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How to Meditate
Meditation is something everyone can do. Practicing can help improve your health and wellbeing.
Explore MeditationSelf-Compassion Meditation
Contrary to popular belief, self-compassion isn’t the same as self-indulgence or self-pity. Rather, self-compassion offers a way for us to fully accept our circumstances and move forward with more grace and less resistance. But cultivating self-compassion isn’t always easy. It takes a lot of practice, and it’s okay if these meditations don’t work right away. When we struggle with showing ourselves care and kindness, practicing a self-compassion meditation helps us reduce self-criticism and improve our emotional resilience.
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What is self-compassion?
Self-compassion involves treating ourselves with loving-kindness, care, and understanding — especially during life’s challenges. When we practice self-compassion, we treat ourselves with forgiveness and acceptance, allowing us to make mistakes and overcome them.
The Insight Timer meditation app has thousands of free meditations led by top mindfulness teachers around the world. If you’re curious about exploring self-compassion meditation to help improve your mental and emotional well-being, try one of our free meditation practices below.
How to practice self-compassion techniques
Self-compassion meditation isn’t just a tool to lean on during difficult times — it can be incorporated daily into your mindfulness practice. Strengthen your self-compassion muscle with the following techniques.
Acknowledge moments of pain
We don’t have to love the pain we experience, but accepting it is important for getting through it. By acknowledging when we’re in a moment of struggle, we allow ourselves to transform our challenges into opportunities. Here’s a non-judgmental mindfulness technique to help you gently acknowledge painful moments:
- Allow any thoughts or feelings to surface.
- Observe them without judgment. Self-observation meditation can be supportive here.
- Lovingly ask what your feelings or thoughts need from you.
Speak words of loving-kindness
Silencing our inner bully with more harsh words simply doesn’t work. Often, this turns into a cycle of self-criticism that’s hard to break.
Self-compassionate practices and techniques help replace our inner bully with a kinder voice. Try incorporating supportive affirmations throughout your day to soften how you speak to yourself:
- I am loved and respected.
- I am worthy of success.
- I treat myself with love and kindness.
- I deserve recognition for my achievements, no matter how small.
Bonus: Write down your affirmations in a journal each day and track how you feel before and after reciting them.
Practice genuine self-care
Genuine self-care isn’t about spending lavishly on a spa day or taking an expensive trip — although these can help at times! More so, it’s about treating yourself with kindness and compassion daily. This can look like:
- carving out time for a daily meditation practice
- exercising and moving your body
- eating mindfully
- setting boundaries with loved ones
- taking a self-compassion break when you’re overwhelmed
Ultimately, it’s about living a life that aligns with your needs on any given day and matching those needs with appropriate action and care.
Extend compassion to others
For many, extending compassion to others feels more comfortable than showing it to themselves. Surprisingly, this can be a good place to start practicing self-compassion, too. Becoming more mindful of how we extend grace to others can help us realize we’re also worthy of the same treatment. Plus, it can help strengthen our connection to the people in our lives.
Free self-compassion meditation practices with Insight Timer
Meditators, mystics, and philosophers have long understood the value of self-compassion. There are many different types of self-compassion meditations, and with Insight Timer, you can access all types of this age-old wisdom for free. Our meditation app contains over 200,000 free tracks, with 80+ new free guided meditations added daily.
Explore self-compassion meditations below, uncovering how you can become more loving and accepting toward yourself.
Metta meditation (a.k.a. loving-kindness meditation)
Metta (a Pali word), or Maitri in Sanskrit, is a type of loving-kindness meditation. In this practice, we send caring, compassionate thoughts as a wish to ourselves or others. Frequently, these types of meditations involve affirmations, such as:
- May I be safe.
- May I be healthy.
- May I be strong.
Self-compassion body scan
A self-compassionate body scan meditation entails comforting the body using sensations, thoughts, or visualization. It helps foster acceptance, gratitude, and self-love while releasing tension and stress.
Mindful self-compassion
Self-compassion researcher Kristin Neff has developed several self-compassion exercises that you can do in just a few minutes, including the mindful self-compassion break. If you’re looking for a quick meditation that’s suitable for beginners, here are some mindful compassion meditations that might be ideal for you.
Guilt and shame are universal human experiences. But they’re not always helpful. Self-forgiveness meditations help us develop a kinder and more understanding demeanor toward ourselves. This type of meditation is especially useful for caregivers, nurses, or first responders who frequently encounter stressful, life-altering situations at work.
Self-soothing meditation
Experiencing heightened emotions and having trouble self-regulating? We know how challenging that can be. A guided self-soothing meditation offers a healthy way to cope with difficult emotions while fostering a sense of safety and minimizing anxiety.
What are the benefits of self-compassion?
Self-compassion is not only a form of self-care that helps us love ourselves. It also increases our resiliency and strengthens our relationships with others.
Reduce anxiety and depression
Increased self-compassion has been linked to improvements in common mental health problems like anxiety and depression. Research shows that self-compassion has the power to help:
- decrease rumination
- minimize self-criticism
- improve depression symptoms
When we engage in self-compassion practices, we give ourselves the power to feel our emotions and move past them with greater acceptance and ease.
Boost self-esteem
Self-talk impacts our beliefs and identities in positive and negative ways. Almost everyone has experienced the voice inside their head whispering they’re not good enough. But by practicing self-compassion, we can learn to not believe it.
Practicing self-compassion can release oxytocin, the feel-good hormone, and help us raise our self-esteem. Studies have further demonstrated this with an online Mindfulness-Based Compassionate Living (MBCL) intervention that reduced participants’ self-hate and elevated their self-satisfaction.
Without the harsh inner critic taking over, we’re likely to feel safer to act authentically and take greater risks, further elevating our level of self-esteem.
Increase self-acceptance
Self-compassion reminds us that to be imperfect is to be human. Perfection doesn’t exist. And striving to be perfect reinforces the belief that we aren’t already whole, taking away from the present moment and the ability to accept ourselves as we are.
One study found that perfectionism is further correlated with a shorter lifespan. Another found increased levels of anxiety in people with perfectionist tendencies.
Everyone experiences difficult times and hardships, and the sooner we accept this, the better we can accept ourselves and our imperfections. Self-compassion helps us do just that.
Strengthen relationships
Studies show that connection with others is a necessary ingredient for living a satisfactory life. When we are able to offer ourselves greater self-compassion and acceptance, we become more capable of extending this same love and care to others. This can deeply shift our relationships with loved ones and even strangers, allowing us to show kindness and empathy without the expectation of something in return.
Explore more mindfulness tools for relationships.
The history of self-compassion practice
The earliest references to self-compassion can be traced back thousands of years to fundamental Buddhist teachings, where karuna (compassion) and metta (loving-kindness) were encouraged externally and internally. But the concept isn’t exclusively rooted in Buddhism. Self-compassion has been emphasized by many spiritual and philosophical traditions since then.
Western psychology, for instance, has played a crucial role in shaping our understanding of self-compassion and expanding its influence. Dr. Kristen Neff is credited with introducing the holistic concept of self-compassion into modern psychology in the early 2000s. As part of her postdoctoral work, Kristin Neff defined self-compassion as having three main components:
- Self-kindness: This involves being kind and understanding toward the self without harsh criticism.
- Common humanity: This is the recognition that suffering is part of the shared human experience.
- Mindfulness: This means observing our thoughts with openness and balance, neither exaggerating nor suppressing the positive or negative.
Working closely with Christopher Germer, Kristin Neff also played a critical role in developing the Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) program, which was designed to cultivate self-compassion skills for individuals, and The Center for Mindful Self-Compassion (CMSC).
Today, we can practice self-compassion with apps like Insight Timer, without becoming a Buddhist or joining a program — or you can do those too!
Resources and tools for self-compassion meditation
Insight Timer’s free meditation app
Insight Timer provides hundreds of thousands of free guided meditations to help you cultivate self-compassion. With globally recognized teachers, you’ll gain insights and wisdom from experts around the world. On top of this, new meditations are added daily, giving you an array of practices to choose from!
Online resources and communities
Online communities and groups can support you in increasing compassion for yourself and others. Enjoy support from peers on similar paths, develop lasting connections, and share tips to help further each other’s personal growth journeys. Insight Timer offers many groups catering to different meditation interests, including self-compassion meditation.
Premium self-compassion meditation courses
For those wanting a more structured approach to their self-compassion journey, consider using premium courses on Insight Timer. Here are a few meditation courses to help you get started:
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