The least you can do for yourself is everything.

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Instead of giving self-compassion a special, VIP pass right into our soul, we stand guard against it asking it to leave immediately.

In the 1950s, the well-known psychologist Harry Harlow examined the development of the attachment system. It is not just us who need attention, care and love, but also newborn monkeys.

Harlow studied the behavior of newborn monkeys. Their mothers had left them and they reared alone in a cage. The question was whether the baby monkeys would spend more time with a pretend mother who gave them warmth and comfort. Or a stark, mesh figure that held a milk-dispensing bottle but provided little comfort.

The little monkeys did not care about the milk. They barely glanced at it. They clung to their cloth mommies as if their life depended on it. They only left the love and comfort that was by their side for a minute. And that was to take a quick drink from the milk.

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We are so used to giving love to our loved ones. And fail to give the same love to ourselves. This habit is so deep-rooted that it is unconsciously a part of us. If you ever pay attention to people talking around you in a coffee shop or a company meeting, you often hear phrases like,

“I need to buy something for my wife’s birthday.”

“I can’t wait for my brother to see what I have delivered in his home.”

“I can’t wait to see my mother’s excitement when she sees what is waiting for her in her kitchen.”

“I’m going to clean the whole house so that my girlfriend can rest when she comes home.”

I have bonded with friends and colleagues over this.

To be clear — I am not saying we should not do those things and more for those we love. We should.

But why not do the same things and more for ourselves? Why not give yourself a break? Why not give yourself something you have been dying to have? Why not focus on the fact that you need to give yourself love to give it to those you love?

We need to give the same kind of attention, care, and love to ourselves. What the little monkeys craved was love more than food. They crawled to the mother who touched and cradled them instead of running to enticing milk. You would think the way they clung to their pretend mother that their life depended on it.

If we are giving attention and love to those we love, we sure as hell deserve the same consideration. If not more. Our lives depend on it.

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Self-compassion is taking care of yourself.

We need others. And that is beautiful. But you need to swim on your own. The line between you keeping an eye out for each other and you relying on the people you love for things you should do for yourself is a blurry one.

It is like heavily relying on someone who is trying to remain afloat in choppy waters. Everybody will drown in that scenario.

Learn to swim on your own. 

Do things for you that you would do for someone you love. Fun things like getting you those shoes or getting a foot massage or drinking that rich, deep, spicy and complex red wine. And harder things like standing up for yourself or following through on your promises. Do things that make you happy. Like getting to know yourself or walking barefoot on the grass. Get involved in creating something. A blog, a cake, a book or a special dish. It’s yours and it’s for you.

Self-compassion is accepting ourselves with an open heart.

My mother blamed herself when diabetes forced her son to take insulin at 17 years of age. Did I give him too much sugar? Am I responsible for this diagnosis? She blamed every kind of sugar content she gave us. No more coca-cola and ice-creams in the house.

She could not find any reason why her only son has to take insulin two times a day, every single day. There is no history of diabetes in the family. So it must be my fault, my mother taught.

When I came to visit my family after a college break, I found my mother broken. I could not recognize her. I could not see her lovely face behind the darkness that swallowed it. She had rolled up into a tight ball of insecurity and fear.

All the love she had within her had been completely silenced by her choice to seal her heart. I spent the next three months with my mother working on why she was judging herself. For something that she had no control of.

Diabetes had come to our home. It was not our fault. This was not evidence of us having done something wrong. It was just something that happened.

This is life. Something always happens to us that we have no control of.

It took some time but my mother finally released the death grip she had on herself. She accepted she was not to blame. That life throws something at us we have no control of.

What we should refuse to do is close our hearts and give up on ourselves. What we should never allow is shoveling cruelty to our hearts.

Self-compassion is to treat ourselves with the same caring and compassion we would show to a good friend or a stranger. You’re not making yourself a better person by beating yourself all the time. Release the tight hold you have on yourself. Your soul is craving for you to cradle it with a gentle hand. Just as you would when you see a dear friend crying her heart out.

It is not easy to keep an open heart when you have been hurt. When something has happened to you that you did not expect or deserve. It is not easy but you have to because even if someone shovels your heart again, you know who has you? You.

Self-compassion is being kind to yourself.

The baby monkeys could see the milk right in front of them. Yet, they preferred cuddling, touching and contact with another who looked like them. When I was a little girl my mother had rocked me for hours when I was sad. I need to rock myself when I need it now.

“If one is cruel to himself, how can we expect him to be compassionate with others?” –Hasdai Ibn Shaprut, 10th C. Jewish Scholar

I often make mistakes and hurt the people I love. I often make illegitimate excuses for behavior that is careless and even selfish.

But if I don’t exercise kindness to myself, the air lacking in my chest would drown me. If someone else was furiously keeping score of what I do or fail to do, I would find that completely disheartening.

This is why we need to stop keeping score. Because exhaustion will kill us.

This is why you need to be kind to yourself. When you make a mistake. When you are angry you have missed a deadline. When you are not too happy with yourself.

Begin by giving yourself the benefit of the doubt. Your life is so much lighter when you cut yourself some slack. When you actively comfort yourself. When you give to yourself what you want from others.

Self-compassion is no longer banging our heads against the wall.

Imagine yourself like an ocean.

Deep down an ocean, there is a bobbling kind of stillness. On the surface, things are so choppy. You are tired. You are frustrated. You are agitated. Oh my God, he is driving me crazy. That meeting went badly. The words I said to my friend on the phone keeps on cringing me. I lost my patience again.

The surface is noisy and distracting and being caught in it tangles you, sucking you in.

You have to go deep to seek what you need. You have to go deep because on the surface your head keeps banging against the wall.

Our noisy brain will never stop thinking. Thinking is what it does. But if you don’t take a minute to just be, storm of feelings are going to drown you.

So, learn to sit by yourself. To find the stillness that lives beneath the chaos. Focus on your breath. That allows you to sift through who is thinking this constant, incessant, relentless streams of thoughts. It allows you to leave the choppiness behind for a while and go deep inside yourself.

If you learn to sit in silence for a couple of minutes and breathe, you would be giving the compassion you need for yourself.

Self-compassion is changing your critical self-talk.

You are sympathetic to your colleague who arrives late in your workplace. But you judge yourself when you are five minutes late.

It is very hard to train yourself not to belittle yourself. Your inner talk is fierce and wild and doesn’t take well to anyone attempting to change its course. Its sole job is to make itself heard.

I like this insightful quote by T.S. Eliot that tells us the war that is going on inside each of us,

“What is this self inside us, this silent observer, severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us and urge us on to futile activity. And in the end, judge us still more severely For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?” –T.S. Eliot, The Elder Statesman

Every time you hear yourself say you can’t do that, you don’t have that, you’re not good enough, set aside some time to talk to yourself. If you are talking to yourself in a way that you would never speak to someone else, you need to shut that voice down. You can learn to talk to yourself in soothing tones.

Practice, again and again, talking to yourself with a light tone. After repeating this dynamic several times, your brain learns. In time, your inner critic comes up less and less.

Self-compassion is exercising mindfulness.

You are watching a captivating scene on the big screen. Without realizing it, your face is wet. Tears are pouring out of your eyes. The tragedy that is right there in front of you has a death-like grip on your heart.

Suddenly somebody coughs behind you. And you blink.

You are in a cinema hall watching a film.

This analogy is used in mindfulness. You learn to be compassionate to yourself when your present moment nudges you like the coughing of that person did.

Facing up to reality. To see things as they are, no more, no less, is how you learn to be compassionate to yourself. We try so hard to change our past but we need to understand and accept we can never have the past again.

It is best to be there for what is right in front of you.

You need to catch yourself when your mind is latching on what you should have done or not done in the past. You need to catch yourself from falling off the deep end by bringing yourself to your present moment. That way, you can treat yourself more compassionately, helping you to turn away from what you cannot control to what you can do something about.

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To your inspirations,

Banchi