Why self-care is the least selfish thing you can do

I do not believe we can be truly empathic with others without embodying self- empathy first. 

Yes, I have drawn your attention to “embodied self-empathy”.

I have just finished co-hosting a 4 day Focusing residential and two of the trainers-in-training ran a workshop on the caring-feeling presence (from Biospiritual Focusing).

I really got an embodied sense of how my body knows when it is completely and wholly accepting (my words for describing self-empathy) of all of me and I have noticed that since that workshop I have been so excited to bring my attention back to this embodiment. It would come as no surprise to any of you, I am sure, that the more connected I am with this, my embodied Presence, the more able I am to self-empathise beyond words into my deeper pain and living experiencing AND then the  more I am able to hold a caring-wholly-accepting presence with others.

In my trainings I integrate Focusing into the NVC training by going to feelings before observations. I use, Ann Weiser Cornell’s saying hello, or acknowledging of the feelings and then a sensing into what our body knows about this. Once these feelings feel heard by my inner self then I find I have the space and inclination to make an observation that is more objective and leads to agreement.  Then, later, before making requests I use Focusing to “vision” what my body knows and can show me about how it is when my needs are met. From this space my request is more gentle and less dependent on the other person agreeing to it.

One other way I use Focusing is by using metaphors for some of the feelings. For example, when I feel “disappointed” it may be not such a big thing, when my friend feels “disappointed” it actually feels like a deep pain to her. So if she hears me say I am disappointed she interprets a higher level of pain than I may actually feel. When she tells me she is disappointed I may not realise the depth of her pain. This comes from Gene Gendlin’s TAE process and the differentiation between our public knowing and shared understanding of a word and our own individual bodily knowing of that word in our particular context.  A metaphor however, gives the listener an insight into my inner landscape. The other reason I like metaphors is that the listener doesn’t seem to take on board that they are the source of disappointment in the same way.

To be honest I am gradually coming to some sense of realising that my inner relationship with myself is critical to my NVC practice – much more so than I had realised when I started learning and practising NVC. I am moving towards developing a more extensive workshop on connecting with our inner caring-feeling presence and embodying it through a variety of experiential activities. This seems like a wonderful foundational training. The first step towards inner peace. Then, my instinct tells me the listening and expressing in NVC will flow from our inner world.

Still ruminating on this…but here are some of the ways I have heard people describe embodied self-empathy:

caring-feeling presence

radical acceptance of everything

having a good relationship with yourself

self-acceptance

Presence

spacious non-judgment

poignant stillness