Self Compassion
The Universal Antidote
What is this self inside us, this silent observer,
Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us
And urge us 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
Many people, myself once included, hate themselves.
I don’t mean that some can be self critical, or judge themselves harshly. I mean that many people hate their own guts. Most of us are charitable toward others, yet toward ourselves, we’re monsters.
I was. At the time, I never could have seen it.
In 2010/ 2011, back in New York, my older sister unexpectedly passed away, during a year where she and I fought often. We never got a chance to resolve our conflict. My girlfriend and I went through a difficult breakup. I moved out. I told anyone who asked that I was writing a novel, although every day I found better things to do. I waited tables in the evenings. I was mostly vegan, living off coffee, beer, tofu, takeout, and seed oils. I was skinny-fat, Vitamin D deficient, and inflamed; thus anxious, depressed, cynical, adrift.
I needed help, but didn’t know where to turn. My therapist, an aging and kind Jungian, had just passed away.
A friend had a profound experience drinking ayahuasca, not common 15 years ago. Taking a week off and flying to Brazil seemed a bit dramatic, but I said yes because I was scared. I’d never taken psychedelics, and I didn’t know what else to do.
Before the first ceremony, I was wrought with fear, self doubt, and hyper-recrimination. I almost chickened out and left the Amazon for a Rio hotel.
The shaman, also a psychotherapist, saw my anxiety and gave me a small first dose. I drank with a few others around 8pm. I white knuckled my knees, clenched my jaw, and cracked an eye, waiting for deserved punishment and consequence for doing something stupid and risky.
An hour or so later, the frogs, insects, birds, monkeys, wind, rain, and unknown voices from the Amazon symphony relaxed my nervous system’s suspicion and grip. Before I was cognizant of the medicine’s effects, I felt like someone I loved snuck up behind me and wrapped me in a bear hug. Every cell of my body was flooded with warmth, love, and compassion.
To my eternal surprise, it was me, hugging myself. Love and appreciation for myself, more real than real, flooded my whole being. The contrast between this self love, somatically familiar from childhood but mentally inconceivable, and my vituperative, self-directed battery acid was enough for a come-to-Jesus moment:
I hated myself.
I like me, I admitted. I’d hang out with me. Why am I so cruel to myself?
I couldn’t remember why I started, nor when or how or where.
The root cause of my problems wasn’t death, break-ups, or seed oils (although please don’t eat seed oils, or tofu for that matter). It was self hate, or self crime.
—-
Things fade, as they tend to do, and habits return, as they also tend to, and I’d soon find myself on another Road to Damascus.
In 2014, I finished that novel. I was determined to find an agent, secure a deal at a major house or hipster indie, leave the restaurant, travel the world with my savings and book advance, and write a second novel based on these travels.
I didn’t get an agent. I didn’t get published. I arrived in Asia (Bali, funny enough) depressed, dispirited, and disappointed. Hellbent on making it as a writer, I extended my middle finger to the world and started writing a second book.
It was hard maintaining a writing schedule when constantly on the move, and, although lighter out of New York, I wasn’t excited to visit the Da Nang textile museum or see the Filipino cover band play Bob Marley’s Legend (again). I spent many afternoons in Vietnam, the Philippines, or Cambodia enjoying myself somewhat yet bargaining with time to pass faster. The famed stoic Seneca is attributed with this gem: if you don’t know to which port you’re sailing, no wind is favorable.
Kinda felt like that.
(Eventually, I found Koh Phangan, Thailand, joined a community of miscreants and outlaws, grounded in nature, and wrote. These were happy years, but that’s another story, and doesn’t serve the arc of this narrative).
—
Years passed. I rode out Covid in Los Angeles and returned to Koh Phangan first chance I got, in December 2022.
In May 2023, I was on a visa run in Luang Prabang, Laos, a beautiful town of temples and cafes on the Mekong River. It was off-season, hot, and slow. My Thai visa was taking longer than expected, extending my trip by a week. I grew groggy, funky, and depressed, and annoyed for being groggy, funky, and depressed. My emotional tenor mirrored ten years prior, traveling Asia as a self-perceived ‘failed’ novelist.
My third morning in Luang Prabang, sitting in a coffee shop and staring down an empty day, despair and self recrimination arose again to bludgeon me with renewed self crime and self disrespect. Disgust for my life choices, and shame and despair for professional, financial, and romantic failures, resurrected. I felt like I weighed a million pounds, and would return to Thailand floating on a river of my own tears.
The self loathing and shame, so acute in the belly, made me feel alive, and the remorse spirals in the heart were known and familiar, tantalizing in their seduction. Seeing how easy and tempting it was to jump into ‘pain body’ again made me sick. I vowed to stand for it no longer (even if it was just to spare the cafe’s other patrons of my bad vibes).
Why I didn’t decide that 20 years ago, ten years ago, or the day before?
I dunno.
I surrendered to the oncoming tsunami of certain feelings I’d been ignoring and outrunning. For days, yes, but some for years.
As the great Ken Wilber says about allowing ourselves to feel what we previously could not: Hurts more, but will bother you less.
I shut my eyes and let in despair, for perhaps the first time. I allowed the waves to pound, the dirty water to flow, move, and do as it wished. It percolated to a direct bullseye: my first novel failing, when disappointment, shame, and self crime was too intense to admit. This was the thread. It led to the reef that controlled the waves, the moon that controlled the tides, and the breath that controlled the winds.
Still on the banquette in the coffee shop, I reached in the back of my psychic cabinet and grabbed the medicine the mama of the Amazon gifted me in 2011. I dusted it off, uncapped a musty, stale hug, and said variations of the following to that part of me stuck in 2014, professionally disappointed, emasculated, and embarrassed.
Damn.
That really sucked.
That was hard.
Professional failure, disappointment, leaving New York after 13 years. Death, breakups, anxiety, depression.
Yikes.
Yet, you wrote your ass off. Worked stressful jobs you didn’t like for ten years. Risked everything.
Big risks.
Big fails.
That really sucked. That was hard.
I let in the hurt and disappointment, which, at the time, had been too painful to feel. Instead, unconsciously, I chose to feel bitterness, jealousy, victimhood, and blame, which my psychic accountant thought safer, bless it. I tried to distract, suppress, outrun, outtravel, outmove, and outwrite these feelings, but it didn’t work.
It never does.
I hugged that 2014, thirty-four year old model of Michael like he was a kid.
I’m proud of you, I said. I can’t believe you did that! You’re awesome. You’re ambitious, determined, creative. Keep going. I love you.
I felt self love and compassion for the first time since the Amazon. For that self and current self.
When I opened my eyes, despair blew from my cells like an old dandelion in the breeze.
The Mother of the Amazon’s 2011 transmission wasn’t a telegram to be read once and stuffed in a drawer.
It was instruction.
I picked up What the Buddha Taught (great intro to Buddhism, btw), took a sip of coffee, and got on with my life.
What I once had to take a week off and fly to Brazil for, I could do in two minutes in a coffee shop.
And I could have all along.
(How I found and traced despair to its source, I don’t truly, truly know, but I do know that being a 20-year meditator has advantages, particularly comfort in physical and emotional vulnerability, which can, if you stick with it, reveal filaments rooted to stem cells of emotional patterns (sankharas), and the events that catalyzed them. If your meditation teacher isn’t advocating for mental, emotional, and physical vulnerability, you may be bypassing, and, buyer beware, bypassing was, is, and ever shall be all the rage, so be careful out there, and know that if you’re starting a meditation practice only to find zombie feelings buried long ago resurrect to sneak attack you, dust off your proverbial tablecloth and invite them to stay for dinner, or at least tea (and work up to a 20-course meal), so you can learn as much as possible while they’re resurrected, and if this seems unreasonable, or even unsafe, remember that, paradoxically, it’s the most direct route to expedite understanding, thus passage).
—
The simple, obvious, and relatively unknown practice of self compassion has become most of what I work with people on in Ayurveda. It doesn’t matter what you eat, how long you meditate, how much you exercise, or what supplements you take if you hate yourself, never give yourself credit for anything, and feel that nothing you do is ever good enough.
Little will change.
Recovering from the illness has given me x-ray vision to see it in others. Self crime is the root cause of too much suffering, lead leaching from old bullets stuck inside us from civil wars started long ago, for reasons we don’t remember (for those who do remember, it’s unanimously not worth it). Ayurveda is a root cause medicine, and if I’m not taking you to the root, I would be out of integrity
As Thich Nhat Hanh says: to be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.
As apropos, the poet Robert Bly: every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
If you want to try it at home, ask yourself ‘when did my first symptom of anxiety, neck pain, depression, etc. arise?’ This often is the best clue for what age to start doing the practice.
The only two rules are to feel, and to be as cheesy as possible. No one is listening, cheesiness is funny, and smiling is important.
Western doctors who matter say that emotions and trauma are stored in the fascia, and Ayurvedic sages have long said similar. The physical digestive system can be kickstarted through diet, exercise, and herbs. Emotional and mental digestion is activated by vulnerability, awareness, and feeling. We must feel what we previously couldn’t.
Awareness brings feeling, feeling brings agni, digesting. In Ayurveda, ama, roughly translated to ‘undigested food waste’ from a sluggish metabolism, is not only physical, but mental and emotional. Empathy is vacating, compassion is nourishing.
If you don’t ‘grow up,’ ‘clean up,’ and ‘show up’ (as Ken Wilber says), your ‘waking up’ spiritual practice or pickleball game or yoga practice may become a distraction and avoidance from what you’re scared to feel. As Gangaji says, the medicine of meditation or yoga or psychedelics becomes a poison because it makes us think we’re ‘doing the work’ when we’re primarily distracting ourselves, even fertilizing aversion to our core wound. The quest to heal gives us purpose, but beware of the bind: fulfilling our purpose of healing whatever our thing is may remove our purpose, and incentivizes the never-ending search.
Dr. John Sarno, in his classic book Healing Back Pain, demonstrated that the unconscious can and will generate chronic pain to protect and distract us from painful emotions trapped in the unconscious or psyche, what we really need to look at. When we’re in chronic pain, we don’t have time, attention, or energy to do so (Dr. Nichole Sacks is one of Dr. Sarno’s proteges and has a great podcast of case study after case study).
—
A few weeks ago, a friend and I hiked through the Mt. Batur lava fields here in Bali, where a village existed 100 years ago before the eruption. Back on the bike, riding to the hot spring, I thought it strange that there are innumerably bizarre ways to leave this life, but only one way to enter it.
There’s only one birth canal.
When we’ve deviated into the purgatory of self crime, there’s only one way to re-birth, only one correctional facility.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar once said: the human life is a journey from the head to the heart.
We must feel, empathize, and com-pass, with our hearts, the only true north. Otherwise, we’re just using our minds to dig another clever tunnel out of here.
—
Working Together
Over the years, the recommendations I make are often too much for clients to metabolize at once. So, I’m transitioning my Ayurveda practice to a coaching model.
Moving forward, a coaching package includes seven sessions in a calendar year (initial appt. is two hours, the remaining six are one hour), written plans after each meeting, and email and WhatsApp access (48-hour response time, usually less). $1800.
Ayurveda is mind, body, soul, and spirit. Addressing one of these four anchors can take hours. It’s more helpful to both of us to invest in commitment. I take the journey with you. Into self compassion, diet, lifestyle, digestion, meditation, movement, breathing, sleep, and so much more.
It’s said that a healthy man has 100 problems, a sick man only one. The healthier, happier, and more secure you are, the more of service you can be to others.
Email or WhatsApp for a free 15-minute discovery call.
If you’ve done an Ayurvedic appointment and wish to do a follow-up in the old system, I’m happy to honor that agreement.
Thanks for reading.
Michael
Great to hear your story, that which I remember, and that which I have missed over the years.
Love it. Thanks for the vulnerability, insight and direction to tackling the most important topic there is.