#6 Day Six! You’ll need a journal of sorts for this one.
Exercise 6: Self-Compassion Journal
Keep a daily self-compassion journal for a week (or longer.) Journaling is an effective way to express emotions, and has been found to enhance both mental and physical well-being. At some point during the evening when you have a few quiet moments, review the day’s events. In your journal, write down anything that you felt bad about, judged yourself for, or a difficult experience that caused you pain. (IE: you got angry at someones facebook post so you reacted by writing a rude comment. Afterwards, you felt ashamed and embarrassed.) For each event, use the 3 steps of compassion; mindfulness, a sense of common humanity, and kindness to process the event in a more self-compassionate way.
Mindfulness
Bring awareness to the painful emotions that arose due to your circumstances. Write about how you felt: sad, ashamed, frightened, stressed, and so on. As you write, try to be accepting and non-judgmental of your experience, not belittling it nor making it overly dramatic. (For example, “I was frustrated because she was being so slow. I got angry, over-reacted, and felt foolish afterwards.”)
Common Humanity
Reflect on how your experience was connected to the larger human experience. Perhaps, acknowledging that being human means being imperfect, that all people have these sorts of painful experiences. Think about the various causes and conditions underlying the event. (“My frustration was exacerbated because I was late for a doctor appointment and there was a lot of traffic that day. If the circumstances had been different my reaction probably would have been different.”)
Self-Kindness
Write yourself some kind, understanding, words of comfort. Let yourself know that you care about yourself, adopting a gentle, reassuring tone. (It’s okay. You messed up but it wasn’t the end of the world. I understand how frustrated you were and you just lost it. Maybe you can try being extra patient and generous to any wait-staff this week…”)
Practicing the three components of self-compassion with this writing exercise will help organize your thoughts and emotions, while helping to encode them in your memory. If you keep a journal regularly, your self-compassion practice will become even stronger and translate more easily into daily life.