Understanding the connection between mindfulness and compassion is transformational in helping you to embrace your true self and each of your experiences with gratitude, appreciation and loving kindness.
Mindful self-compassion does not mean you have to be filled with loving kindness twenty four seven either. What it means is that your awareness is loving, kind, happy and compassionate. So in the event you feel upset, angry or frustrated you can embrace that experience with an awareness of mindful self-compassion.
Barriers of negative feelings and situations can prevent you from developing your mindful self-compassion journey. The key is to understand your core values and beliefs that you hold about yourself, often these are the negative beliefs that have been formed within you since childhood. You can read more about historical belief systems in my shadow work blog post series.
To start your mindful self-compassion journey, take out your journal or notebook and write down your core values and beliefs.
- Take a moment to reflect on what you have just written. How does it make you feel to see these in writing?
- Then ask yourself when these beliefs first developed and how? Were there any specific experiences that you can go back and connect to those beliefs?
- Take another deep breath and reflect on who encourages those beliefs about yourself?
- And finally, what would your life look like if you did not believe those beliefs about yourself?
You can continue writing in your journal as you think through each of these questions to clear on not just what the barriers are, but how they are influencing who you are today.
Now that you have started your mindful self-compassion journey the next step is to continue and practice with perseverance and patience. The more you practice and dedicate reflection time to understanding how your beliefs influence who you are today you can then develop a positive change to your personal growth and development.
When you regularly practice mindfulness your skills in compassion are strengthened. It helps you to become more compassionate towards yourself.
As we learned in part 1, `what we practice becomes stronger’. When you think about this on a deeper level, you will find that you are relating to yourself daily. You are practising the art of relating constantly.
Mindfulness is having an attitude of openness and curiosity towards yourself and builds self-compassion. As a result, it reflects on the compassion that you then have for those around you.