Mindfulness involves kindness and a self-compassionate stance towards yourself. Participants have to connect with the inner critic and how to effectively cultivate a friendly and caring relationship with oneself

1. Mindfulness Coaching
Session 6

2. Outline – Session 6
• Compassion
• Self-criticism
• Self-compassion
• Why Self-compassion
• Why compassion for others
• Mindfulness and compassion
• Exercise: Loving Kindness
meditation 1 & 2
• Three minute breathing space
• Homework

3. Homework
Debrief
Did you practice meditating?
If so, what was your experience?
Did you practice daily gratitude?
What did you notice?
Did you pay attention to how you dealt with goals?
If so, what did you notice?
Do you have any other questions or concerns?

4. Seated Meditation

5. Exercise: The inner critic

6. Compassion
Kristin Neff is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading experts
on self-compassion, being the first one to operationally define and
measure the construct over a decade ago. In this movie she explains
what self-compassion is.

7. Self-criticism
• Life can be hard at times.
• Things go wrong in everyone’s life.
• How do we usually react to such things?
• The reactions we have towards ourselves are often
merciless.
• Gentleness and compassion - they have the power to
transform all that negativity.
• Compassion can be increased if we practice it.

8. Unlocking Compassion, gratitude and
reverence
Jon Kabat-Zinn tells us why being mindful can help us unlock our compassionate
side.

9. Self-compassion
• First understand what compassion means.
• It doesn’t mean that we too should be suffering alongside
that person or even pity him.
• Compassion means that we recognize when someone is
suffering and that we acknowledge his suffering as well.
• Suffering may create resistance; there is the need to relieve
the suffering at any cost.
• When we experience compassion, we must give up the
struggle and resistance against suffering and learn to
accept suffering as a part of life.
• There is no judgment in compassion, only the realization
that bad things happen, we all make mistakes and
everyone feels down sometimes.

10. Difference between self-compassion and self-
esteemProf. Leary explains the important difference
between self-compassion and self-esteem and
suggests to boost self-compassion rather than self-
esteem.

11. Self-compassion
• Self-compassion simply means showing the same
compassion towards ourselves that we show others.
• When we are self-compassionate, we treat ourselves with
kindness and gentleness.
• Self-compassion is a form of acceptance.
• Compassion is something that comes natural to us and it
even seems rather obvious.
• Instead of being accepting and gentle, we struggle with our
emotions and treat them like they are our enemies.
• Self- compassion means that we stop fighting with our own
emotional pain and instead let it in and respond with loving
kindness and understanding toward oneself.

12. Why self-compassion
• Failure - internal critical voice.
• The critical voice has little gentleness. It is lacking in
compassion.
• Demotivates us, make us feel guilty or cause anxiety.
• Causes internal conflict.
• Can result in negative emotions such as guilt or fear and
frustration.
• We can easily lose ourselves in a destructive cycle of
emotions (guilt) and thoughts (critical voice) which goes on
endlessly.
• Without compassion or gentleness the chance of conflict is
fairly large.

13. Why self-compassion
• Be more loving and kind to ourselves..
• Helps to perceive the things that happen from a more
positive perspective.
• You are human, just like everyone else.
• Opens the doors to looking at an experience from the bright
side.
• Difficult to empathize with the feelings of other people if
we do not tolerate the same feelings within ourselves.
• If we learn to deal with our own distresses in a healthy
manner, there is plenty of room left to devote our attention
and energy to other people. It is only then, that we can
expand our loving kindness to those around us.

14. Why compassion for others
• Enables connectedness (social connection).
• Feeling connected with others, enhances psychological and
physical well-being and it reduces the chances of getting
depressed and having physical ailments.
• Increases empathic ability, cooperation and trust
• In their study, Hutcherson, Seppala and Gross (2008) found
that by enhancing compassion, feelings of social
connectedness and positive emotions towards others were
enhanced as well.
• Practice = experienced stronger feelings of social
connectedness and positive emotions towards strangers

15. Exercise: Loving Kindness Meditation 1 (self)

16. Exercise: Loving kindness meditation 2 (others)

17. Mindfulness, self-compassion, suffering and
healing
In this clip, Dr. Ruth Buczynski interviews Dr. Christopher Germer about
the
relationship between mindfulness, self-compassion, suffering and
healing. |

18. Exercise: Visualising a compassionate self
• Think of the most meaningful qualities of a compassionate individual

19. Homework
• Do the exercise “three-minute breathing space” about three times a day.
• Become aware of the critical voice in your head this week. Whenever you
notice this critical voice, take a moment to notice the tone of this voice.
Ask yourself these questions: How do I feel now? What would a dear friend
say to me now? See if you can be gentler towards yourself.
• Do the loving-kindness meditation as much as you can this week. You may
combine it with the seated meditation or body scan. Or you can also opt
for a shorter version, in which you keep a few people in mind and wish for
all of them 3 specific things without doing the elaborate meditation.

20. Log Book
Exercise Times performed
Observations or perceptions during
the exercise
Seated meditation / Loving-Kindness
Meditation
Three-minute Breathing Space
Observing the Critical Voice

21. Dankie
Thank you
Siyabonga
Re a leboga
Ke a leboha haholo
Ngiyabonga
Ndza Nkhensa
Ke a Leboga
Ndo Livhuwa
Enkosi
Siyabonga