In this episode of Meditation Happy Hour, guest Kelly Sell explains mindful self-compassion through the very personal lens of his life and experiences. An avid mountain biker, hiker, paddler and snowboarder, Kelly’s work is to help people live their lives to the fullest. It is through his own personal mindful self-compassion journey that he brings the listener into a world where we can find more compassion for self and others by realizing we are not alone in our suffering.

How is it that mindful self-compassion helps with trauma and/or chronic pain?

Kelly Sell, a Mindful Self-Compassion practitioner and guide explains, “The idea with the mindfulness self-compassion is we have to ask ourself about mindfulness first, what's really happening? What am I feeling? What am I experiencing? And, we ask the question, what do we need? Because a lot of times we've grown up in such a way that when we ask what's going on or what do we need, we don't hear a nice voice in our heads. We often are very hard on ourselves and depending on who we are and how we grew up, we can be very hard on ourselves when we're going through a hard time that we're doing it wrong. We're not doing it right, or to use the term we're a f*ck up or, you know, we're messed up or whatever the thing is that we say to ourselves.

They're showing in research that is not helpful when we're dealing with a hard time that we hear stronger, harder voices. And there's this amazing thing Paul Gilbert talks about when somebody yells at us or says something to us strongly, negatively, our body has a whole cascade of chemical events that happened to make us feel a certain way. And we know that happens in the brain and we can measure it. If we silently say those same words to ourselves in our brain, in the same voice, our body does the same thing. It doesn't know the difference whether it's us saying it to ourselves or somebody is saying it to us, which is really an amazingly intense and sad thing to learn, thinking about how we often talk to ourselves, when we're dealing with trauma.

I am no expert. I'm a Chinese medicine practitioner who's had to do this work on my own, so I'm not a therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist. I'm, you know, just some guy who can sit with people and likes to ride his bike. But in that learning and sitting with my own trauma and learning that if I can be nice to myself, I'm able to maybe make more mistakes, fail and get back up and explore things a little bit more. I can be nicer to myself when I feel bad.

The best example of self-compassion or mindfulness self-compassion and why we would do it is if we have a little kid who's sick. If we are really nice to them, it doesn't make them get better any faster. We're just nice to them because they're sick. And so it's a hard thing to get a hold of with a lot of these practices. I think we were promised with therapy and meditation and a spiritual path that we're going to feel better. We're going to find a better way. Otherwise, I mean, you can't sell a program that's like this is a practice of you're just going to feel bad before you feel better. Who's going to want to do that? And that's a hard thing to commit to. So that's the biggest thing is how can we just be nice to ourself just because we're feeling bad?

I was just reading something Chris Germer says, that this mindfulness self-compassion is a practice of goodwill, not good feeling. Can we bring goodwill to our trauma and suffering?”

Kelly has two upcoming offerings on Mind Oasis, including a free mini-workshop, “The Self-Compassion Break” (22 July 2021) and a six-week series, “Mindful Self-Compassion: Being Kind to Ourselves in Moments of Sufferings” that starts 5 August 2021.

You can learn more about both here.

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