I Heart Me (19 page)

All of us have ‘stuff', baggage, regrets. We get the idea that we need to eliminate all that to be healed. That's not true at all. Peace is when we
accept
it all. And if we can be at peace with ourselves, we'll be
enough
.

Accepting ourselves needn't mean that we no longer grow, or pursue our hopes and dreams. Growth, like change, is natural and healthy when it originates from a sense of
enough
. It's perfectly natural to sense possibilities for expansion and improvement and to follow them up.

Equally, when we accept ourselves, life doesn't cease to be challenging. We don't sit on a metaphorical white cloud in a state of perpetual peace. We simply meet people, challenges and experiences with a healthier mindset. Life goes on, pretty much as usual.

As it goes on, we can learn a lot from watching animals. Oscar knows who he is. He chases ducks and other birds when we're at the river. If he goes too close to swans, they ward him off with a guttural ‘kchh' sound. And I'm fairly confident he doesn't think,
That swan is hissing at me. Maybe it doesn't like me. I wonder if I've done something to offend it
. He just gets on with sniffing trees and dog wee.

Oscar has taught me lots. One big lesson is that my gravity diminishes when I'm overly obsessed with what people think of me and whether they like me or not.

I believe Oscar and I were always meant to find each other. In fact he has helped me to find myself.

I bet you have an animal or a person in your life right now who is teaching you about yourself. Pause for a moment and think about it! Who is teaching you who you are? Who is bringing out your authentic self? Or who is
forcing
you to see your authentic self?

The following exercise is about discovering what makes you who you are. When you know that, you'll find it easier to be authentic.

And when you find your real self, the people who need to be in your life will find you, too.

SELF-LOVE GYM:
Who Are You?

Take some time to reflect on everything that makes you uniquely
you
. Think about the good stuff, but include your wobbly bits too. And your hopes and dreams, because they are part of you. Even include how you act when you fail, because that's part of you too.

Think about the people who have influenced you, helped mould your character, helped you be who you are, provided the environment in which you became yourself…

Think about the events that have influenced you – those that have helped you display your character, those that have forged your character…

Draw or paint who you are, or write it all down as a poem if you prefer.

Chapter 10

Self-Compassion

‘Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend.'

E
LIZABETH
G
ILBERT
,
E
AT
, P
RAY
, L
OVE

It was the middle of the night when Dobby the house elf appeared in Harry Potter's bedroom at 4 Privet Drive to tell Harry that he was in mortal danger.

Passing that information to Harry, however, was forbidden. It was a betrayal of the Malfoys, Dobby's masters. So each time he gave Harry some information, he inflicted pain upon himself. Initially he bashed his head against a window. In later scenes in the book, he struck himself with objects instead.

While few of us bash our heads on windows or hit ourselves with objects when we do something wrong, we do the same kind of thing with words. A lady who attended one of my workshops said that if she called other people by the names she called herself a lot of the time, she'd have a criminal record by now.

If self-criticism were an Olympic sport, it would be very difficult to win a medal. So many people are so good at it that there'd be a huge number contesting the medals.

When I was a child, when someone called you names you'd chant: ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.' Useful as the saying was in terms of defiance, it was merely an irritant to the person doing the name-calling and did nothing at all to diffuse the pain of being attacked with poisonous words.

The truth is, words hurt. We all know that. Not only do they hurt when someone else uses them against us, they hurt just as much when we use them against ourselves. And the problem is, we do the latter much, much, much more often. Do any of the following sound familiar?

• ‘I'm such an idiot!'
  
• ‘I can't believe I said/did that.'
  
• ‘I'm such a failure.'
  
• ‘I'm a screw-up.'
  
• ‘I'm just no good at that.'
  
• ‘I'm never going to be any good at that.'
  
• ‘I'm so fat and ugly.'
  
• ‘I'm disgusted with myself.'
  

Not pleasant, is it? Who wants to listen to that?

Would you criticize a child for falling on their first attempts to walk? Would you brand them a failure? I don't think you would. I'll hazard a guess that you allow everyone else to be a child, stumbling, falling and feeling their way through life as they learn to walk and then run, but criticize yourself for not being able to run on the first attempt.

But we're all like children. We all stumble and fall through life. We all screw up. We all make mistakes. We're only human.

Self-compassion acknowledges all this and softly says, ‘It's OK.'

Self-compassion is an antidote to self-criticism. It's having compassion for yourself. It's taking action to relieve pain or disappointment, sometimes with a few kind thoughts or words for yourself, sometimes with a hot bath and sometimes even with a tub of ice-cream. Self-compassion is soft, in contrast to the hardness of self-criticism.

If Dobby had showed some self-compassion, he might have said something like: ‘Harry Potter, I'm not supposed to share my masters' secrets. I am a house elf and it is forbidden to betray my masters. But I believe I'm doing the right thing. You are in danger and I want to help you. So, even though I've done something technically wrong, I know my heart is in the right place and I'm not going to be hard on myself.'

Of course, Dobby wasn't very self-compassionate. He hit his head against the window instead.

I remember when my book
Why Kindness is Good for You
was published I was very proud of it because I'd spent many months collating all the evidence I could find that showed that kindness and compassion were healthy. I'd also included one or two inspirational stories of kindness. My goal with the book was to inspire more people to be kind. I've always believed that kindness can change the world. Now I was getting lots of national newspaper and magazine publicity and radio interviews and was due to appear on a breakfast TV show. I was on a high.

Yet a day after the book was released, the very first review posted on Amazon UK was a one-star review. It was from a gentleman who I presume hadn't actually read the whole book and had completely misinterpreted it. He said that I encouraged people to be kind purely to make themselves feel good. I wasn't entirely sure how he got that from the book. I could only conclude that he'd read the title and the back cover then skimmed through a few pages to find ‘evidence' to back up his belief.

But I was shattered. My face flushed when I read the review. All that work and now no one would buy the book.

Over the next few days, as more and more people purchased and read the book, I was relieved to find it started racking up five-star reviews. I felt much better as they began appearing.

The experience taught me two valuable things, though. First, I realized that my feelings of worth were wrapped up in how the book was received. And second, I didn't have self-compassion.

It wasn't so much that I was a self-critic, but I had no soft place to land when things went badly. Self-compassion is that soft place. It's the part of us that softly squeezes our own shoulder and tells us, kindly, that everything is going to be alright, it's not the end of the world and that whatever happens, we're still here.

Self-compassion buffers the pain of disappointment. It stops us from taking everything so personally. It reminds us that it's OK to have a bad day, it's OK to fail, and that we haven't failed anyway just because we don't feel happy, or we haven't been successful, or we're not in a relationship, or we're broke. There's always tomorrow.

Self-compassion highlights an important difference between self-love and self-esteem. Most of the time those terms can be used interchangeably, and I've done so throughout this book. But sometimes, people get their self-esteem from their successes and achievements. Then, when things go wrong, they suffer badly. Their self-esteem is like a boat on the ocean, rising and falling with every wave.

Self-love is wider than self-esteem. It contains self-compassion, whereas self-esteem does not. When we have true self-love, when disappointment comes, we understand that it's OK. These things happen. We know
we
aren't a failure, it's just that something hasn't turned out quite right. We understand that we need support, kindness and compassion and that we're entitled to it. So we offer ourselves support and kindness, or even seek some extra in the arms of a loved one or friend, but we're doing so because we know that we deserve it. We
are
enough.

With self-compassion, disappointment is not nearly so painful. Self-compassion also helps us to extract our worth from our successes and achievements, reinforcing that we
are
enough. And when we're striving for a goal, it stops us judging ourselves as
not
enough right up until we achieve that goal.

All this and it's healthy too!

From research into self-compassion, it's now clear that it is a triple anti-inflammatory.
¹
This means it reduces three kinds of inflammation:

1. biological inflammation
   
2. inflammation towards the self (self-criticism)
   
3. inflammation in relationships