Exploring the Path of Teaching Mindfulness and Self-Compassion

In this episode, Chris Germer speaks with Engaged Mindfulness Institute graduate Lucy Sunday about teaching mindfulness and the intrinsic role of self-compassion in mindfulness meditation practice.

• Meditation, mindfulness, and self-compassion.

• Mindfulness and self-compassion teaching methods.

• Trust, intuition, and teaching wisdom.

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Christopher Germer, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and lecturer on psychiatry (part-time) at Harvard Medical School. He co-developed the Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) program with Kristin Neff in 2010 and they wrote two books, The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook and Teaching the Mindful Self-Compassion Program. MSC has been taught to over 250,000 people worldwide Dr. Germer is also the author of The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion and he co-edited two influential volumes on therapy, Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, and Wisdom and Compassion in Psychotherapy. Dr. Germer lectures and leads workshops internationally and he has a small psychotherapy practice in Massachusetts, USA. His website is www.chrisgermer.com

Podcast Transcript

Lucy Sunday 00:00

Hello. My name is Lucy Sunday, and I am an EMI graduate. I'm delighted to be here today interviewing Chris Germer. Chris is a doctor in clinical psychology. He lectures part-time at Harvard Medical School. He also co-developed the Mindful Self Compassion Program with Kristin Neff in 2010, through which they have taught over 250,000 people worldwide since then. Thank you for joining us. When reading about all of this fantastic work you've done, the first question that popped into my mind was, which came first for you? Was it your meditation practice or contemplative practice? Or was it your Clinical psychological work?  

Chris Germer 0:57  

Thanks for asking. Meditation came first. I first learned meditation when I was 25. I learned Transcendental Meditation, and I had a big opening experience. Then, I went to India for a year and traveled around India, learning about meditation. After that, I applied to graduate school and got in. Then, I spent the rest of my career trying to bring some of the contemplative wisdom of the East into modern scientific psychology. So, I started with meditation, and I'm ending with meditation.  

Meditation has been the central thread, especially bookending, with more attention to that inner practice. In my career, I've been trying to do more external effort during my career. But now I'm at the tail end, and once again, super enjoying meditation.  

Lucy Sunday 2:10  

That's great. Your practice has been the center of gravity, and you've overlaid your work with others.  

Chris Germer 2:22  

 I think so. Yeah.  

Lucy Sunday 2:24  

That's beautiful. How would you say that self-compassion is related to mindfulness?  

Chris Germer 2:33  

Well, at an absolute level, they are indistinguishable. In other words, when we're fully mindful and suffer, we're probably self-compassionate. But what happens, for example, if we practice mindfulness and come up with a really difficult emotion, like shame, anger, or fear, we're not very mindful. We wish it to go away. So, we get caught up in aversion, grasping, confusion, or delusion. So, our mindfulness is usually not too mindful when we are in the grip of intense and disturbing emotions. And that's when we need to add something  to mindfulness practice: bring in the heart level and warmth.  

And so, mindfulness primarily regulates emotions through attention and awareness. In other words,  what we're paying attention to and how we're paying attention to it. Self-compassion regulates emotions with connection and caring. When a baby is upset, it receives connection and caring; it doesn't say, Okay, pay attention to this. A mom might direct the child to something different, which will help.  

These ways of working with our inner state of mind are complementary. That's the relative level. They're pretty indistinguishable at the absolute level, but most of us live at the relative level. But mindfulness refers to a loving awareness of moment-to-moment experience, whereas self-compassion refers to a loving awareness of the experiencer—the conscious being—the sense of self.  

What's interesting, too, is that many people who practice mindfulness worry that if they pay attention to the self, they won't be reifying the self, rigidifying the self, or making the self more of a problem. Shouldn't I just be dismantling it?  

We find that, with mindfulness, by focusing on moment-to-moment experience, we can dismantle the self and have a more flexible self. But when we focus on, so to speak, the self, the relative self, the individual self, with loving-kindness and compassion, the self also becomes more flexible; it kind of melts, it melts in the warmth. And we all know this when something's bugging us, and somebody gives us a lot of love and care, hugs us, we settle down, and we can start to deal with it. But if we're caught up in fear, we can't.  

So that's what self-compassion is about. Self-compassion, we say, is warmth. Mindfulness is space. And warmth creates space, and space creates warmth. At the end of the day, they're complementary.  

Lucy Sunday 6:12  

That's great. I'm taking notes for myself. What do you think are two guiding principles that you keep in mind when teaching people Mindful Self-Compassion?  

Chris Germer 6:33  

If people are interested in mindful self-compassion and want to be kinder to themselves when they suffer, it's well-intentioned because they want to feel better. But what happens is that often, it's mainly at the beginning of practice. It stirs up old wounds. The two things to remember are backdraft,  which I'm starting to explain. And then the second is what's called the core paradox of self-compassion.  So, what backdraft means is the distress that arises when we give ourselves compassion. So there's a saying that love reveals everything, unlike itself; this is what happens when we give ourselves love; we discover the opposite. If we start saying to ourselves, with all the best intentions, I may accept myself,  just as I am. When we start to say that, inevitably, we start to think about either how we have not been treated acceptably by others or we think about what's not acceptable within ourselves.  

So when we start thinking about these things, we don't feel good. This is called backdraft. So the reason why it is important to keep in mind for mindfulness and compassion teachers is that when your students start to feel bad, it doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. It doesn't mean they're doing anything wrong. It's the process. It's how it works. The key is to respond to the backdraft with kindness and mindfulness.

In other words, if I remember a traumatic event that happened when I was five or 10 and I have some traumatic memories. In this moment, we have an opportunity to transform that experience by holding ourselves in that moment as the difficult emotion arises with the same kind of understanding and compassion that we needed back then.  

But now we can give it to ourselves. When we do that, the memories are transformed. This is actually how self-compassion transforms through the mechanism of backdraft. But if teachers aren't aware of it, they will blame themselves, or students of meditation will blame themselves because we are all expecting to feel better, and then lo and behold, we feel bad.

So when we feel bad, it's not a bad thing—it's a good thing. It means self-compassion is working. How we respond to it matters, and that's where the magic happens. The second point, the core paradox, is closely related to this. That is, when we suffer, we practice self-compassion—not to feel better but because we feel bad.  

What does that mean to you, Lucy? 

Lucy Sunday 10:00 

It means it's not goal-oriented; it's more oriented toward actual care.  

Chris Germer 10:07  

 Absolutely. We're stuck in backdraft, or when we're just practicing self-compassion because we're not feeling so good anyway, we have an idea that if I throw self-compassion that my experience, or at me,  I'm going to feel better, or I'm going to become a better person. In other words, it's a strategy. And it just doesn't work. It may work initially with a beginner's mind for a short while. But after a while, it is in the service of resistance. Ultimately, what we want to do is to be able to open up to our experiences, feel them, and be kind to ourselves.  

So, for example, with loving kindness and meditation, there's an old Torah story in which a student asked the rabbi, Why can't we take the holy words and put them in our hearts? Why does the Torah say we should put the holy words on our hearts? And the rabbi responded Because as we are, our hearts are closed. So we put the holy words in our hearts. And then, when the heart breaks, the words fall in.  

This is how we can open our hearts to what's happening in the present moment. Responding to that with warmth and kindness makes all the difference. If we're saying, Self-compassion, self-compassion, self-compassion, because I don't want to feel like this, I don't want to feel like this. It's just a war that we're in with ourselves. So the goal of practice is, as Rob Nair, a meditation teacher in Scotland, says, to become a compassionate mess. And Jack Kornfield says We don't practice to perfect ourselves. We practice to perfect our love. Or, again, when we suffer, we don't practice removing our suffering; we practice meeting our suffering with kindness.  

That's key. When a meditation teacher has that in mind, they can better understand why self-compassion and mindfulness are not working. It's because it's in the service of resistance, and what we resist persists. But if we can open ourselves to our experiences with loving kindness, then transformation happens naturally. So those are the two things to keep in mind. If you're teaching self-compassion,  expect backdraft and help your students to refine the intention behind their practice, from feeling better to loving themselves because they're not feeling so good.  

Lucy Sunday 13:36  

 I appreciate so much of that. The one that stands out to me is that intention to meet it and have the capacity to be with the suffering. Also, from the lens of newer teachers who are entering into this, being teachers, having that capacity for oneself stretches their capacity to be there for whoever it is that they're sitting with, right? 

Chris Germer 14:06 

Teachers must know that they are open to this from their own experience. And frankly, if a teacher knows how to open up to their suffering, they can open up to their participant’s or their student’s suffering without colluding to make it go away. In other words, when somebody shares their struggle, we don't want the teacher's heart to clench. We want the teacher's heart to open and think,  Oh, tell me what's going on for you. Let's be with this together rather than work together to drive this away. So teachers need to have experience in their hearts with how transformation happens most naturally by opening to suffering rather than wishing it didn't happen.  

Lucy Sunday 15:02  

That highlights the point you made earlier about the strategy. Suppose you're going into the practice with the strategy of not being with the suffering or going into self-compassion practice with the strategy of not being with the suffering. In that case, you're projecting that onto whoever you're sitting with.  

Chris Germer 15:19  

And all the while respecting that all of us, the only reason we do anything is because we wish to be happy and suffer less, so everybody will always have this agenda. The question is, how do we succeed? The Buddha said you don't succeed by wishing it weren't so. You succeed in alleviating suffering by opening and accepting the fact of suffering. That was the Buddha's first Noble Truth, life includes suffering, so if we could get this in our heads. So, anyhow, neurologically, we never get it in our heads. But we can override through wisdom and learn that suffering will recede by opening our eyes to suffering. So it's paradoxical.  

Lucy Sunday 16:16  

 What is that inquiry process that's used in Mindful self-compassion?  

Chris Germer 16:30  

So, inquiry is a way that teachers engage their students to talk about life, particularly about practice. The general idea is that the teachers model in their interaction with their students the relationship they would like their students to cultivate in relationship to themselves. So that means if your student wishes to learn mindfulness, then the teacher should relate to the student mindfully because the student inevitably takes that conversation into their hearts and then relates to their own experience like that. So inquiry is meditation in relationship toward the purpose of having somebody relate to their own experience or themselves more mindfully or compassionately.  

There are different aspects to it. How inquiry is conducted in mindfulness-based stress reduction differs slightly from how inquiry is conducted in mindful self-compassion. The essence of inquiry and  Mindful Self Compassion is emotional resonance. So what does that mean? Dan Siegel says it means, You know that I know what you're feeling. When we can empathize with somebody, we feel that this person knows what I'm experiencing.  

So that's resonance, and then to conduct an inquiry on the foundation of resonance if you're the teacher, it means as your student is speaking, you are feeling this person in your body, you have a felt experience of this person. And you're also listening for what stands out. In MSC, we call it the pings, like something that stands out is a student's courage, determination, sense of humor, or insight. That's a ping. Or maybe what stands out is despair, shame, or confusion. Those are pings. So, as we listen to a student talking about their experience, we feel it in our bodies; we are resonating. As that person shares, we're noticing the key things that are popping up within me. And then, when it comes time to speak, the teacher speaks from the pings, so we're listening with the heart and speaking from the heart. So if somebody asks how your practice is, Oh, fine, you know, like smiling, but inside you think you're feeling like it's not going so well.  

You want to respond from that awareness: You're a brave soul. I could see you want to make this work. I appreciate your tenacity. Are there any struggles, though, in your practice? So you speak from that; intuitive awareness comes from resonance. So that's the inquiry process. Then, the more a teacher can do this, the more the student or participant in a program can do it for themselves. In that way, ultimately, they learn self-compassion. In other words, the best way to teach self-compassion through a relationship is to be compassionate and give compassion. Besides, self-compassion is a loving,  connected presence. If we can be with our students with a loving, connected presence, they can feel it and include themselves in that relational experience.  

That's inquiry, in a nutshell. People can spend 200 hours learning and inquiry, and I just shared what we do in Mindful Self Compassion.  

Lucy Sunday 21:26  

Thank you for sharing. I had a couple of pings; I just kept thinking of the word attunement, emotional resonance, and also of when you're attuned if you're trusting your own Buddha nature, then you can reflect or model that to whoever it is that you're working with.  

Chris Germer 21:49  

You need to trust your experience as a teacher and your felt experience. And even to some extent, do not trust your thoughts too much. So if I have a direct experience and go into my head, think about it,  and then talk about my thoughts, I've disconnected. And the other person can feel it. So, we want to resist the temptation to think about stuff. And we usually go into our heads when we cannot hold in our hearts a person's experience, if it frightens us or makes us feel despair. If we're not comfortable being in the midst of empathic suffering, we will go into our heads, we will talk from our heads, and that creates disconnection.   

Lucy Sunday 22:52  

The thoughts override what's genuinely happening.  

Chris Germer 22:56  

It's a defense against what we're feeling. So, staying with what we feel and then responding from that same experience—listening and speaking with the heart—is the essence of inquiry.  

Lucy Sunday 23:13  

It's great. Thank you. We touched on a couple of these, but I will ask the question anyway. Because there's probably more to say, what are some critical elements in preparing and training to become a mindfulness teacher?  

Chris Germer 23:34  

Well, first is one's own experience, one's practice. If you want to be a mindfulness teacher, you should practice mindfulness. If you want to be a self-compassion teacher, you should practice self-compassion.  So, the foundation is one's practice. The second thing is that you have to like people. Some people want to be teachers because they like being a teacher. But maybe you don't love people. Maybe that's not your thing. Maybe you'd rather write books about stuff rather than deal with people.  

 You have to like people and want to be in connection with people. So that's another thing, personal practice being in connection. Then, the whole learning process has multiple, what are called domains of competence; in the MBSR and MBCT world, they have a framework with domains of competence that we can learn. In the world of self-compassion, for example, you want to learn, first of all, the curriculum of the  MSC program. You want to learn how to guide practices, you want to be able to hold a group, you want to be able to interact compassionately with people when it's difficult, like when they don't like you, or when it's not going well. We need to be able to practice inquiry. So, there are various domains of competence. In other words, pedagogical skills are necessary to teach this properly. But the foundation is a personal practice and enjoying people and connection.  

Lucy Sunday 26:02  

 I don't hear that second one getting mentioned very often. It's very, very key.  

Chris Germer 26:10  

Once you are successful in this as a teacher, they love it. People want to be around people who love them. They will like the experience, and they'll tell their friends, that kind of thing.  

Lucy Sunday 26:30  

It makes so much sense. Do you have any tips for maintaining practice?  

Chris Germer 26:42  

Yeah, so usually in chat in MSC courses, like online ones, we asked people, Okay, those of you who have been practicing for a long time, what tips would you offer? So, there are probably 100 tips. Anytime you look at a meditation magazine, they usually say, these are the five things that usually don't match each magazine, the five top reasons, the best tips for practicing. So it's quite variable, and it depends on  the individual what tips, so just to be clear about that. The common ones are practicing in the community, having a sacred space to do it simultaneously, and doing things like that.  

However, I found that the two most important elements for practice if you want to have an ongoing practice are making it pleasant. And number two, make it as easy as possible. And if it's not pleasant or easy, make sure it's super meaningful. Because that allows us to do it, even if it's not pleasant and easy.  But what this means is that you have to like it. And it shouldn't be a big climb to get there, it should be a low threshold, like walking from your living room to your kitchen. You don't have to climb Mount Washington to do it; it's easy.  

So make it pleasant and easy, and then it becomes self-reinforcing. If we like it, we'll do it again. If we don't like it, we won't. So what this means is that if practice, particularly meditation, feels like work, we will not do it. We just won't. We have so much work already. We have so much drudgery in our lives. If meditation becomes drudgery, we won't do it. So, students' first obligation is to figure out how to make this pleasant, so I want to do it again. It's just like somebody who wants to go to the gym regularly. What does it take to go to the gym every day? What it takes is you liked it the last day, and you'll want to do it again. This is the key. You have to figure it out. And nobody can tell you how to do this. You have to figure it out. It might mean you sit on a cushion or a couch instead of a cushion. It  might mean you sit down with a hot cup of tea or your dog in your lap. What is it? What is it for you? So make it pleasant, easy, and ideally meaningful so you'll carry on when it is neither pleasant nor easy.  

I think self-reinforcing is helpful, too. I recommend sitting and experiencing the rewards of learning how to be more present with oneself and others.  

Chris Germer 30:01  

It has to be a relief. It has to cause relief, not just the absence of stress or less stress. But then there's also the joy aspect and less stress is positive; joy is positive. You want to make it delightful. It must feel good, or we will not do it again.  

Lucy Sunday 30:31  

That's great. One of my early meditation teachers told me that every time I stand up from the cushion before I stand up, I put a smile on my face.  

Chris Germer 30:41  

Yeah, and as long as it's real. If, for example, putting a smile on your face feels like you're just doing your duty, it's not sustainable. If you feel good putting a smile on your face.  

Lucy Sunday 30:56  

It was very context-specific. What motivates you, or what rather, continues to be your north star in  wanting to keep doing this work and share and teach this work in the ways that you are?  

Chris Germer 31:19  

Several things. So first of all, in life, we have to be useful. We have to contribute. We have to help. That brings joy to oneself and others. So when I get up in the morning after meditating, it's like,  okay, what next? And so, for me, the next thing is to contribute to this area, helping people grow their inner lives. That's the main thing.

As a psychologist and meditator, I have always been entranced by the inner life. Psychology is about the mind. Meditation goes beyond the  mind, but it's both inner. This is my thing. This is what happens very naturally to me. This is what says what I do. And it is a contribution. So, as there is life in the body, I want to be helpful in some way. And this is the way that comes most naturally and benefits most. So that's pretty much it. I think in life,  especially nowadays, especially with technology, the inner life is undervalued. Everything is external, like what's happening in the world. I think this is why there's so much suffering right now: We are completely out of balance, both inner and outer life.  

And so, during the pandemic, for example, people massively started to learn contemplative practice because they were on a forced retreat and didn't know what to do with their minds. Then when the pandemic ended, people went back into their external lives, and some people stayed with what they learned internally and others didn't. But unbalanced in this world, the inner life is, in my view,  significantly undervalued. And so I think more and more people need to learn how to occupy inner space so that their lives, individually and collectively, will be better. Compassion and mindfulness are very deep, ancient, and empirically validated ways that anybody can do this without any traditional allegiance or lack thereof. It's precious for our world as well to cultivate these inner skills.  

Lucy Sunday 34:42  

 I couldn't agree more. That was beautifully said. It feels like a culmination point where we can start to bring things to an end. Is there anything else that feels salient or that's lingering for you that you'd like to share with people who are on this path of becoming teachers?  

Chris Germer 35:15  

A critical point for teachers is personal practice. However, teachers need to trust themselves and their intuition. We need to check our intuition with external awareness and wisdom. But I think self-confidence is essential for teachers. I say this particularly because we need to trust our students to do our job as teachers. We need to have confidence in our students, and we need to have more  confidence in our students than our students have in themselves. We need to see beyond our student's current level of individuality and the enormous resources that each of us has, which are largely untapped.  

To have that kind of deep confidence in the wisdom of a student, we need to develop confidence in our wisdom. And when we have deep confidence in the students, we can encourage them to have confidence in themselves. And ultimately, every student, in my view, is their own best teacher. If it ever comes to whether I should trust my intuition or my teacher, Trust yourself. This quality is trusting the student and knowing that the student is their best teacher. And then ultimately, if a student says, No, I  don't want to go there, or That's too tricky for me, back off. Just respect resistance, respect boundaries, and respect the student’s wisdom. Maybe in one year or 10 years, they would like to take it further,  someplace you would like to take it. But for now, always trust your students. To do that,  we have to trust ourselves. That's important.  

Lucy Sunday 37:54  

I think so, too. Beautifully said. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing such wisdom with us, but with wider circles in the world, the work you do. 

Chris Germer 38:17 

Thanks, Lucy. It's a joy. And what a pleasure to have this conversation. Thanks for your time and your wisdom. 

Lucy Sunday 38:27  

Thank you.