replenish the burnout, to help deal with the pain of taking on these mammoth tasks. It’s really hard, it’s draining, and it’s difficult. And fierceness is really the thing that energizes us and helps us be committed to doing good in the world. We need both.

Shay We do. And it’s outstanding how much you have emphasized social justice in this book and kind of interwoven it throughout. I felt that really came across and it’s lovely. How much kind of credence you’ve given to the importance of using this concept of and practice I should say of self-compassion in that, through that social justice lens.

Kristin Yes. Yeah. Well, it’s funny. Cause I heard in the opening chapter that I used to be much more focused on this. So my dissertation was in India about gender role hierarchy. And you know, I was really interested in justice issues of justice and equality and feminism and all these things. And then I got carried away by the self-compassion movement and there was so much work to be done and it was so fascinating, and you know, kind of breaking new ground and then it kind of hit me that, well, wait for second social justice equality, this is part of compassion. Or I look at Martin Luther King or Gandhi, these were compassion movements and that it was really so lovely. It was like a homecoming when I could integrate both, so it was really fun for me. I must say to be able to bring in history, politics, feminism, social justice into a kind of classic self-help book, but they do go together. They have to go together. If they don’t, that can be a problem. If it’s just about, you know, me and improving myself or helping myself, it’s actually especially, but you know politics, Donald Trump, Me Too Movement all of this that, you know, Black Lives Matter, all this is the background, the world we live in, the pandemic. And I kind of realized that I had to write this book, we need this now from my point of view anyway.

Shay Yeah. That’s so true. There’s another aspect that I really love you, you dedicate significant time in this book to looking at anger and how we deal with anger, what anger is, what the purpose and function of anger is. I want you to speak to that and I’m sure I’m going to have some follow-up questions, but I feel like it’s nice for you to introduce kind of the relationship in this book between anger and self-compassion and how you see that.

Kristin Yes. And I don’t write this as the anger expert, right? I actually write it as a person who struggles with anger. Kind of my wiring is, I’m quick to reactive anger. I get triggered and I get angry. So, part of this book was me coming to terms with it. And I always thought, well I’ll use my mindfulness and my compassion practice to work with it and try not to make it anyone else’s problem. And you know, there’s a bit of shame around it, but I could give myself compassion and I was able to work with it. And then it hit me that, wait for a second, this anger, the energy of the anger when it’s harnessed for good. This is a lot of who I am a lot of what is powered by the ability to achieve what I had in my life. I really started realizing that I love that book by Soraya Chemaly. She writes for, especially for the woman’s movement, you know, anger doesn’t get in the way anger is our way. All we have to do is own it. So I started realizing that the problem is especially women because of our socialization. We don’t have a healthy relationship with anger. We’re afraid of it, or other people are afraid of us, or we think it is ugly. Or we think we aren’t supposed to be that way. And because of that, that means when we get angry, it just kind of like spills out on other people. And we aren’t really able to harness it for good, but, you know, especially with all the stuff going on the world, I realized if we are angry, we’re asleep, there’s a lot to be angry about, but is that anger going to be destructive? This means it’s bitter, which means it’s focused on harming other people it’s personal, it causes harm or does that anger force for doing good for saying, I’m sorry, we are not going to take this anymore. I can stand up to injustice because anger makes us brave, suppresses the fear response. It energizes us. It lets people know themselves and others there’s a problem. There’s something that needs to happen is to protect her. You know, I liked the book, the metaphor I use is mama bear energy, right? And I think, and I like that because it’s, even though women aren’t allowed to be angry, they are allowed to be mama bear toward their children and we all know this, this volcanic force that can arise in us when we need to protect those we love. And so part of protecting ourselves and loving ourselves is also using mama bear to protect ourselves. Whether it’s the Me-Too Movement, right? Standing up to harassment, standing up to abuse, demanding equal treatment at work, and drawing boundaries with people. This is a really important aspect of self-compassion. So it’s really starting to get a healthier relationship with anger, stopping our judgment of it, which is a huge part of the problem. And then, you know, working with it. But again, I’m not saying I have it all figured out. It’s still a challenge for me. Other people are actually naturally better than it to me, but I did really realize that this is actually a good thing in my life, which is huge for me instead of being like my shameful secret. It’s like, actually, this is what makes me who I am. I love this part of myself. I just want to make sure it doesn’t harm anyone, you know? You can do that. It’s a lifelong journey, but it’s a good journey.

Shay Yeah. There, there was a kind of Eureka moment for me. And the way you were describing how to kind of work with anger in the book where you discussed that shift from making it personal to looking at kind of the, again, it’s like the larger lens of we don’t want to tolerate this in the world because that kind of behavior, it doesn’t just harm the individual. It harms our whole community. (It does. It does.) And I really understood that in a new way at in the way that you took it, you moved anger outside of the lens of the individual and kind of opened it and expanded it further. And I thought that was really lovely, the way that you addressed that.

Kristin Thank you. Thank you. Well, but I mean, if you look at what anger is, it really is a force of protection against harm, and justice, unfairness. It is transpersonal, you know, sometimes it’s personal, but it can be this larger force and it is powering a lot of these social justice movements and that’s actually a good thing. It’s not a bad thing, as long as it doesn’t get personal and doesn’t cause harm by demonizing anyone to humanizing anyone, leaving violence, anything like that. It’s important. We need to honor it as it’s a gift. It’s a tool as long as we honor properly and don’t suppress it, cause if we suppress it then we bottle it up, and then it explodes like a volcano and that’s not good either. Right?

Shay No, that’s not useful. I remember I read well maybe a year or so ago that they did some research. I think it was through functional MRIs to look at different emotions and how they activate different parts of the brain and the researcher who had done this work said he was quite surprised to see that anger seems to be the only emotion that they’ve been able to document so far. That’s really exclusively in one hemisphere that it lives basically entirely in the left hemisphere of the brain, from what they can tell. And I thought, wow, that is so interesting. And it also made me realize, okay, so when I feel anger, a very useful practice might be to try to bring online more right brain thinking. Right? Yeah. What do you think about that idea?

Kristin But yeah, no, I think, cause it really is about that and it is anger is a difficult one. I mean, it’s hard to work with because it’s very hard to have perspective, especially if you’re triggered. I’m pretty able to very quickly afterward say, I’m so sorry, try to repair, but at the moment it’s hard and it is a practice. And like I said, I’d be lying if I said I was an expert at it, but you can make a movement. And so this thing of intentionally calling up love, calling up, the you know, I don’t want to harm anyone and trying to remember, okay, I’m entitled to my anger because anger is saying this harm can’t continue, but you have to do it intentionally to bring in the other side. That’s what I call the caring force. Right? Intentionally bringing in the tenderness, the yin energy, the care, seeing the bigger picture, seeing the interconnectedness, making sure no one’s dehumanized. And so not to suppress the anger, but to integrate with it and work with it. Then what you have is something incredibly powerful.

Shay Mhm. And you do a lovely practice in the book. That’s about the integration of that anger kind of that self-integration. I love that. You know, I think one of the great things, hoping that people will take away from this conversation, that there are practical things you can do. You can do some of these practices and transform change your relationship to things, right?

Kristin They are practices. I mean, that self-compassion is ultimately a practice. It’s also an idea. And some people are naturally born with more than others will often depending on their early family history, but it’s something you absolutely can do. The research is very clear on that. You can practice it, you can build the skill, you can build the muscle. That’s my hope is that people will not only, it’s a good idea but actually start to intentionally practice it.

Shay And I also want to share just so that our listeners know that you teach a course called Mindful Self-Compassion and you might want to share a little bit about that.

Kristin Yeah. I developed with my colleague, Chris Germer. We developed a course called mindful self-compassion program. Is it’s an eight-week program in structure. It looks kind of like mindfulness-based stress-reduction or a lot of these eight-week programs. So the normal course is eight weeks, two and a half hours a week. We’ve got a lot of the practices in my book are drawn from that program. Sometimes they’re tailored a little bit to really focus on the fear side of compassion, but you can take this online. It’s taught all over the world. I think every place except Antarctica, although there are two continents now. What’s exciting is because the basic program has been empirically supported and it’s been well established is we are creating adaptations. So for instance, I just published an adaptation much shorter, six one-hour sessions for healthcare professionals that really helps them reduce burnout, right? This kind of you is replenishing your own battery through self-compassion. We have programs for teenagers. We have programs for parents, for couples. So the basic concept and practices of self-compassion are now being, you might say tailored for particular types of suffering by compassion by definition is a way to try to help alleviate suffering to help ourselves. And so when people share like a certain type of thing they’re working on whether it’s parenting or it’s going through the teenage years or being a parent of a special needs kid, et cetera. It helps to get in a group to practice together and that’s really exciting.

Shay Yeah. I think that’s so great for our listeners to know that again, this is a way they could deepen their self-compassion practices and it’s lovely that you’ve been able now to customize it for a different audience.

Kristin Okay. Chris Germer and I founded a non-profit called the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion. You can also Google them or get to them through my website that has a lot of online training. Now that’s one good thing about the pandemic is everything moved online, but it’s enabled us to reach a lot more people than before when we are mainly in person.

Shay That is great. You reminded me of something you shared in the book. It was from a meditation teacher that you had studied with where he, I believe the equation was suffering equals pain times resistance.

Kristin Yes. Shinzen Young. I saw some retreats with him. He’s well known for that quote, which really talks about in this case, I’m using suffering more generally, but he’s using it specifically to talk about kind of add-on suffering. I mean there’s a pain in life. There’s always gonna be pain or human beings. We make mistakes, we get old, stuff happens, but the more we resist it at the moment, usually the more we amplify our suffering. So it’s kind of interesting because mindfulness is really at the core of self-compassion, this ability to open to what it is and not resist the fact that it is happening. I think some people get confused because I accept the fact that I’m hurt or a situation is difficult. They sometimes confuse that with complacency, that non-resistance means I’ve accept my situation. You don’t have to accept your situation. You need to, first of all, you need to open to the fact that the situation is there, people that put their heads in the sands for instance, about racism, they aren’t being mindful. They aren’t aware that it’s happening. So, accepting that racism exists doesn’t mean you’re aren’t gonna do anything about it, quite the opposite, right? What it means is that you actually acknowledge that it’s there and you do what you can to change it. So, acceptance is those at the moment but change is what we do in terms of trying to shape future moments. And we don’t have control because it is the illusion of control, but we try our best. Of course, we do because we care.

Shay Yeah. I think that’s a very important point to clarify. So this is not about passivity. This form of acceptance is not passive.

Kristin No, it’s just accepting that this is what’s happening and we need to do that in order to change it. Right. You know, Carl Rogers talked about that. The curious paradox is the more I accept myself, the more I can change. So you have to start with accepting that this is happening. This is true. And then you do what you can to try to better it.

Shay Yeah. And that also takes me to, you share in the book that there really was this impetus for writing this book that was quite specific, that was out of a story of great harm, that came from a community that you were involved in. And I know you’ve changed some of the details in terms of how you presented it, but I’d like to give you an opportunity to share kind of the impetus and what made you want to tell this tale.

Kristin Yeah. Well, so it was part of the Me-Too movement, right? So this is all very current. I mean, we aren’t talking about me too movement as much, but we’re still in it. Right, so what had happened is there was a community. I was supporting a center that taught autistic kids cause my son’s autistic. And it turned out that, the man running the center was a predator. He was like sleeping with everyone, including someone who was very young, who had introduced to the center. She was almost like a daughter to me. And what had happened is when it all came out, I access my anger very clearly. I was enraged. I was like really committed to stopping the harm and speaking up and kind of dealing with it, I started seeing how some of our gender socialization in the past has led to why haven’t we spoken up in the past? Well, a lot of that is because we aren’t supposed to rock the boat. It was doing good work in the world. We don’t want anyone to get upset. We don’t want them to harm anyone. Some fear of speaking up. Also, fear of being judged. I mean, all of these things have come into play as part of our gender role socialization. I really saw them occurring. And kind of, I saw my role as A- first of all, being committed to speaking up and not letting the harm continue. It would have been easier just to like, oh, well, you know, let’s just not think about that, but I wasn’t going to do that. Right? So commitment to reducing harm, helping the people involved really get in touch with their anger. For some people that was easy, but for some of them like the woman who I was closest to, she couldn’t get in touch with their anger. And so kind of helping her get in touch with their fierce mama bear, self-protective energy was very important and just kind of understand how for so long even, I didn’t see it for so long. What happens? That means we don’t, we are able to see it. A part of it is because A that’s just the way men are, you know, accepting that, which shouldn’t be accepted, which hopefully is starting to change, but it was still in place. And almost being too yin without enough yang, you want to see the best in people. This man was doing good in the world. He was helping a lot of people in emphasizing that to the point kind of shutting, not really seeing some signs, I should have seen that this isn’t quite right. So it was really the experience of that that inspired me to write this book. And I really realized that women in particular, at this moment of history need to start rocking the boat. Things haven’t been working, we need to make a change, and this is something we can actually, this is the cool thing. Mama bear energy is actually feminine energy. I mean it’s not, man and woman can access it, but we have it. We have a metaphor for it, which woman understands, which is our mama bear energy or call your Durga. There’s a lot in mythology, we know it’s there and it’s allowed to come out and things like protecting our children. So this is a way for us to say, you know, I’m also going to harness this energy to protect myself. Hmm.

Shay You also share a story in the book about your son, Rowan when he was young and how you had a moment where that mama bear energy came out in a really strong way for you. I don’t know if you want to share a little bit of that story and kind of how you’ve come to learn to work with the mama bear energy, so can make it useful in your life.

Kristin Yeah. I think I have a couple of mama bear stories with Rowan cause you want to see mama bear energy. If you do anything to my son, that mama bear-like, really scary energy. Yeah. So, well I actually opened the book with the story being at a bird show and a woman was like aggressive, not verbally aggressive, but like gave my son a look cause he was being disruptive. And you know, kind of the judgmentalism since people don’t know he’s autistic. I called her a name in front of my son, which really wasn’t good to do, but you know, I’m only human. It came up. Even though I wasn’t mindfulness teacher yet but slipped out and we started getting kind of angry and yelling at each other in this bird show. And it was actually my mindfulness practice that just stopped me and allowed me to deescalate. And I was, wow, Kristin, you’re really out of control here, we need to de-escalate and leave. The story is that you know, for many years I kind of thought, that was like a shameful part of myself that part that got so angry. And then I started reconceptualizing it and I started saying, well, wait a second that’s beautiful. This part of you that comes up and will literally, I would lose my life for my child. I would do anything that protective energy is it’s something to be it’s a superpower. It’s something that, we need to bend down, and give our thanks to this energy that we don’t want to run them up. We don’t want it to harm other people. And obviously, in an ideal world, I wouldn’t have called her a name, it’s not that part wasn’t good. But the energy itself, we’ve kind of just judged it when in fact that powerful rising of protection is a beautiful face of love. And you know, we need to work with it. We don’t want to shut it down. We don’t want to judge it. We want to harness it. Just like a, like a bucking stallion. You know we want to ride that horse. We don’t want to just shut it up in a barn. So, cause then it you know, it’s actually a beautiful thing, and that’s really what led me to write this book. It was a lot my own journey coming to honor this part in myself that I had previously thought was kind of maybe not such a good thing.

Shay You know, it’s so fascinating. I got to witness a similar type of a moment where I was at an event. It was in like a public garden basically, but they had this classroom, and we all came into this classroom to learn like a little lecture that they were going to offer. And a mom came in and I could see right away that her son had autism, cause I’m in this domain, this is the work that I do. So, I recognized, but there was another woman in the front who didn’t recognize. And she started getting upset and she became very critical of the mom and was like, why can’t you get your son under control and started being very harsh and judgmental and the mom stood up and she got very clear with the other woman and said, you know, she actually just named it. She said, my son, has autism. He’s not out of control. He’s not doing anything wrong. This is who he is. And she just sorts of like very fiercely responded. And I felt so allied with her at that moment. And I was like, you go because it was really a form of ignorance is what was happening. The other person, again, she wasn’t trying to be harmful either. It was, it was a veil of ignorance. She didn’t understand what the larger picture and dynamic were. And went very quickly to judgment.

Kristin Yeah. And that’s what anger can do for us. Or that fierceness. It could conspiracy to speak up, speak our truth, draw our boundaries, to say I’m sorry, that’s not okay. You know, let me, we don’t want it to harm other people so it can, yeah. We also have to try to get imbalanced. So we’re going to get off balance and then you apologize, we just try again. But the impulse is actually an impulse of love. So when we reframe it, it makes a big difference.

Shay Yeah. And I love how, when we do fall off balance, then what you’ve described, I think so beautifully is then yes, we go back. Yes. We make amends. Of course, we do that. And we also go to self-compassion, I’m a human. I sometimes make mistakes. I sometimes do things in a way. I really wish I hadn’t and I have the ability to both acknowledge that, to those that I’ve hurt and also provide tenderness to myself.

Kristin As well. Yeah. So yeah, it’s a constant, it’s not a destination. We don’t get anywhere. It’s really a process as a way of being. But after a while, so that was my last chapter is called “Becoming a Compassionate Mess” because, after a while, you aren’t trying to be a mess. You know, you always tried the best you can that you realize I’m a mess. I’ll always be a mess because I’m human. Human life isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being a mess, but can I hold that mess with compassion? And that actually becomes your goal. It’s not so much where you get to, but how you relate to what’s happening, that should go. And that actually believe it or not is an achievable goal. You will not be a mess, but you can be a compassionate mess. So that’s, that’s really where I focus now.

Shay And that’s so related to mindfulness itself, right because it’s about the holding it’s about them being present in the, now it’s not about an end goal. It’s about, can I just hold presence right here right now? Yes.

Kristin Right. Yeah. And so we hold presence right here and right now. I think sometimes people mistake that to mean that therefore there’s no movement is activity, right? So, it’s this paradox and the whole thing is a non-dualism paradox, right? So we’re present with what is at the same time that life is happening. So, we’re moving through life and we’re trying to shape it as much as we can toward alleviating suffering and bringing more love and care into the world. We don’t have total control, but it’s not just about acceptance because that wouldn’t be good either that leads to complacency and that actually causes harm. So, it’s this balance, this dance that we’re constantly doing and that’s okay.

Shay It is okay. And you know, the other piece that made me think of is the Peace Movement cause, for years, people have really denigrated I think the beauty of that movement by saying, oh, it’s just passive. You know, and to me at its core, it’s actually entirely the antithesis of that. It is an embodiment of fierce compassion.

Kristin Absolute, nonviolence. So Martin Luther King, Gandhi, are fierce self-compassion or compassion movements. You don’t even need the self in their fierce compassion movements. Right. And some of actually the most effective social justice movements in history have come from a place of compassion. So, we just don’t want it to be, things get out of balance and things fade away, but nothing’s really new in my book. I’m maybe just packaging it a little bit differently, but this is what Martin Luther King talked about. This is what Gandhi talked about. It’s also maybe just applying it a little bit more to also ourselves, but it’s really, we’re all part of this larger whole it’s just including ourselves in this circle.

Shay Yeah. There were also, I wanted to share because there were some linkages to health outcomes that I thought were really interesting. So, you share in the book, how people who are more self-compassionate tend to be happier, more hopeful, optimistic, satisfied with their lives, grateful for what they have. They tend to be less anxious, depressed, stressed, fearful. They are less likely to attempt suicide or abuse, drugs, and alcohol. So why do you think that self-compassion is also linked to so many of these positive health outcomes?

Kristin Yeah, and it’s a little bit unusual and that’s because, so again, by definition, compassion is aimed at suffering, right? So, where we hold our pain, which means it tends to reduce that pain, right? So, we, for instance, instead of fighting ourselves or judging ourselves, because we failed we’re supportive, which means we’re less depressed, less anxious, et cetera. But even though it’s aimed at suffering and pain, it actually feels good. Compassion is actually a positive emotion when we feel kindness when we feel mindful and present when we feel connected to others. So, it’s a way of generating positive emotion not to cover up or sugarcoat negative experiences, but to hold those negative experiences. So we’re generating the positive at the same time that we’re decreasing the negative. And so, it’s kind of like an alchemy, you know, it transforms things in a way that’s incredibly powerful and it also affects the nervous system, right? So usually, the self-criticism the judgment that’s part of sympathetic nervous system response, fight-flight, or freeze like cortisol, a lot of negative health outcomes, like high blood pressure are linked to sympathetic activity. Care, which is what we’re bringing to ourselves, cares linked to parasympathetic activity. Things like heart rate variability oxytocin help us calm down. So we know self-compassion is linked to better immune function, right? Because the more stable and peaceful your mind is the same, it follows with your body. So, what is linked fewer holds and aches and pains, things, just physical symptoms because of our minds in a better place, so I’m sure you talk about that a lot on your show, but of course, the mind and the body are connected and the research supports that.

Shay Definitely. And also I thought an important point that you shared is that the research also shows that women tend to be more compassionate towards others and actually have lower self-compassion scores.

Kristin Right? Which, which some people find surprising because, first of all, if you come to one of my workshops, 85% of the people are women because compassion is part of the female gender role. And I think men feel a little more uncomfortable with it. But for women, it’s part of the female gender role, compassion for others, right? And women have definitely in all the research, pretty substantially have higher levels of compassion towards others than men do because they’re really raised for it. Right? But they have less self-compassion than men because they’re socialized to be self-sacrificing. They don’t feel as entitled to meet their own needs as men. So that means the discrepancy between how women treat themselves and others is larger than it is for men. The good news about this, though, you might say, and the reason that I write about this in my book, the woman is compassion experts, we’ve been trained. We know how to use our voice. We know what to say. We know how to be supportive; we know how to help and so in a way we kind of understand the value of compassion. You know, we aren’t afraid of compassion. So, in some ways, it’s easier for us to develop self-compassion once we decide to do it because we have all these tools at the ready, we just have to make a U-turn and use them with ourselves. For men who maybe haven’t had that socialization, it may be a little bit like they may have a little less understanding of what to do. I mean, these days, I don’t want to reify these. I mean, there are lots of individual differences and this isn’t about actual gender. It’s just about socialization and people are taught different things, different things are emphasized. So, it’s hard as woman, but it also, ultimately, if women can harness it and use compassion to help themselves, they’re more skilled. You might say, they know how to use their carpenter craft. He just has to be willing to fix her own table.

Shay Right. Well, as a woman and a mother, how would you describe, and you talk about this in different points in the book, how would you describe what your son has taught you about Self-compassion? What have you learned through that relationship?

Kristin Yeah, so, I mean, I talk a lot about my son. He knows I do. He’s okay with it, but he’s really been my largest teacher. You know, from the very beginning, when we first got his diagnosis and we think, thank God I had about seven years of self-compassion practice under my belt, by the time he got diagnosed. So what I learned was, the more I could, first of all, allow myself to feel what I felt authentically, including, you have feelings of like disappointment. It’s not the plan you signed up for, you had a certain vision of what your life with your child is going to be like, and it stopped that vision. So, it helped me hold the grief of that to accept, to not judge myself for feeling that way. The more I could open to myself, I found the more I could open to him, right. The more I could kind of accept, this is hard for me, the more I kind of allowed myself open to him. Then I’ll tell you what he really taught me kind of on a very concrete level is how the neuron system works, believe it or not. So one of the things that kill me about people who think that some people think self-compassion is selfish. It’s not, self-compassion is a gift to others because of the way the brain, the human brain is designed. The brain is just, we have mirror neurons whose whole function is to feel the emotions of others and autistic kids. Some people argue that they don’t have very good empathy skills. It’s actually not true for many of them. They have difficulty perspective-taking like using mental theory and what must that person be thinking. But they’re very sensitive to the emotions of others. And in fact, that’s part of the reason they withdraw because they’re so sensitive. So my son and I were very bonded. He was really tied into my emotions and I was very tied into his emotions, but everyone is not just your son. I mean, this is the way the human brain works. And what I started to see through him is when he would have tantrums or when, you know, especially when he was younger, when you had a really hard time, how I related to myself affected him. So if I got angry at myself or I got really frustrated or I’m so stupid, I can’t wait. You know, if I did any of that stuff, if internally the mind state I had was one of frustration or stressor, self-judgment, his tangents would get worse, right? The more I could give myself compassion I feel overwhelmed. This is so hard for me right now, his tangents would get decreased. So just we, our emotions affect each other. And so what we cultivate insight, every single person we come into contact with is coming into contact with someone who is either self-compassionate, loving, kind, supportive, or self-critical judgmental full of shame. You’re carrying that around. And everyone you touch is reading that through their rear neurons. It’s not verbal. It just happens. That’s the way the brain works. And so, I just I think any parent, regardless of the kids, if they’re autistic or not, I learned how to drive. And I would find that when I would get stressed about him doing something, he would get more stress. You could feel it. But if I gave myself compassion for the stress, I was feeling that will calm me down and didn’t trigger him. So, this is, I think we know this as parents. So really the more self-compassionate you are in so many ways, it helps you that helps people mirror neurons because they read it. It also helps resource you. It helps you suffer less from burnout, so you have more resources to give. So, it really is a gift to others more self-compassionate you are.

Shay Yeah. I think I’m so glad that you shared that and that story because it’s fast. This has been one of the things I’ve been really playing with as of late. I have in a way the good fortune; I have someone in my life who can be really reactive but there’s someone I still want in my life. And I’ve noticed if I just fully settle my nervous system and I stay really calm that their reactivity changes dramatically.

Kristin Yes. We affect people. Absolutely. They affect us and we affect them. And so, you know, and you can say something like try to stay really calm and maybe you’re able to, and more power to you. But I know for someone like me, it’s actually hard to stay really calm. But if I say this is so hard for me, oh, I feel so upset. Then that’s the way I calm down. You actually can calm yourself down through mindfulness, kind of accepting what is, you can also calm yourself down too. Compassion, you know, caring about the fact that it’s so hard, put your hands on your heart, giving yourself some warmth and tenderness that also calms you down. And so, it really is a form of emotion regulation and it helps other people without a doubt.

Shay Yeah. And I love how you there, how you put your hands on your heart and you’re talking about that in the book as well. How touch can also be a way touching our own body can be a way to help us to, you know, be able to even breathing you talk about that all the different ways that we can help ourselves to love ourselves.

Kristin That’s just hugely important. One of the main techniques we teach for self-compassion because, you know, we evolved as human beings through the touch is a signal of care. The first two years of life babies don’t have it really. They don’t have any communication skills. There’s some tone of voice and stuff and gaze, but touch is really the primary way we communicate love and care to our infants. So we’re designed that way. You know, the skin is designed that way to convey these emotions. So sometimes your head can’t go there because it’s twofold the story of how you failed, or the difficulty of the situation, you touch your body, and you’re going directly to your physiology and your nervous system. And that’s why it’s probably so the primary way I practice self-compassionate it goes straight to the point.

Shay Yeah, that’s great. I love that. It goes straight to the point. Well, I want to ask you, Christin, cause we ask all of our guests to share what you think healing is. What does it mean to you? What does it mean to heal?

Kristin Yeah, so, yeah, again, I would probably move it away from an outcome to a process, right. So instead of healing be okay, I’m getting better and like focus on the end goal. Am I getting better or not? Am I healing from this? Whether it’s an emotional wound or a physical wound. I would really say it’s a process. Healing is a process. Healing is a way of holding, being with the process of life as it’s unfolding. Right? And so, again, you know, I’m kind of a one-trick pony holding it with compassion. Sometimes I say very simply, what is compassion? The ability to hold pain with love, I might say, what is healing? It’s the ability to hold pain with love, you know, and as we do hold our pain with love, again, whether that’s physical or emotional healing does start to occur, but it may not look exactly like we think it’s supposed to look. It’s really also a way of being humble because who is way to say how it’s supposed to look, you know, we don’t have the big picture of like what’s ultimately and the wellbeing of ourselves or the world around us. So, kind of having that humility and just trying to hold it all with love and saying, okay, this is how it is. And I’m here for myself. How can I support myself by taking action if you can? But when you give up that illusion of control, which is just giving up control, it’s an illusion. Anyway, you never had it. When you give up the illusion of control and open your heart and just say, okay, I’ll try to do my best. And I’ll be here with myself. To me, that’s what happens with healing.

Shay Lovely. That that process piece is something that doing this podcast has really taught me that in some way, every guest through their answer has in some way communicated that it is a process. Even though they’ve maybe not used the word you used, you almost classically like a researcher, would you very quickly saw the framework and it’s more organic in terms of how they express it, but they’re very clearly communicating that it is a process.

Kristin It is a process. Not a destination. It’s not a goal. It’s a way of being on the journey.

Shay Yeah. There’s a lot to learn from that. I’m, I’m learning a lot about healing by having these conversations. So we wanted to end with kind of a quick fun lightning round with you, where I just ask you a few different questions and you can answer them however it feels authentic to you. So the first one is which book or podcast profoundly impacted you in your life? Is there one you want to share?

Kristin Lately I’ve been into Bell Hooks, You know? I just kind of discovered her recently while writing the book, actually someone said you should read some Bell Hooks. I didn’t take those courses. Women’s studies. I cried after reading her books, I was like, all these threads. She brought together not only feminism and the experience of being a black woman, but love, and she’s a Buddhist. And like, all these threads just came together to me. I would say where recently that’s a lot of books have had a huge impact on me, but in terms of recent books I read, she’s just, she’s brilliant. And I’m hoping to meet her someday. Yes.

Beider Yeah. Do you have a favorite Ted Talk?

Kristin I am so funny. I showed this to one of my class. I show a lot of Ted talks. I teach a undergraduate class. I love Jill Bolte Taylor’s. (I love her.) I’ve seen it probably 50 times. I enjoy it every time. I just love the way she talks about the bluff, the love, and the interconnection. Yeah. I have a lot of favorite ones, but that one’s up there. Yeah.

Shay Yeah. It’s so moving and her story itself is so moving and how she’s dealt with it.

Kristin And I love her delivery. She’s like Midwestern or talking about stuff that would sound like being on an Aspen trip. Do you know? I love it. She’s great.

Shay Good combination. Yes. Wonderful scientist. Okay. This one almost seems funny because I could ask you about your favorite wellness hack. I feel like it would be of course self-compassion, but I’ll ask what’s your favorite wellness hack?

Kristin In addition to self-compassion and wellness in addition self-compassion or touch? Well, it’s touch. Cause it was kind of the way. I mean, it’s part of self-compassion, but it’s more than self-compassion. So, for instance like I think getting massages is really important just to have that touch. I think touch is, you know, I have cats cuddles me. I think touch in terms of a hack it’s it helps heal in so many different ways that communicate. Yeah. So, it can be used for self-compassion can also be used for fierce self-compassion. I mean, touch is an amazing thing. So maybe I’ll choose that one.

Shay I think that’s a great choice. I’m definitely a fan of touch with integrative touch for kids. How could I not be? All right. This one’s fun too. So if you could have lunch with anyone past or present, who would it be and what would you want to know?

Kristin Wow. That’s a good one, so I’m going to say, and I actually have met her for tea once, but only once. And I want to again with Gloria Steinem, such a hero. I mean she just single-handedly made such a big team. I had the privilege of meeting her for tea. It was about 10 years ago, and I would love to talk to her now, what does she make of the Me-Too movement? What does she make of the social justice movement? Because I know she’s a real activist. I would just, she’s gotten 10 years of wisdom. I just love Gloria. If you’re out there, please invite me over. That’s right. Yeah. She’s one of these, she’s still around and just has so much wisdom and seen so much, I would just love to understand her perspective and her wisdom of what’s happening, which also particularly for women, but for whatever reason, my life has led me to really be interested in women, particularly what’s happening for women at this particular moment of history, because I feel like we’re at some shifting points, some tipping point women compared to, all the time before I think we’ve already gone over that tipping point. We aren’t going to go back to where things were before, but something has shifted an energetic level. It sounds woo woo. But I’m just going to say it because every woman I know says can understand what I’m talking about. Something has shifted for women and things are going to be different from this point forward, you know, in general, I would love to ask Gloria, what do you think about that? What is that? Where are we going? What would you like us to do? Yeah. It’s a great time to be a woman. It’s interesting, but we still have a lot of work to do. I mean, our fight is not over. We haven’t achieved equality in many, many ways. yeah.

Shay And Kristin, when I asked you at the beginning of this conversation, you know, what was really important to you? What intention felt of high importance or great importance in our dialogue, you obviously shared about, you know, spreading the word of self-compassion and what that is and what that body of work is. But you also said empowering women, this is a huge piece of who you are and what I think it sounds like you really value in life. And so, I want to kind of in closing ask if there’s any other parting wisdom that you want to share around that empowerment of women.

Kristin Yeah. And cause, you know, western woman we’ve made a lot of gains. We aren’t equal yet. There’s still a lot of power and equality, but if you look around the world, I mean the position of women around the world is still really pretty horrific. And gender is actually the first, one of the very first categories. People, kids even learn, you know, well even before they know what race they are, or even just these other things you usually know by several months in, they know the difference between men and women. So the fact that this organizing principle is so entrenched, so embedded, and the fact that because of our history, one of these categories has given power, assumed power and competence and the other is not, it’s a real problem, right? And part of me intuitively thinks that it’s almost like the core of the first form of oppression and that if we ever really want to live in a world, that’s free of oppression, including what we’re doing to our planet, we have to deal with this gender issue. We have to really learn to value yin and yang equally and to honor them both and to harness them both and to really focus on their integration. And again, it’s not just okay to do it enough to do in our own lives or even in our own society. But this is a global issue with global consequences. I think in some ways, global warming stems from this unbridled yang, without yin this using an exploding dominating. So I it’s a big task. It’s a big goal at one person at a time. Something inside me is just really calling to me and saying, this is where I should be focusing my energy, which is why I am focusing on this.

Shay Good for you for listening to that. And I also feel like, we’re in a very interesting moment where in many ways, gender itself is being completely redefined. I mean, I have a daughter who’s just about to be 13, who, you know, she’s got kids that are transgender, she’s got kids of all sexual orientation. She’s got kids who define themselves in a number of ways that when I was a child, we didn’t have language for. It’s extraordinary, right? How that’s happening at the same time.

Kristin Yeah. It’s, it’s very different in the younger generation, you know, maybe they don’t need a book like mine. Maybe my book is written for people who had the more traditional gender role socialization. I really believe that every single person is going to manifest these energies in their own unique, beautiful, marvelous ways. And they should be allowed to do that. You need to stop putting people into boxes. It’s not like women have to be like men or any of that. It’s like some people will conform to these just naturally these yang than yin, and other people mix it up in other ways. But really I think that it is one of the first forms of oppression. And if we want to end all forms of oppression, we have to make sure that we’re having our eye on gender oppression. And so stereotypes and socialization are really one of the earliest forms of oppression. And it’s so amazing, isn’t it? The young people are seeing through them.

Shay It is, it’s really, I love it. I feel like our world is exploding in a positive way that they’re redefining what all of this is and means to them. And that’s a beautiful thing.

Kristin Yeah. And then who knows, what’s going to come with that. Things are going to be different.

Shay They are, the world is changing underneath our feet. Well, I am so grateful to you, Christian, for taking the time to have this conversation with me, it’s absolutely a pleasure. And an honor to get to do this. I highly recommend your new book. Fierce. Self-compassion I adore it. And I want to say it’s so silly, but I want to say I’m so proud of you. I’m proud of your I’m proud of you as a woman. I’m proud of your accomplishments and what, you’re the really amazing work you’re doing in the world.

Kristin Thank you.

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