Neuroscience informs us that it’s in our highest interest to move our awareness beyond mindfulness to what I call “Heartfulness.” While witnessing our own distress without judgment is key, learning to respond to ourselves with love is what’s most healing. In fact, when researchers at the Max Plank institute compared various types of meditation, those aimed at self-compassion were most effective and led to the most impactful changes in the brain. Self-compassion practices can actually lengthen your lifespan, preventing the shortening of telomeres (the structures at the end of your chromosomes)!
We tend to withdraw from our distress by avoiding it or numbing it because we fear that contacting it will feel unbearable. However, turning toward our suffering with kindness actually helps us feel better.
You can choose to learn to relate to yourself in this way.
When you become skillful in approaching what arises, you become a good caregiver to yourself. In fact, the act of approaching or leaning into one’s experience strengthens the left side of the brain’s frontal lobe, which is associated with happiness, and calms the right prefrontal cortex, which is linked with avoidance and depression.
Trauma expert Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk’s comment makes sense in this light:
“Contemporary neuroscience studies have shown that mindfulness and self-reflection are only helpful if they are accompanied by self-compassion.”
The work I do with clients and participants in The Connected Heart Program is all about cultivating this growth mindset. A heartful perspective is inclusive and holistic rather than divisive. That means you attend to whatever arises in your experience in a warm and curious way. Dan Siegel calls this method “an approach mentality.” When we can compassionately connect to the parts of us that present themselves, moment by moment, we become more emotionally regulated.
But how does a person aid their own suffering while they are suffering?
This is the paradox of Self-Compassion.
To do this, we need to grow our capacity to witness ourselves. The tricky thing is to stay present with your sensory experience while getting enough distance from it to see it clearly. If you don’t have the intention to pay attention, you can’t do anything to help yourself. So, learning to anchor yourself in that part of you that can witness what arises, your “Observer Self”, is vital. We can view mindfulness, then, as the first step toward wholeheartedness.
But just witnessing your distress without doing anything to soothe yourself isn’t enough to become regulated. Think of a mother who notices her baby is crying but doesn’t do anything to help her. Or a therapist who remains a blank slate throughout treatment. Not the warm, fuzzy experiences you’d wish for! On the contrary, Self-compassion means leaning in to alleviate your own distress, with kindness.
The more you lean in and inquire about the longings of your suffering selves, the more skilled you come in meeting those needs. This is ultimate empowerment, psychologically-speaking.
Of course, discovering your own longings and needs and how to meet them can be quite a journey. Like birth, developing your Self is often a process of contraction/expansion. It’s helpful to have a midwife when it comes to shifting to new patterns of relating to yourself so that you can feel the love, more of the time.
The good news is that you can learn to embrace, rather than resist, the parts of you that suffer and become skilled in alleviating this suffering. My clients and program participants identify practices to help fill in aspects of care that were lacking. They become skilled in soothing their nervous systems so they can thrive.
You can learn to tap into the caregiving part of your nervous system in order to balance the part of your nervous system concerned with managing threats. This is a pathway to happiness.
Self-compassion has been shown to decrease depression and anxiety. It enhances vagal tone, the hallmark of good parasympathetic functioning. This means increased blood sugar regulation, lowered blood pressure, improved digestion and cardiovascular functioning, and improved immune functioning. Self-compassion decreases the incidence of heart disease and cancer. Researchers have also documented how self-compassion increases our ability to notice more possibilities and perform better on cognitive tasks. Self-compassion fosters resilience overall. The more resilient you are, the more flexibly you adapt to adverse life experiences, and the quicker you recover from distress.
Dr. Lissa Rankin writes “Negative relationship dynamics stimulate the stress response, whereas love, nurturing compassion, and feelings of attachment and belonging trigger the release of hormones that induce relaxation and feelings of pleasure, such as oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphins.”
Love used to be treated like a 4 letter word in psychotherapy. Now that we know that loving yourself is key to health, longevity, resilience, focus, productivity, and happiness, it’s time we make Heartfulness the number one self-improvement goal.