“We do not think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.” – Richard Roker
What is Mindful Self-Compassion?
Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) increases your resilience, strength and capacity with yourself, in your relationships with others, your job, your world and more.
Many of us move through the world with kindness towards everyone around us except ourselves. If we can learn the practice (and it can indeed be taught, and become a practice) of turning that kindness towards ourselves, that’s when the alchemy/ magic happens. To quote Dan Siegel, “It is never too late to heal the mind and to bring to ourselves and those around us the compassion and kindness that arise from that healing and integration.”
It is a myth that MSC can make a person lose their edge. Instead, research has shown that self-compassion leads to greater ease and emotional well-being in one’s daily life and improves one’s relationship with oneself and others. It boosts resilience and happiness, reduces stress, anxiety and depression, and can even help maintain healthy lifestyle habits such as diet and exercise.
On Q13 Fox News Seattle, Blair explains Mental Mindfulness and three simple steps to help you let go of stress.
The 8-week MSC Course
Mindful Self-Compassion is empirically supported and presented as an 8-week training program developed by Dr. Kristin Neff of the University of Texas, Austin, and Dr. Chris Germer of Harvard Medical School.
Blair trained directly with Drs. Neff and Germer as an MSC instructor, and now offers public 8-week classes at the University of Washington’s Center for Child and Family Well-Being in Seattle. MSC can be learned by anyone. In this 8-week program, participants will learn MSC through experiential exercises, meditation, short presentations, group discussion and home practices.
Participants in Blair’s course will cultivate the mental and emotional habit of mindful self-compassion and learn how to infuse their moment-to-moment experiences with increasing kindness, especially when feeling anxious, depressed, hurt, inadequate, overwhelmed and frustrated, or all of the above. Blair’s classes are about coping and surviving everyday stress with more peace, equanimity and self-love.
Is MSC for You?
Blair believes we are born with a curriculum our soul is meant to learn during our lifetime.It is up to each of us to figure out how, and if, we will do so.
Instead of trying to get rid of the “bad” feelings and replacing them with “good” ones (which doesn’t work long term), positive emotions are generated by embracing our suffering with tenderness and care, so that light and dark are experienced simultaneously. MSC provides the tools we need to explore the full range of life’s emotions.
If we honor our difficult emotions, if we send love and care and loving kindness to the hurt, scared, angry, wounded parts of ourselves that we usually numb and spend so much effort hiding, we can then move through them, release them, and live life with more authenticity and joy than we could ever imagine. This is the process of Mindful Self-Compassion.