Let’s say you get stuck in an unexpected traffic jam and you are on a rigid timeframe. Maybe you’re on your way to the airport and don’t want to miss your flight.  Are you mentally or literally screaming “NO! This can’t be happening right now!” Are you getting red in the face and louder as you inch along, resisting at every turn?

Some amount of pain is inevitable in life.  However, suffering from that pain is completely optional.  By suffering, I include regretting, worrying, obsessing, and blaming.

We’ll never be able to control external circumstances or our internal responses to them.  Rather than try to control everything, what if we embrace life as it is?   Instead of fighting something, self-compassion will allow us to accept both the good and the not-so-good.

It probably sounds odd, but what we need to be happy is to embrace some unhappiness. We need is a new approach to pain and pleasure.

Sometimes difficult emotions disappear by themselves.  Unless we change our relationship with them, anger or fear may always be just under the surface.  By giving ourselves unconditional kindness and compassion while negative emotions arise, we can avoid the usual discomfort that would arise.

Any kind of pain (physical, mental or emotional) creates a conflict between how things are and how we prefer they be.  We resist what’s happening right now because we planned for them to be different.  Christopher Germer writes in The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion that “we can measure our happiness by the gap between what we want and how things are…We spend our lives on a treadmill, continually arranging to have pleasure and avoid pain.  Our natural reactions are instinctive, but they are not successful strategies for emotional well-being.”  I learned all about this one when my daughter was little and would scream every single day between about 4 and 6pm.  Sometimes, Mr. B would call and say he was running late getting home.  Had I known he’d be home at 7:00, I would have planned to be strong and carry through the nightly trek through the house, bouncing the baby and singing.  Since I expected him home at 6:00, I was fuming mad by the time I saw him an hour later, despite the fact that neither he nor I could not change the situation.

Instead of meeting painful moments by pushing against them, what if we notice our distress and respond to ourself with kindness? When you fight these moments, you get stuck in them.  If you are continually focused on aches in your body, wishing it weren’t there, they probably aren’t going to go away.  We can go to war against ourselves, using critical messages and becoming absorbed in ourselves.

How we relate to everyday discomfort can change everything.  The alternative to this fight is to begin a new way of relating to yourself.  It involves self-kindness, a feeling of common humanity, and awareness.  In the next three posts, we’ll be discussing the benefits of turning toward emotional pain by looking at each in turn.

If you are anything like me, your first thought when something unexpected occurs is to resist and to blame, either myself or someone else depending on the situation.  That takes a lot of energy!  It would be much better to be aware of what specifically troubles us and allow them to be there.  We can’t skip this step! The next step is to bring in some compassion when we notice we’re feeling bad.  Finally, we can realize that these things happen to lots of people… we aren’t alone or different.  The combination of these 3 steps leads us to turn toward our pain, freeing ourselves to face suffering from a position of strength and wisdom.

Had I stopped to be mindful of my situation (screaming baby – arg!) and emotions (frustration, exhaustion), acknowledge that I am part of a global network of parents who go through this exact thing, maybe even right that minute with me, and then offer kindness to myself (bounce over to the kitchen and make some tea? turn on some music to save my voice?), I can’t even imagine what would have changed.  Probably everything.

Fighting anything only makes things worse.  Traffic on the way out of town when we anticipated a smooth ride, a last-minute assignment at work when you had evening plans, fear about making a presentation at a meeting… the faster we can accept the new reality, the better off we’ll be.  Kristin Neff suggests imagining your pain as a gaseous substance.  “If you allow it to just be there, freely, it will eventually dissipate on its own.  If you fight and resist the pain, however, walling it into a confined space, the pressure will grow and grow until there is an explosion.”  (Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, Kristin Neff)

Speaking of explosions… let’s look at that traffic jam I mentioned.  I’m sorry to tell you that you’re making yourself far more agitated than need be.  Your anger is not going to magically break up the traffic.

Neff points out:

“once something has occurred in reality, there is nothing you can do to change that reality in the present moment.  You can choose to accept this fact or not, but reality will remain the same either way.  The less you resist, the less you suffer.”

I think it’s natural to shut ourselves off from pain.  It’s certainly not innate that we turn toward the pain in order to be with it and to accept it.

Christopher Garner also writes, “We can step back and learn to be calm in the midst of pain; we can let pleasure naturally come and go.  That’s serenity.  We can even learn to embrace pain as well as pleasure, and every nuance in between, thereby living each moment to the fullest.  That’s joy.  Learning how to spend some time with pain is essential to achieving personal happiness.  In may sound paradoxical, but in order to be happy we must embrace unhappiness.”

He says that “wisdom is the quality of knowing the short-and long-term consequences of our actions and choosing the path of greatest long-term benefit.”

Neff agrees that yes, sometimes life sucks, but why make it even worse? “The key to self-compassion is not to deny suffering, but to recognize that it’s perfectly normal.  There isn’t anything wrong with the imperfection of life as long as we don’t expect it to be other than it is.”

What we resist persists.  If we can find ourselves within our struggle and offer compassion and care because of our suffering, rather than trying to feel better, we are already pulling ourself out of the hardest part.

Try to recognize when you’re straining and see if you can do the same exact thing in a different way.  Be aware of your feelings but don’t let them carry you away from rationality.  Scan for any tension in your body and loosen it.  Notice if you resist reality and try to manipulate and control your life.  Let that go.  When we can offer ourselves compassion, we notice what’s good as well as what’s wrong and we can point ourselves toward the good.

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I am making my way through an online Self-Compassion workshop co-facilitated by Drs. Kristin Neff (Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself) and Brené Brown and decided to do a whole month of self-compassion posts.  If you missed the first few, you can find them here.  Thanks for reading and commenting!

Missed any Self-compassion September posts? Read them here.