Fierce Self-Compassion w/ Dr. Kristin Neff

the Laverne Cox Show. I'm Laverne Cox. Something a lot of people don't know about me is I can be really hard on myself, like debilitating lee hard on myself. Years ago, in an acting class in New York City with Brad Calcatara, Brad would have me do this exercise to take on the shell of the bitchiest drag queen from RuPaul's Drag Race and to read myself as if you know, I was reading someone else with all the

negative things that I say about myself. And so I commenced doing the exercise and fully committing because that's what I do as an actor. And after Brad said cut, I broke down into tears because I had witnesses a class full of people who witnessed how hard I am on myself, all the horrible, awful things I say to myself about myself. Self criticism is something that has been a theme in my life. It's something that I I

think I've used as a survival strategy. And last year, when the pandemic started and I was alone a lot, I realized that all of those old self critical thoughts were creeping back in all of a sudden, I was being really, really mean and awful to myself, and that I'm just kind of almost hardwired. And so I turned to Kristin Nef's work on self compassion. I went to Kristin Neff's website and I was like, Okay, I should

definitely look into this. That's why I wanted to have Kristin Neff on the show to talk about it, to help me on my journey towards being better. It's self compassion, and hopefully it will help you as well. Dr Kristin Neff is an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and a pioneer in the

field of self compassion reserved. Her new book called Fierce Self Compassion, How Women can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim their Power and Thrive has been released this summer. She argues in it that in order to realize the full benefits of self compassion, we need to develop both its strong and tender side. She's also the author of Self Compassion, The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, where she explains how to heal destructive emotional patterns. Please

enjoy my conversation with Dr Kristen Neff. Hello Kristen, and welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today? I'm doing wonderfully. Thank you so much to learn for having me on your show. Can we just start by you just defining what self compassion is. Absolutely so self compassion.

It's really just compassion turned inward. So we're familiar with what the experience of compassion for someone else's when you know, when someone else is struggling, or they're feeling badly about themselves and they make a mistake, or you know, have some health challenge, you know what it feels like to open our heart to someone, to be warm, to be supportive, and really, at the heart of compassion is concerned with the alleviation of suffering, the desire to help in some

way So self compassion quite simply is just making a U turn and using that same supportive attitude with ourselves. Right, so even if we fail or we're feeling inadequate, we accept ourselves, We encourage change if that's what's needed. There's a sense of kindness and care and connectedness and how we relate to ourselves compassionate about alleviating suffering, and then how do we turn that inward? It just feels like a very something. I'm gonna breathe, and how do we

alleviate suffering from within? And I was talking to my boyfriend last night and I told him I was recording the podcast to day and he asked what the topic was and I told himself compassion, and he's sort of did Devil's advocate? Well, you know what is what if you're too compassionate towards yourself and you don't hold yourself

accountable or you become narcissistic. And then I sent him an excerpt from your new book where you distinguish between self compassion and self esteem, and he's like, I think I was talking about self esteem. Can you address that and then talk to us about the difference between self compassion and self esteem. Yes, so well. Inherent to compassion is connectedness, right, So, Laverne, you'd probably like it if I had compassion for you, and you probably wouldn't like

it if I pitied you. So what's the difference. The difference is other people. If I pity you, I'm feeling sorry for you, I'm looking down on you, have compassion for you. It's like, hey, I've been there, I've gone through something similar. So it's the same thing with self compassion. It's not self pity. It's not self focused. It's not woe is me? You know, because the word self is in there, people think it's self focused, but it's actually

everyone faces life challenges. It's actually not just me. And so when we relate to our own struggles and imperfection with that more connected, inclusive stance, it's not so much about self love as it is just love in general. And in fact, if we just turm love outward and we care about others and we cut ourselves out of the circle of compassion, if we if we're kind to others and we treat ourselves like crap, you know, that's really self focused, isn't it. That's really not seeing ourselves

as part of the larger hole, right. And so you know what we know about self compassion and self esteem is they're kind of related. In other words, if you have more self compassion, you're gonna have higher self esteem. But what the based on is very different. Self compassion is unconditional. Self esteem is a judgment is like, did I did I, you know, make my sales target? Was I productive enough? How do I look? You know? Did

I lose the way they wanted to lose? The worth that comes from self esteem tends to be conditional, as conditioned on success, on what other people think of us. It's there for us on the good days, but it's a fair weather friend. You know. What happens when we fail or we aren't productive or we gain gain that way or whatever it is that our self esteem is based on, it deserts us. And so there's been a

lot of research actually comparing the two. And so what we know is the sense of self worth that comes from self compassion is much less contingent, is much less dependent on external circumstances, and therefore it's more stable over time. We need to remember that it's not just us. We aren't alone. This is part of the shared human experience,

and really importantly, we need to care about it. We need to have desire to help ourselves in some way, to hold ourselves, whether we're helping ourselves with warmth and acceptance, or maybe we're helping ourselves by saying you better do something differently because this isn't working for you. You know. I like to say self compassion could be tender or can be fierce. It it really just depends on what

we need to alleviate or suffering gorgeous gorge. We've been talking about shared humanity as one of the three elements of self compassion, and you name two others. Can you

talk about those and how how important they are? Yes? So, kindness, which is kind of the most obvious, being kind and supportive toward ourselves, accepting as opposed to very harshly judgmental, a sense of common humanity, remembering that everyone's imperfect and everyone leads an imperfect life, as opposed to feeling really isolated and separate by our pain and struggles. And also mindfulness.

Mindfulness actually has to be a part of self compassion because could you imagine if you had a new a friend who was struggling and you didn't pick up her phone calls, or you just like blew her off, like I'm busy. I'm sorry, I can't listen to you. You know you can't. You couldn't have compassion for your friend. And yet we do that to ourselves. We get so busy and we're just so focused on problem solving or getting through each day that we don't pause to be mindful.

You aware of the fact that, oh this is really hard. You know, what can I do to help myself at this moment? Can you define mindfulness? Because mindfulness is a word we hear a lot right in wellness space. We heard a lot, and I feel like I don't always know what it means if I'm being really how do you define mindfulness? Right? What I have to say? I'd like to steal a line from Bernie Brown. We are teaching a workshop together once and she said, Kristen, I

don't like the word mindfulness is to woo woo. Can we rename it courageous presence? And I'm like, that's why you're so brilliant, Bernie. So that's what it is, right, It's the courage to be present with what is so beautif the courage to be present with what is yes. It's so we avoid two extremes. One extreme is just pretending is not there. I'm gonna look at it, put in our head in the sand. I mean the way that people do with so much of the suffering in society.

What's not a problem, right, I'm not going to even go there. That's not mindful. At the same time, when we're president, it's like we're exaggerating. We aren't lost in the drama. There's some spaciousness. It's like, yeah, this this hurts, instead of being lost in the paining, like oh my god, this is the worst. Seeing everyone catastrophizing, it's like just seeing things for what they are, no more and no less.

I love in your work that you give us concrete things because I read you or I watch a speech. I'm listening to you now and I'm able to take it in and I'm able to embody everything you're saying about self compassion and feel it. But then I have what you call default mode. I have a default mode that is very critical, and I think what I want to go to now are the things that get in the way of us having self compassion. I think that's related to attachment theory, and I think it's related to

trauma as well. For me, I think a lot of my self criticism comes from having been bullied. My mother was emotionally abusive, and I think a lot of what she was really critical of me in ways to try to protect me, right, So that I learned and very early that like if I'm self critical, if I sort of preemptibly bully myself, then I can be protected and safe from a really harsh world or racist world, effectist

all the things. So my default mode is to be highly critical of myself, and it takes it takes a lot of work for me not to just immediately go to beating myself up like that is my like boom, that's where I go, because that's just it's so deeply ingrained. And how do you when you do your default mode is to be self critical, and like, how do we what is the work to like break out of that? I guess self criticism its rooted in the desire to be safe. So we don't want to beat ourselves up

for beating ourselves up. Right, Even our parents who are often very misguided, you know, they thought they were keeping us safe by criticizing us. Of course we know that they actually made things worse. It's the exact same thing with ourselves. We think we're keeping ourselves safe but beating ourselves up criticizing ourselves, but in fact it's just making things worse. So you might say that the root of

the desire to criticize ourself is actually a good one. Ironically, is the desire to be safe and to protect ourselves. It's just that it's really not effective. So when we criticize ourselves, were activating the threat defense system, we increase cortisol for instance, that fight or flight response to try to feel safe. When we give ourselves compassion for activating the parasympathetic nervous system, or you might say, the care system and reduces cortisol, and it makes us feel safe

another way. And that's what the attachment system, the safety of care. Right, So when you have a friend or your parents put their arms around you and say, hey, it's okay, sweetheart, I care for you, that also makes us feel safe. So believe it or not quite literally, that's what we do with ourselves. Hey it's okay, sweetheart, I'm here for you. Right, And we don't want to believe that we're perfect when we aren't. You know there are things we need to change there, there are real

dangers in our environment. That's why I like to call this, like Mama bear self compassion. You know, sometimes self compassion this care is like I'm gonna protect you, but it's not coming from a place of you know, because you aren't good enough or you aren't worthy unless you change. It's like I want you to change because I care about you and I want to protect you. It gives us the sense of safety that's actually much more effective.

And um, it's a different frame. It's a different frame than like you are a piece of ship you need to change and think you are beautiful and worthy and deserve you know, all the things. Now it feels like a great time for a short break. We'll be right back now, we are back, pick you up where we left on. It hits me in my gut when I think about the trauma piece where I think that the attachment piece and the trauma piece for me, that's what

gets in the way. Yes, and you talk about the relationship between attachment theory and how self compassion can be a way to sort of fix some of our anxious or um where it was anxious and then um, what was the other at all acts and avoidance. Yeah, I can so. First of all, your intuition that trauma, especially family trauma, makes it more difficult, is absolutely true. In fact, we even have a term for it. We call it backdraft. Backdraft.

You know, backdraft is a firefighting term and it refers to when you open the doors of a house on fire, the fresh air rushes in and the flames rush out, and you can actually be quite explosive. So the reason firefighters carry those picks, it's probably so they can poke hold holes in the house to let the errand more slowly. Well, actually, a similar process happens with self compassion. I've had people, you know, write me and say, Kristen, thanks for giving

me one more thing I'm bad at. Like sometimes when we practice self compassion, especially especially if we have early family trauma, it's scary at first because what's happened is, again we've had to shut down our hearts, we had to number ourselves. It's almost like when you numb your hands and they start to warm up, they start to hurt. The same things happens with their hearts. And also the

attachment system which should have made us feel safe. If you have early family trauma didn't make you feel safe, quite the opposite, and so this is definitely a barrier to people practicing self compassion because it's frightening and it can feel safer just to keep ourselves shut down. What we're really doing with self compassion is we're reparenting ourselves. We're starting to give ourselves unconditional love. You start to rely on yourself, you start to feel secure because you

know that you'll be there for yourself. Right. So there's a whole type of therapy called compassion focused therapy that's all about using compassion to help people deal with early childhood trauma. But again, so just like those firefighters that have the pics to let in the air more slowly, if you do have a history of trauma, we tell people just you just need to go slowly. Maybe you're doing one of the meditations on my website and you know you're you're doing it and you just become flooded

with painful memories, or you start dissociating. We know which which can happen for people if they have strong back off. If you decide, Okay, I'm gonna stop this meditation, not because I'm bad at it, but because you know what, this isn't what I need right now. This is a bit too much, is overwhelming. I'm going to have a cup of tea instead to care for myself. If you do that, you're still practicing self compassion. And it really

doesn't matter how you practice self compassion. It can be taking a walk, fetting your cat, having to cup of tea. You can go slowly, you like to say, go slowly, walk farther. Yeah, right, what's really important is to shifting attitude in mindset. Why are you doing it? You're doing it because you care about yourself and you're trying to help yourself be well. Yeah, absolutely, it's a gentle process, or it could be too much, and I think it

can flow down the healing. It's like you're re traumatized in the process, right. Absolutely. You said that when our hands are numb, it can kind of feel painful. When they warm up, it hurts. Yeah, when they warm up, it hurts. So it's like a gentle a gentle warming by the fire. Yes, And it really is not a destination. It's a journey. It's not like you get to this point where you're totally self compassionate. It's really moment by moment,

how are you relating to this particular moment. Normally we close down unconsciously, you know, we grab that beer, or we just need to put on the TV. We don't get any benefit from it. It's really your intention. You know, why are you doing it? Are you just doing it mindlessly?

But if you consciously close and you say, you know, this is a little too much for me right now, I'm gonna do something else, And first of all, you've done it out of kindness, and then second of all, you remember that, Okay, I'll try to come back to this when I have more resources available, and self compassion is an amazingly powerful resource to do the work of healing. M It's beautiful. What I also love too, because my my therapist always says to me, She asked me, where

do you feel letting your body? She says, it had to be embodied. Can you talk a little bit about how we can embody so that it's not just an idea in our heads, but that it becomes embodied, it becomes something that can we can use to shift our nervous systems and to regulate our nervous systems. So anytime we're dealing with difficult emotions. We actually encourage people if they can, to stop thinking about what this situation is

and just to feel the discomfort in their body. Right, the emotions very intense, so times the best thing to do is, instead of feeling the emotion itself, actually fill your feet, the soles of your feet on the ground. Now the way, you're actually distracting yourself and the sensation of the emotional pain. You aren't like if you feel stabbing in your gut and it's really overwhelming, you actually don't want to feel the stabbing in your gut. You want to feel the soles of your feet on the ground.

So you're distracting yourself, you're moving your attention. You can do it anywhere, So for instance, nurses often use this practice that we've taught when they're all stressed out, you know, dealing with the COVID pandemic. These feel the souls of their feet as they're walking from room to room. Because you always have your feet, you're typically always standing, so it's something you can do it any time, and it's

very good for grounding and stabilizing you. And there's actually research that shows it's a very good way to deal with overwhelming emotions. Having said that, if it's not so overwhelming to go with the physical emotion again the storyline of my boyfriend left me or whatever, it is maybe too overwhelming, but maybe you can handle feeling that, you know,

stabbing in your gut. So you can, for instance, just put your hands gently over the part of your body where you're feeling the pain and the verb would you indulge people by doing that? Right now? I'm doing it right now. It's always in my gud You can't see I'm doing it too. Yeah, And just you just feel the warmth of your hands and kind of use the pressure that's kind of tender and supportive, and then you say some kind words to yourself, like I'm so sorry,

this is so hard. I'm here for you. Is there anything I can do to help You're just like you might say to a friend you put your hand on their shoulders, I'm so sorry, you know, can I help you anyway? Even if there's absolutely nothing you can do, When your friend just knows that you're there for her and that you love her, it helps the exact same thing with ourselves. So maybe we can't solve the problem, and it's just you know, ancient, or it's too difficult.

Just being able to rely on the fact that we care and we want to help and support ourselves makes a huge difference in our ability to cope. I'm so sorry. Is there is something I can do to help? Yeah, I'm here for you. Aren't those the words we long to hear from other people, which end often they for

whatever reason, they can't say it. Yeah, And I think too, like a lot of my life was like when I'm when I turned thirty and when I turned forty, and I just felt very like I hadn't done what I needed to do and what I was here to do. When I was just so hard on myself because I hadn't achieved what I wanted to achieve, and that was so none of that was helpful. It's like repeating the cycle of me not getting to where I need to

go by trying being so critical. It's like it's I'm trying to help, but it actually is making things worse. So if you think of a newborn child just comes out of the womb first day on this earth, I think most people just so naturally feel the intrinsic worthiness of that newborn child. You don't say to that newborn child. Okay, you know, go once you get your college when to come back, and then maybe you'll be worthy. We could feel, you know, the sanctity of you know, the beautiful, precious

nature of the life of that newborn child. And that's still us. You know, we're still that newborn child in many ways, just like we would protect the life of that newborn child. You know, we deserve the same kindness, care and love that that that newborn child does. And really that's what self compassion is is giving ourselves that same kind of parental, unconditional, loving, supportive energy. I love it, I love it. Thank you. Your new book, it's called

your new book, it's called Fierce Compassion. How Women can harness kindness to speak up, claim their power and thrive. Can you talk a bit about why you chose to focus on women and gender and in relationship to the self compassion in your new book. Yes, yes, So it's it's really about harmful effects of genderal socialization. So as a trans woman you probably know something about this, right, I've talked extensively about this for years yet, So basically

I talked about there's two faces of self compassion. There's two sides of it that I call the fierce and the tender side. The tender side is more the side of self compassion. We've been talking about the mothering energy, the unconditional love and support, and this is what allows us just to be with ourselves tenderly, gently. But there's also really important fierce side to compassion. Like I said, the MoMA bear energy, the warrior energy. You want to

see someone fierce. You try to threaten a mother's child or threaten a Mama bear's child, you know she'll tear your head off. So this idea of protection and also providing for being willing, willing to sacrifice and do stuff to help or to motivate change. But what's happened with traditional gender role socialization because we just stuff people in the boxes? Right, So people who are you know, born at birth as women are supposed to be tender and

nurturing and kind and gentle. But she better not be angry or fierce because we're gonna call her names. But people who are born you know, biologically as men, they also you know, they're socialized, but they aren't allowed to be too tender. You know that they're called sissy, they're called names and that really cuts men off from this whole beautiful part of their nature because of genderal socialization.

So really, you might say the whole thesis of the book is freeing ourselves from these restrictive gender roles norms, and just saying that this these are two energies that every single human being needs to develop and integrate and harness to help themselves be. Well, it's really about how all human beings are harmed by these oppressive gender roles.

And I really passionately believe that I love it, and I prefer the term assigned male at birth or assigned female at birth to talk about what what we sort of impose on people, right, yes, thank you with that assignment. What's really deep to me that when someone is born and they have a certain set of genitalian so we assign them a gender, and then we have all these expectations of how they should be based on that genitalia.

I've lived it. I was assigned male at birth, and there were all these sort of spectators of the power is supposed to act, and I was in the system. What I learned very early on is if I do not conform to those expectations, I will be punished. I will literally be beaten by other children. I will be beaten and chastised by my parents and teachers. That there are violent consequences to not conforming to those expectations, and

everyone learns that. And if even if you're not transgender, you learned very early on that there are consequences to not conforming to the expectations, even sist gender people get. I really think that if we can move beyond these simple binary categories and really just go towards seeing all the faces of love, and there's more than just fierce and tender, They're unlimited, you know, love manifest in so many different ways. Yeah, I think our non binary siblings

have so much to offer us on this. I think that the relationship between self compassion and embracing every aspect of ourselves in terms of our gender expression is it's the most compassionate thing, because it's like, the judgment of I have to repress this masculine part of myself or I have to repress this feminine part of myself is not compassionate. The self compassionate approach is to be like,

this is beautiful. This is the beautiful side of myself that I have to allow to be more authentic, but I have to love all of myself. You're probably also noticed in the book, I don't even use the terms of masculine and feminine. I use the terms yin and young because even the you know, the fact that you call the masculine and feminine in a way is already

messed up. For instance, Mama bear, that's a female energy, although we typically think of that ferocity as part of the masculine gender role really has nothing to do with gender. These these yin and young energies, these gentle and ferienced energies that are part of life. We know from Chinese philosophy that in order to be healthy and well, we need both in and young. They need to be balanced and integrated. In fact, the definition of disease is an

invalid between you and young. And yet we're saying the half of the world's population you could only be one way and not the other. You know, it's messed up. Thank you. I love that, and I think in the book what I think. I also appreciate that you delve deeply into anger and why it's why it's tricky, and you know, as a black woman, you know where and you talk about this in the book that we're often

I've been called an angry black woman many times. Can you talk to us a little bit about like the difference between like when anger we can become this thing that releases the wrong hormones and like becomes detrimental, and then when it's useful, and then the relationship between healthy anger unhealthy anger. For for women, that's a lot I can't And by the way, Levern, I'm talking about this not a soone who gets it right all the time,

but the someone who often gets it wrong. Anger is a bit of an issue for me, and I thought it was something that I could work with with mindfulness and compassion and I could hold so I wouldn't be so reactive. And it really wasn't until I fully saw that, Wait a sec. It my mom a very side, my angry side. That's what's allowed me to accomplish everything I've accomplished in the world and helped me raise my artistic

sun and do so many good things. You don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, right, It's something that we need to honor, really deeply honor that ferocity. The main difference between constructive and destructive anger is what's its purpose. So constructive anger is aimed at reducing harm, alleviating suffering, compassion, right, it's all really so angered and justice. Anger at sexual harassment, anger, it um you know, someone

exploiting someone else. The anger is actually it's not personal, right, So when it's constructive, it's just saying this is wrong and it needs to stop. Right, and when harnessed in that way in the service of justice, it can actually be very effective. Destructive anger, on the other hand, is personal. It's retaliatory. It's cutting people out of the circle of humanity, saying you're badge or evil, I hate you, and that's

when it becomes destructive. But even constructive anger, even if it's really clear and firmed, people still aren't gonna like it, especially from a woman, especially from a black woman, because it triggers all these stereotypes. So it's not like if you use constructive anger, everyone's going to suddenly be okay with it. They may still not be okay with it, but you'll be okay with it. It doesn't raise your

cortisol levels, it doesn't leak to the heart problems. It actually leaded more effective conflict resolution as long as it's clean, and it's aimed at preventing harm as opposed to being used to cause harm. That's when it becomes the problem. This is just that to be really real here, I did this really intense for me because I so much of the ways in which I've abdicated for justice publicly.

I mitigate my anger, or I tried really hard to mitigate my anger, like, because I feel like people are going to be able to hear me, They're gonna be like, oh, she's just angry. She's this black trans woman who's angry. And so I'm constantly out in the world going on television shows talking about injustice that is infuriating and trying

to mitigate my tone and mitigate my anger. It's so it's like this nuanced thing right around allowing ourselves to have righteous anger, to have anger that against injustice, but but do it in a way in public so that people can still hear us. It's a challenge, is a huge challenge that anger has to be modulated in such a way so that it doesn't turn inward and said that it doesn't become self effacing or self critical. And that's where I go, because I will beat myself up

in a second. I mean so, so it really just comes down to the simple idea, is it causing harm or preventing harm? Right, So, you might even get angry at yourself if you are stuck in a really toxic relationship, or maybe you're addicted to a substance and it's really harming you, you may need to get quite fierce with yourself, even angry. But it's not angry like you are bad, you are unworthy. It's not personal. It's just the powerful

young energy. If this has got to stop, this is harmful. No, it feels like it's the difference between shame and guilt. That shame is I'm sorry I am a mistake, and guilt to that and sorry I made a mistake. So then the guilt becomes something that can become adaptive as opposed to the shame that becomes like at least to depression and suicidal ideations and whatnot. So it feels like the anger that we have needs to be about behavior and not self. We have love for each other, but

it is the behavior. The behavior is not okay. That it's not that we have anger about. It's a brilliant analogy. I think that's exactly. It is, right, It's it's not personal, it's not blaming, it's not shaming, but it can be quite fierce in terms of its intensity. So I like, I've got a picture if you were to go into my meditation room right now, I've got a picture of the Hindu goddess, colleague, because God some destruction, and she's got all these arms and in anach arm is the

severed head of a person. She's destroyed. But what she destroys is illusion. What she destroys is the illusion of separation. So that angry energy, that wielding, that fierce sort of justice when is aimed at destroying the illusion of separation, right, and so racism, sexism, and justice, this is an illusion of separation. Right, it's not true. You're actually trying to cut through an illusion and you're helping, supposed to harming anger.

Sometimes it's really necessary. The reason why we have to get angry is first of all, when you're angry, when you're flood with anger, it makes you brave, makes you courageous, makes you very focused, and it sends a clear message to you and everyone else. This is damn serious. We

need to pay attention. It sounds that you have to be careful in the parlance of trauma resilience, to be careful that the anger that we stand our resilient zone right when we were angry in within our resiliency and not like bumped out into survival or bumped out into sort of a trauma response. The fight flighter free exactly, very delicate. It's really, this is really, this is high level stuff. It's a challenge. I'm not I'm not saying

this stuff is easy, right, It's not easy. But the thing is we want we just want to have all all the tools and resources available to us. And you know, sometimes you need to go right, Sometimes you need to go laugh. Sometimes you need more tenderness, more softness, more acceptance or gentleness. Sometimes you need more fierceness, more in more action. We're doing something to change the situation. And

really that's where wisdom comes in. Nowhere from the outside can say what's right for you, But you have to care enough to ask yourself the question, what is it that I need right now? Right? Gorgeous? Oh, honey, has that for a little truth? We've got more for you after a tiny break. Oh, I'm loving where this conversation is going without further Ado. I have to say this because you were talking about the goddess with the all

the heads with Collie. A lot of people who tend to be conservative I don't want to talk about racism. They feel like whenever we talk about racism or transphobia, that we are dividing each other, that just by calling out racism, we are dividing each other, and we should just never focus on race and just pretend it doesn't exist,

and that's the way to alleviate racism. So sometimes people get confused when I talk about common humanity, which is part of self compassion, that the thing that means well, all lives matter, as opposed to like black lives matter. So mindfulness sees things as they are. It doesn't pretend, It doesn't put your head in the sand and pretend that that something that's not present, when in fact it is,

and differences are real. You know, be nice to live in a world where there were no differences and no one suffered more than another. But that's not the reality we live in. So when I talk about common humanity, what I'm saying is no one, including ourselves, should be cut out of that circle of humanity. Every every human being is worthy but compassionate response that in no way, shape or form means that all people are the same

or that all people suffer the same amount. There are very real differences based on all sorts of systems of oppression and personal history. You know, even just a genetic makeup is there's huge variations. So the mindfulness is what allows us to see clearly common humanity. In this case, you stand together with others in order to say, hey, it's not just me. We're going to stand together. And

this is actually what empowers us. When we feel shame, when we let other people shame us because we aren't you know, we don't meet their standards, then we feel isolated and alone. But when we stand together and say, hey, there are hundreds of thousands of people just like me. And then when I stand up for myself, I'm not just standing up for me, I'm standing up for my entire family. Then that gives a strength and empowerment. And

so mindfulness isn't always peaceful. Mindfulness sometimes wakes us up and says, hey, we got to do something in this system right to alleviate suffering. You don't know for sure what action is going to be called for it's really what your aim is, is your aim to alleviate suffering or not. I love that. I love that. I feel like what's interesting about this moment is that we actually

often can't agree with what is right. That there's so much propaganda and there's so many different sort of media sources that are obstucating and spinning other narratives for different purposes, so that that piece of mindfulness gets really tricky because

what reality for me? Right? I think about the um all the anti trans bills that are being introduced all over the country right now, and they're like, we need to protect women's sports like to like like, I'm just like creating this reality where like women are threatened by trans people, and it's like, that's actually not the reality. So we have to be able to sit in the in the truth, and so I think to really get clear about what the suffering is, right that like, yeah,

it's very very important. Of course, it's a process, right, and so there's also an open mindedness to mindfulness. It's not like a belief system. It's really just a process of being open to the truth, open to scene, what's the right in front of your eyes, not hiding things, not twisting things as much as humanly possible. But you also have to open be open to the possibility that your view may be wrong. Right, so you also have to open to someone else making an argument and saying, well, actually,

maybe maybe. As you point, if we start being self righteous about it, then that also causes problems. And I'm sure some of your listeners are thinking, Oh my god, how am I going to do? This is so complicated. I like to say that the goal of practice is simply to be a compassionate mess. This is messy, Social justice is messy, Our lives are messy. Every part of it is messy. We're gonna get it wrong over and over and over again, and we shouldn't actually expect otherwise.

Self compassion is not about getting it right. It's about opening your heart. And so as long as our goal is to hold the entire mess with compassion, we drawn whatever tools we have available to us, whether it's anger or love or tenderness or you know, whatever we need in the moment, motivation, acceptance, and we do our best. We fall down, and we lovingly pick ourselves up again, and we keep on trying. And what happens is you

learn to be less invested in the outcome. You know what if I achieved what's the outcome of my behavior? It just kind of the whole process. If I can be loving and kind and benevolent towards myself in the process, well then I've achieved my goal. It doesn't really matter if I've if I'm a mess or not. I love it. So I like to end the podcast with the question what else is true? And this is taken from my my own therapeutic work in the community resiliency model. It's

about that shift and stay right. So if if I am feeling a sharp pain in my stomach, where in my body it's a neutral or positive, where in my life is a neutral or positive and that can become a resource for me. So, um, Professor Christian nef today for you, what else is true? What else is true? So the first thing that comes to mind is, um, it's just my son. I'm sorry. He always cuss my mind because he's about to get home in school. But you know, this is some the love of my son.

You know, he's autistic and he's just the most beautiful, like authentic human being you ever want to be. He's not operating from the place of what do other people think of me? He's just himself. How old is he? He's he's nineteen, he's nineteen. It's something about him. It's just so beautiful and pure and so that that for me is a resource. I think I can just kind of let go my intellectual professoral life sometimes to know what I'm just a mother to him. It just really

replenishes me. Yea, that is a beautiful What else is true? Beautiful? Thank you so much. I have so much. I'm so moved right now by this conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you for your work, thank you for joining me today. I'm so so grateful for you right now. And your new book is Fierce Compassion. How women can harness kindness to speak up and claim their power and thrive? Can I? Can?

I ask you an honest question. So you know, I wrote the book, so it's written for women, and in terms of genderal socialization as a transwoman, I must have operated a little bit differently for you because you were socialized in the wrong gender, so to speak. So how how did that? How did that strike you? That's a

really good question. I have to say. When I was when I started reading it, I'm gonna be real, honest The initial thought was like, oh my gosh, this is gonna be some white woman feminist thing that's not intersectional. Initially that was my first thought, and then I was like, Okay, she's acknowledging and continued reading it's like she's acknowledging that

the experiences of black women are different. And so I think, what from my experience, I was constantly failing at being masculine and being the young man boy that people wanted me to be, and so I felt like I was

constantly failing. And then when I finally accepted my womanhood and transitioned, I was again not feminine enough and then failing again, right right, So the gender thing, honestly, for me, like with through socialization and then through my acceptance of my womanhood, has always been like I'm not enough, I'm failing, And I think that's honestly, probably the reality for most people is that we're constantly not woman enough for man enough, and we're constantly failing, and so we need to just

throw it all out. Thank you for her for indulging me, and I did try to be clear about where I was coming from, and it's the only really perspective I could write from to be authentic, and I think there's a lot of different books that could be written depending on people's different lived experience. The specificity of you writing for assist women didn't take me out as a trans woman, right, Well, that's good things. Where can folks find you? Are you

on social media and all that stuff? Yes? Well, if you google self compassion you'll find my website. I have a lot of free practices and resources and muscle on Facebook, Twitter, I'm just starting up my Instagram account. I'm a little late to the game, but probably my website is the easiest place to start, and I've got a lot of free resources there. So awesome. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Here's to all of us being a little more self compassionate.

Thank you, thank you. It's been a great interview to learn. Thank you. I'm so grateful for Kristin Neff and her work right now, and keep thinking about what gets in the way for me at being truly compassionate to myself, and trauma can hijack my nervous system, we can hijack my whole life. The traumatic response is kind of my default. Self criticism is my default, and so the compassion that we would have towards other people, that we turn that

in towards ourselves. And that seems simple, but oh my, there are a lot of reasons why it's really difficult. It's a gentle process and all this is a gentle process, and it's a daily practice us to be mindful and to be in kindness towards everyone else. And so the self compassion piece is actually really integral to trauma, resilience, to healing our attachment issues and all the things that

you know we've talked about on this podcast. And it's also tied to justice and social justice, self compassion, kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. Here's to all that in your lives and a day to time, a moment and a time, a breath at a time. Thank you for listening to The Laverne Cox Show. Please rate, review, subscribe and share with everyone you know. Join me next week when I talk with internationally renowned researcher and educator Dr Joy Degree

about intergenera rational trauma. Her book, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, America's Legacy of Enduring injury and Healing lays the groundwork for understanding how the past has influenced the present. You can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Laverne Cox and on Facebook at Laverne Cox for Real. Until next time, stay in the loud. The Laverne Cox Show is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio.

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