Quote of the day 🧡

This morning I woke up not feeling the greatest, and was feeling down about “ruining the weekend” up North. Often times as an occupational therapist, I’ll catch myself not using the tools I preach so heavily in my sessions with my clients. I caught myself in that harsh mindset and remembered you’ve been teaching SELF COMPASSION to your clients, time to use it for yourself!

So today’s quote of the day is:

Of course not feeling great is not necessarily the most intense form of suffering, but let’s not gatekeep ourselves from feelings. Any “not enjoyable” emotion or physical feeling can feel like suffering sometimes! So let’s learn together about self compassion!

I first learned about this concept of self compassion this June in the Powerfully You training, which focuses on emotional regulation. In the course, one of the concepts was self esteem vs self compassion. They talk about how self esteem is hard to achieve sometimes because it focuses on positive things like loving yourself, being proud of you, etc…. Things that are hard on good days and even harder on harder days! So in comes teaching self compassion instead:

Self compassion is broken into three different pieces. The first is mindfulness: this is recognizing when we’re struggling or not feeling great, and simply being aware of it. Being mindful of your situation does not mean judging or labelling but just being aware (“I’m feeling very low today”). Self kindness is the next piece, in which you are being supportive and understanding towards ourselves instead of being harsh critics. I like repeating my client’s situation to them and then asking them to think about how they would respond to me if I was in their situation! Often times we tend to be way kinder to others in tough situations than to ourselves, although we too deserve kindness.

During June, I planned various pride month activities for one of the weeks of the day program I work with. One of the activities I planned was a big poster board with the reflective question “what do you do to feel happy, safe and calm?”. On the poster board we’re sticky notes and the same visuals that are in this post! Clients were encouraged to stop by the poster board to answer the question so they can reflect on strategies they can use when being kind to themselves! We had comments like “eat a good meal”, “have a friend that listens”, “talk to a therapist”, “use my fidgets”, “go for a walk” and more.

This activity was to encourage being kind to yourself, but also, by being able to see what other people do, it creates a sense of community, or “connectedness”. Connectedness is the third and final piece of self compassion.

Connectedness is the concept of remembering that you are not alone. The reminder that others also feel sad, lonely, experience challenging moments, make mistakes etc. Something I enjoy about self compassion instead of self esteem is the acknowledgement that you are not alone in these moments. You are not the only one who thinks badly about their body, makes mistakes, feels alone, feels not good enough. You’re also not the only one that needs to use strategies to cope, that needs rest from burnout and that needs to lean on others. By incorporating connectedness in this concept, it can help us not add guilt and shame to whatever struggles we are already experiencing.

Self compassion has been a big concept I’ve started implementing with my clients but also with myself. Allowing myself to rest, be slow, nap, eat well but also eat treats, reach out to friends, feel guilt and shame and sadness etc, has allowed me to be kinder to myself and love myself more.

Often times it’s hard to have these deep conversations with loved ones because it seems out of place in the day to day. Sometimes sharing with a therapist or even just a third party who you don’t usually speak to can be nice. Let’s create a sense of connectedness in the comments!

In the comments, if you feel comfortable, answer the question: “what can you do to make you feel happy, safe and calm?”. Remember these can be different day to day and don’t need to be something super complicated! ❤️

You are not alone, you are deserving of love and you deserve to be kind to yourself ❤️