Dr. Kristin Neff guides in a short practice in self-compassionate touch.
Scroll down for transcript.
Summary: Dr. Kristin Neff guides us through various practices of self-compassionate touch, such as placing hands over the heart or cradling the face, to provide comfort and support. Research shows that self-compassion can improve mental and physical well-being and activates the parasympathetic nervous system, reducing stress.
Guest: Dr. Kristin Neff is an associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin's department of educational psychology. She's also the co-author of 'Mindful Self-Compassion for Burnout,' which offers tools to help individuals heal and recharge from burnout.
How To Do This Self-Compassionate Touch Practice:
Take a moment to try these different touches and see which feels most supportive to you. Whenever you feel stressed or upset, or just need some extra support, use this compassionate touch to remind yourself that you’re here for you. Research shows the practice works best when practiced regularly.
Duration: 20 seconds, practiced daily or as often as you can.
Find a comfortable space. Sit or stand somewhere you feel relaxed and at ease. Try out these practices while thinking kind words to yourself, as though you were comforting a dear friend in distress.
1. Touch Your Heart: Place both hands gently over the center of your chest, one on top of the other. Apply just enough pressure to feel connected, but not uncomfortable. Focus on the warmth of your touch.
2. Feel Your Strength: If it feels right, make a gentle fist with your left hand, symbolizing strength, and place it over your heart. Rest your right hand on top of the fist to combine the feeling of strength and love.
3. Cradle Your Face: Gently cup each of your cheeks with your hands, holding your face as you would a loved one in distress. Let the touch be soft and caring.
4. Support Your Core: Place both hands over your solar plexus, just below your ribcage, and imagine you're holding and supporting your core. This can be particularly comforting if you're feeling fear or deep emotions.
5. Give Yourself a Hug: Cross your arms, resting each hand on the opposite shoulder. Gently squeeze yourself, adjusting the pressure to feel comforting but not overwhelming.
Transcript:
SHUKA KALANTARI Welcome to Happiness Break, where we pause for a moment to try a practice shown to help us live healthier, more fulfilling lives. I'm Shuka Kalantari. And this week, we’re turning to a practice designed to foster self-compassion.
Our guide today is a familiar voice on the show, Dr. Kristin Neff. You might remember her from previous episodes where she discussed the many benefits of self-compassion. We’re delighted to have her back to lead us through a meditation on self-compassionate touch, where we gently embrace ourselves as we would a loved one in distress.
If you missed last week's episode of the Science of Happiness, be sure to listen after this meditation. We get into the science of self-compassionate touch and offer practical tips to make it part of your daily routine.
Kristin's new book, Mindful Self-Compassion for Burnout, offers tools to help heal and recharge when you're overwhelmed by stress, like the self-compassionate touch practice she's sharing today.
When you're ready, here’s Kristin.
KRISTEN NEFF I'm Dr. Kristin Neff, and I research self-compassion, which refers to being helpful and supportive to ourselves when we're struggling in some way. Whether that's some stressor in our life, or we failed or made some mistake.
What the research shows is that when we show up for ourselves in a warm, kind, supportive, understanding way, as opposed to being harsh or cruel or judgmental, that we do better. We have better mental health, we're more motivated, and we're able to deal with the difficulties in our life.
One of the recent findings of research is showing that self-compassion partly works through the nervous system. It seems to be part of our evolutionary inheritance. Compassion is communicated from parents to children, partly through things like touch. So parents soothe their infants when they're crying, for instance, by stroking them or holding them. And what we know is that when we give ourselves compassion through soothing or supportive touch, it actually seems to activate the parasympathetic nervous system response and lower things like cortisol.
And there's actually a recent study out of Berkeley that shows that just 20 seconds of compassionate touch a day, taking a few moments out to touch yourself in a warm way, maybe say some words of kindness and warmth to yourself if you do that consistently for a month, it will significantly improve your mental wellbeing. So for that reason, I'd like to teach you a practice of using touch to engender feelings of compassion for yourself when you're struggling in some way.
So what I'd like to do is lead you through some types of physical touch you can use with yourself when you're feeling distress in some way that can help you really be there for yourself.
This distress can be just stress of life, when things are difficult at work, or in your relationship, or politics or global events. It can also be really helpful when your distress comes from feeling badly about yourself. So when we can show up for ourselves with warmth and care and support in those times of distress, we're going to strengthen ourselves and be able to get through it more easily and with more resilience.
One type of supportive touch, you can try is putting both hands over the center of your chest, over your heart center. So put one hand over the other and feel the center of your chest.
And using just the right pressure that feels supportive, not too strong, not too soft, really connect with your body.
You're holding yourself in this messy experience of being a human being. Notice how that feels. Do you feel safe? Do you feel supported?
And if so, then you can do this whenever you're feeling distressed. For some people this actually makes them feel a little bit vulnerable. Each person's really different in terms of what type of touch feels most supportive.
So you can also try making your left hand a fist gesture, a fist representing strength, and put this fist of strength over your heart and then place the other hand over it. So the gesture is more one of strength, with love.
So just noticing how that feels. Can you feel your own strength? Your own resolve to be there for yourself, to show up for yourself?
Another thing you could try is holding each of your cheeks in the palm of each hand, as if you're cradling your face. Holding your face the way you might hold the face of a young child who is upset.
You can also hold your center. So the center, your energetic center, it's called the solar plexus. Try putting both hands over your center, which is just below your ribcage, above your belly button, and feeling like you're holding your core. You're giving yourself strength and support by holding your core.
This gesture can be really helpful, especially if the emotions we're feeling are in our core. Feelings like fear, or deep grief, it's often felt in our center, so you can hold ourselves here.
You can also try giving yourself a hug. Let's just try putting one hand on the opposite shoulder. So you're just really holding yourself, squeezing yourself again with just the right pressure, not too hard so that it feels claustrophobic, but firmly enough to really give your body the message, "Hey, I've got you."
You can also add some movement into this if you like. For some people, this whole soothing system is really activated when we do some gentle back and forth movement. So you can rock forward and backward, or side to side.
A more subtle way you could be with yourself, for instance, if maybe you're suffering because your boss just said something upsetting and you don't want to hold your heart or hug yourself in front of your boss, you can also just simply hold your hand. Hold your own hand, give yourself a little squeeze. Kind of like saying to yourself, "I'm here for you, it's going to be okay."
Or you can even fold your arms as a way of holding yourself. When you do it with the intention to support yourself, your body registers it, and it calms down as a result.
And now I'd actually invite you to just take a few moments and try out some different types of touch or make up your own type of touch, something that feels right for you. The goal is to find something that you can use, in the moment, whenever you feel distressed. Again, it only takes a moment to use self-compassionate touch, so see if you can find something that feels supportive, helps you feel safe.
Choose one thing to work with and the invitation is, for the next week, try using this type of supportive touch whenever you feel upset about something. Again, it can be something in your external life or when you're feeling badly about yourself for some reason. Can you show up for yourself physically?
And see if you can give yourself permission to take some of this goodness out with you into your day. Thanks.
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