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Episode 84: Self-Compassion in the time of Covid
89 Plays4 years ago
Welcome back to the Goblin Lore Podcast and to a different kind of episode. On the day that this was going to be recorded Hobbes was not feeling well, and Alex stepped up to take the lead to discuss Self-Compassion and Self-Care especially in the era of a Pandemic. This was spurred in part by a talk that he had listened to from a local convention that had been canceled and moved to online. After listening to the recording Hobbes realized that he wanted to tie in an experiential exercise for you all related to this. If you want to check out the script for this exercise it can be found here.
Again we would like to state that Black Lives Matter (with a link to where you can offer support both monetary and not).
We also are proud to have partnered with Grinding Coffee Co a black, LGBT+ affiliated and owned, coffee business that is aimed at providing coffee to gamers. You can read more about their mission here. You can use our partner code for discounted coffee!
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As promised, we plan to keep these Mental Health Links available moving forward too. For general Mental Health the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has great resources for people struggling with mental health concerns as well as their families. We also want to draw attention to this article on stigma from NAMI's site.
If you’re thinking about suicide or just need someone to talk to right now, you can get support from any of the resources below.
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255)
- Veteran's can Press 1 at anytime to be taken to the Veteran's Line
- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741-741
- International suicide hotlines: A comprehensive resource list for people outside the US.
- IMAlive: Click Chat Now to access a live online network of volunteers through instant messaging.
- TrevorLifeline, TrevorChat, and TrevorText (LGBTQ+ crisis support): 1-866-488-7386, or text “Trevor” to 1-202-304-1200
- Trans Lifeline (US): (877) 565-8860
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You can find the hosts on Twitter: Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @Mel_Chronicler. Send questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to @GoblinLorePod on Twitter or GoblinLorePodcast@gmail.com.
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@winterg
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers, and welcome to another episode of the Goblin Lore podcast. Today I'm coming to you by myself, as Hobbs wasn't feeling well, so there's no opening question. I'm just going to introduce myself real quick and jump into the topic. I'm Alex Newman, found on Twitter, at Mel underscore Chronicler.
Self-Care During COVID and Unrest
00:00:17
Speaker
My pronouns are he him, and today's topic is self-care, or specifically self-compassion.
00:00:25
Speaker
Specifically, I wanted to talk about taking care of yourself during these difficult and tumultuous times. I'm recording this during the COVID pandemic. I say hopeful that people will be listening far enough in the future that the pandemic will be in the past. But we've also had a lot of civil unrest after protests against police violence were, unfortunately, answered with more violence.
Exploring Self-Compassion Challenges
00:00:48
Speaker
Self-care is a topic that we have talked about a lot on the cast, both before and after the COVID outbreak began.
00:00:54
Speaker
I want to narrow in on a more specific piece of this. I want something that I myself am working on, but I want to talk about self-compassion. It's often easy for us to tell others and to give others a break and to feel compassion and for other people, but it's harder for us to do that for ourselves. It's easy to help
00:01:18
Speaker
someone take care of themselves, tell them that they need to take care of themselves, but it's much harder for us to do that to us. So, I'm going to then execute a perfect transition to our story topic, which is...
Magic's Color Pie Philosophy
00:01:32
Speaker
Well, now I'm going to take another transition. So, there's a lot of fun conversations in the Magic community about color pie identity. We've talked about it on the show,
00:01:41
Speaker
We're going to do it again, I'm sure, but a version of these conversations that I haven't seen and something that I think the community should be talking about, and I will do it more on this cast, is not just talking about where we fall on the colour pie, but also what we can learn
00:01:58
Speaker
from other colors that don't necessarily fit us very well. And before I go into that too much, I do want to say if those conversations are happening, please point them out to me. I'd love to be wrong about that. I haven't seen them, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. But so today's story topic is I want to talk about a piece from a color that definitely does not fit my color pie identity, but there is a definitive piece that I'm trying to learn from. So for myself, where I'm at,
00:02:29
Speaker
I'm white is really where my color pie philosophy fits for sure. There's definitely other elements of other colors Red for sure. I would say probably some blue but I What I want to talk about today is something from black a core tenant of blacks color pie philosophy Is that each person knows best how to take care of them themselves?
00:02:52
Speaker
There's an extreme end to this where folk will do harm to others for their own benefit, but what I'm talking about is on the small scale here, people being empowered to take care of themselves because they're in the best position to know what type of care they need. Also, I think you can see where my color pie bias is that in that I immediately have to address and then back away from the harmful elements of that philosophy. I'm sorry for that tangent too, but you know it wouldn't be the Goblin Lore podcast if we didn't have tangents even with just the one even with just one host.
00:03:23
Speaker
Anyway, bringing this back to self compassion. This isn't just about you knowing the best way to take care of yourself, which is important, but it's also about you and also about me. I'm talking to myself here as well. Extending to yourself that same compassion and the same understanding that you extend to others.
Cognitive Distortions and Stress
00:03:44
Speaker
Kind of on this topic, something that I've been coming back to a lot lately was something we touched on in our Cognitive Distortions episode, I think back in April, or maybe May of this year. We talked about shoulda statements. Now, you can't see the air quotes that I made, but believe me, they were there.
00:04:02
Speaker
I hadn't realized until we covered that topic how many should statements I was carrying around, how many things I felt that I should be doing, but wasn't, how many things that I needed to have done that just weren't done, and really how much of my cognitive load every day was being taken up by going over lists of things that hadn't been done, and then how much more cognitive load was taken up
00:04:28
Speaker
doing an imperfect job trying to box that list out of my focus just so that I could engage with my day-to-day life.
00:04:36
Speaker
So I want to read a clip from that article. This was kind of the starting point that Hobbes brought to build that episode, and I think this piece speaks to the should statements. Another particularly damaging distortion is the tendency to make should statements. Should statements are statements that you make to yourself about what you should do, what you ought to do, or what you must do. They can also be applied to others imposing a set of expectations that will likely not be met.
00:05:05
Speaker
When we hang on too tightly to our should statements about ourselves, the result is often guilt that we cannot live up to them. When we cling to our should statements about others, we are generally disappointed by their failure to meet our expectations, leading to anger and resentment. So, I mean, we see there are things that need and should and would be nice to get done in any given, you know, day, week, month, whatever.
00:05:30
Speaker
But this is about carrying those expectations for those that are just too high and taking time to recognize that not everything will get done and that's okay. Carrying those high demands causes more stress and takes more mental energy, which just makes it even harder to get everything done. I think in some ways, this relates to kind of the all or nothing cognitive distortion, which we also talked about there, which is kind of like, you know, if you're trying to eat more healthfully or quit smoking or something,
00:05:59
Speaker
And then you do something you shouldn't. You quote unquote fall off the wagon. Again, air quotes that you can't see. The idea that now all of a sudden all is lost. You've totally failed. All this hard work has been erased. But that's not true. And that is just kind of harmful and it causes you to quit something that you... So anyway, this is about understanding.
00:06:26
Speaker
that you can only do what you can do and kind of giving yourself that compassion. And I'm sorry here, I do want to take a quick aside. So you can only do what you can do is a tautological turn of phrase, which I love big fancy terms like tautology, but
00:06:43
Speaker
The whole point of language is to relate complex ideas to one another, and so those terms can help by compacting a large idea into a term, but if people don't know what that term means, you aren't relating those complex ideas. So let me explain that very quickly. Tautological phrases are expressions that repeat a part of themselves. It is what it is, for example.
00:07:07
Speaker
Or, as the phrase I like to do, you say, you can only do what you can do. I understand some folks hate these in particular. It is what it is. It's cliche at this point. It's overused. It's often used to dismiss reasonable things, people trying to examine stuff. I'm not trying to defend all of these things. I'm just saying that as a whole, I like these statements because it forces us to re-examine the words that we use sometimes.
00:07:35
Speaker
to take a random example that isn't this but like the word breakfast is an English word used to describe the first meal of the day but it literally means you are breaking the fast of the night as in you know this in this context the English word fast being used is a period of time not eating not other meanings for that word English is weird it has words that mean multiple things but anyway
00:07:58
Speaker
The whole point of, the reason I like these tautological phrases is if you're examining, you know, it is what it is. It forces you to examine the fact that whatever it is you're talking about, this is its current state. It doesn't matter that it would be different if X had happened or if Y hadn't happened. This is where it is. Now, if you acknowledge that, we can move forward and try to make a
Creative Self-Compassion Discussions
00:08:20
Speaker
change. And I'm sorry, that's a huge tangent. So let's get back to the actual topic of self-compassion.
00:08:26
Speaker
And also I want to talk about, there was one other thing that really helped me crystallize this topic.
00:08:33
Speaker
idea into an episode that I could talk about here. There's a writing convention. I talk about it a lot on the cast. It's a place where I've gotten a lot of good information and help with my own writing. And just this topic of writing just fascinates me, the craft of it. But this convention is called Fourth Street Fantasy. It happens in Minneapolis every year, but except for this year because of COVID, so it was canceled.
00:09:01
Speaker
But the organizers of the event and some of the people who would normally be on panels decided to record some panels, quote unquote, as podcasts so that they could kind of put some stuff out for people and even them get together. And it's a space where we love to collaborate and talk about craft. And so we're gonna put the link to these in the show notes. There's four of them, but a group of friends and I who go to this,
00:09:30
Speaker
particular convention decided to listen to some of these panels online together. We found a good way for us all to kind of listen in real time and then talk about it through Discord. And so yesterday we did this, well, yesterday for me.
00:09:46
Speaker
no idea what time it'll be for you because that's the time travel fun of podcasting but so we got together and we listened to the episode this is fine making art while the world burns it was a fantastic episode i really recommend you listen to it and and anything else if you're interested in the craft of writing there's an episode about
00:10:05
Speaker
meals and in writing and an episode about hospitality and fantasy and it's it's interesting stuff but this particular episode I think our group was intending to listen to multiple panels but we listened to the one hour panel and then spent over two hours talking it was a wonderful conversation and these are these are friends of mine who I see every year and unfortunately we don't live in the same city so
00:10:32
Speaker
I only see them once a year, he there at this convention. So it was very nice to get together and talk to all of them. But one of the things that came out of this conversation that was really important was there was a lot of good personal conversation about how we were all dealing with this isolation, for the social isolation, both, well, with them both personally, professionally, and creatively, and in other elements of our life.
00:10:59
Speaker
And for me, the big thing that really came out of that is we were all really in a lot of different ways. We were this self-compassion. I don't think the term really came up. I got that term from Hobbs and I was talking to him this morning trying to come up with a good term to condense what I'm trying to talk about here. But each one of us really talked about where we were being overly hard on ourselves, where we were creating more stress in an already stressful environment.
00:11:29
Speaker
And because we were in this big group of friends, we were then each
00:11:34
Speaker
able to help that person walk through that and start that process of self-compassion, start the process of giving ourselves permission to, for instance, work on fanfic rather than writing something that we could try to sell because of the professional brain, or giving ourselves permission to take a break creatively, to do things like read more, which is a topic of the podcast too.
00:12:04
Speaker
That can help refill the well. There's a lot more to creating than just the process of writing itself. Sometimes taking a break from that writing to refill the well through watching shows and consuming stories and other medium can be helpful. But sometimes, you know, you even need to take a break from that and we are able to kind of help each other work through our particular pieces of that.
00:12:26
Speaker
And one specific thing that I want to bring up too that someone mentioned that I hadn't really contextualized, but we need to keep in mind that even basic things these days, like going grocery shopping, that used to be something super easy. Do it on the way home from work, do it when you get low on stuff, you just run out and grab a few things. But that comes with a greater level of stress these days because you've got to make sure you
00:12:52
Speaker
have your mask and especially I know in Minneapolis now there's we have in order to everybody is supposed to wear masks which at least for me helps a little bit but especially before that you have the the stress of well if you wearing a mask but no one else is you're still at risk but
00:13:09
Speaker
So there's just so much more involved in this process that used to be small in every day. And it's easy to keep in scope the large scale things. I, you know, all my conventions are canceled. I can't travel to see this. I can't go see my parents. But
00:13:28
Speaker
Even the small things are adding to that level of stress and adding to that load. And so it's important, even more important, to give yourself a break and work on being kind and compassionate, not just to those around you, but also to yourself.
Insights on Self-Compassion
00:13:45
Speaker
So to close this episode out, I want to share something from an article that Hobbs sent me this morning while I was working on this episode and bouncing stuff off of him.
00:13:55
Speaker
This article will also be in the show notes. We've got all this stuff collected, and we'll get that in there. But this is an article called, How to Cultivate More Self-Compassion by Alison Abrams. And here's a bit near the article, including a quote. Psychologist Kristin Neff was the first person to measure and operationally define the term self-compassion.
00:14:16
Speaker
She describes self-compassion as kindness towards the self, which entails being gentle, supportive, and understanding. Quote, rather than harshly judging oneself for personal shortcomings, the self is offered warm and unconditional acceptance. Close quote. In other words, this is still the article,
00:14:36
Speaker
Being kind to ourselves in good times and bad, in sickness and in health, even when we make mistakes. Having self-compassion means being able to recognize the difference between making a bad decision and being a bad person. When you have self-compassion you understand that your worth is unconditional.
00:14:56
Speaker
And something Hobbes notes is that this article continues on to draw a difference between self-compassion and conceit, which perhaps is a deeper end of black spectrum. That's a thing that maybe we talk about in another episode.
00:15:13
Speaker
So I would encourage you to go read this article, read these other resources we have in there. I think with this, I'm going to sign off. Right now, I know there's a lot of terrible stuff going on, but please don't let yourself add to your own burden.
00:15:31
Speaker
Hi, all. HobbsQ here. I thought that we might do something a little bit different with kind of this episode after I had had a chance to listen to Alex's great introduction to the concept of self-compassion and to see what he has been able to do with this episode. He approached me the morning that we were going to record in a day that I was not feeling well. I was not doing well. I was... I'd been ill. I'd not been sleeping well. And I was pretty hard on myself, but I also knew that it was not a good day for me to record.
00:15:59
Speaker
However, Alex had been talking about this article for quite a while. Well, this podcast that he mentions, this element from the 4th Street that is about creation in the time of COVID. How do we create in this period of basically
00:16:16
Speaker
where there is a push to be content creating in some ways or that there is a push to be doing this stuff and not necessarily being aware of our self or how to care for ourselves because there is so much ability to have should statements and could statements and feel that I should be doing this because I have the time now and not recognizing that just because you have time doesn't mean that it's time that you can use effectively.
00:16:40
Speaker
And I bounced around this idea with Alex of self-compassion, this concept that a lot of us are actually very compassionate people. But when you ask a room of people to define compassion, oftentimes what you are going to get is these definitions that relate to others. They are going to be the definitions that relate to
00:17:02
Speaker
being gentle on other people, being understanding the mistakes that they make, to be supportive, to be loving. And oftentimes, people do not include themselves in that sense of compassion. And a lot of times, they don't feel that they deserve compassion, something that they would reserve for other people, they're not as open to do for themselves.
00:17:26
Speaker
This is actually one of the things that we kind of see a lot of, I would say, in just working with people with everything from substance use to depression is those sense of worth but those beliefs that other people are deserving and we are not. One of the tools that we often use is kind of trying to use, you know, solving your problems or working on your problems through other people's eyes.
00:17:50
Speaker
because then you might be able to separate yourself a little bit better to be able to see that compassion that you are deserving of also.
Guided Meditation on Self-Compassion
00:17:59
Speaker
To this end, I actually thought that a nice thing to do for today's episode would be to introduce a loving kindness meditation. So this is something that you can find online if you're the type of person that wants to go look for different versions of it.
00:18:15
Speaker
or people doing it, but I thought that I would kind of run us through a loving kindness meditation. So this is something that should take about 10 to 15 minutes to do. I'm going to be doing a shorter, more abbreviated version of it. But this is the idea that this is just something maybe that you can try for yourself, even if it's just listening to before bed. These are the types of things that I oftentimes will
00:18:39
Speaker
Listen to if I've had a rough day or things that I will put on at night You know I find a good one that I like on YouTube You know it always finds It can be helpful to find somebody whose voice really matches yours a lot of this really does come down to that kind of fit There's tons of options out there for these you can look for in guided meditation You can look for deep breathing exercises any of this But I specifically want to do one that is called the loving kindness meditation because it really is aimed at this idea of self-compassion and
00:19:09
Speaker
So the first step for any of these is always to just kind of get yourself comfortable wherever you're sitting. Kind of feet on the floor, legs none crossed, and just kind of get yourself into a comfortable position. If you feel comfortable, you can close your eyes. If not, just pick a place that you can kind of stare at just to kind of focus your attention. And I want you to just take your breath. Just want you to breathe in.
00:19:39
Speaker
and breathe out. Just breathe in and breathe out. Continuing with this, just focus on your breath, clearing your mind of worries and just bringing your attention to your breath as you breathe in and breathe out. There's no need to change or manipulate or counter breathing. All I want you to do
00:20:09
Speaker
is notice and pay attention as you breathe in and breathe out. Now I would like you to bring your attention to conjuring up the image of someone who is close to you, someone towards whom you feel a great amount of love.
00:20:37
Speaker
This could also be a pet, it could be a family member, it can be a friend, but basically anybody that you can think of that you have a strong affinity for and strong emotions towards. And I want you to just sit and picture that person and notice how that feels. Notice the sensations that you're having in your body. You might feel warm.
00:21:07
Speaker
or openness or tenderness. But I just want you to continue breathing and focus your feelings as you visualize this person, this animal, whoever this is. As you breathe in, I want you to imagine that you are breathing in those warm feelings. And as you breathe out, you are sending those back out towards that person.
00:21:38
Speaker
Breathe in warmth and then pass it on to the person that you're thinking about. Silently, I also want you to repeat these phrases. These are just some examples. I find that you can use any variations or kind of any almost mantras or just statements that work for you. But I want you to just repeat these phrases as you're breathing in and you're breathing out to yourself.
00:22:07
Speaker
May you find happiness. May you be free from suffering. May you experience joy and ease. May you have happiness. May you be free from suffering. May you experience joy and ease. As you repeat these phrases, I just want you to be breathing in and breathing out.
00:22:37
Speaker
sending those feelings of happiness, warmth, and love towards the person or whoever you are thinking of. Now I want you to take a time to picture when this person or this animal, this friend, whoever was suffering. Maybe they experienced an illness, an injury,
00:23:07
Speaker
difficult time in a relationship. I want you to notice how you feel when you think about their suffering. How you feel in your heart. Do those sensations that you had when we were thinking of the love or the warmth change? Do you continue to feel openness and tenderness? Are there other sensations, sorrow, grief,
00:23:37
Speaker
Continuing to breathe in and out, I want you to just visualize that loved one, and again, extend out your love, your gentleness, your compassion to them. This time I want you to think of the phrases, may you be free from suffering, may you have joy and happiness.
00:24:06
Speaker
May you be free from suffering. May you have joy and happiness. Now I want you to take these same feelings and I want you to visualize yourself. I want you to picture yourself. And it can be when you've had a time that you have suffered as well. Or when you're in conflict with someone that you cared about or you didn't succeed.
00:24:37
Speaker
You felt that you let people down. You feel that you left yourself down. I just want you to kind of picture a time when you were suffering and notice how that feels in your heart. The sensations that you get in your body, aching, sorrow. Just as we wished for our loved ones suffering and pain to end,
00:25:07
Speaker
I want you to think about the same thing to ourselves. I also want you to realize that you are worthy of happiness and worthy of love. So I want you to think as you're breathing in and you're breathing out, may I be free from the suffering. May I have joy and happiness.
00:25:34
Speaker
May I be free from joy and suffering. May I have happiness and joy. And like I said, you can come up with any types of phrases that work for you. I am worthy. If you're thinking of others, they are worthy. However it is, I just want you to make sure that what you're applying to others, you're also then turning around and applying to yourself.
00:26:13
Speaker
Now I want you to just take a little bit different and think of somebody that you neither like or dislike. Somebody that you may see in your everyday life, a classmate, another player across the table from you that you don't know well but you see them, stranger on the street, maybe somebody you see at a store regularly. And even if you're not familiar with this person, I want you to think about how this person may suffer in their life.
00:26:44
Speaker
how they may have conflicts with a loved one, or may have suffered illness, how they may have failed or feel that they didn't live up to themselves. I want you to take this image, visualize it as best as you can, continuing always to breathe in and breathe out, saying to yourself, may you be free from suffering, may you have joy and happiness.
00:27:16
Speaker
May you be free from suffering. May you have joy and happiness. Again, notice how this feels in your body, how it feels to send those, those vision or those vibes, those emotions that light from you out into the world towards other people.
00:27:46
Speaker
Just continuing to breathe in and continuing to breathe out. Always just taking that time to focus on your breath. As you repeat to yourself, may you be free from suffering. May you have joy and happiness.
00:28:12
Speaker
Now I want you to visualize someone with whom you have had difficulty in your life. Could be a parent, child, an ex-boyfriend, an ex-girlfriend, a roommate, coworker, whoever it is. I want you to picture someone who you have had negative feelings for in the past, or maybe struggling with due to conflict.
00:28:41
Speaker
And even if you've had these negative feelings and emotions and the strife in this conflict, I just want you to think of how this person may have suffered in their life. The conflicts that they may have had with others, the suffering that they may have experienced. I want you to notice right now, does this feel different? Do you feel warmth and tenderness?
00:29:09
Speaker
Are there other sensations that you might be feeling, whether it's resentment or still that underlying dislike or that conflict? Just notice these sensations, what is happening in your body. I want you to continue to visualize this person as you breathe in and breathe out. And again, repeating to yourself,
00:29:38
Speaker
May you be free from suffering. May you find joy and happiness. May you be free from the suffering. May you find joy and happiness. Notice any changes that go on as you try to send these feelings out into the world. As you notice them yourself, does it change your own emotion? Does it change the sensations that you're feeling in your body?
00:30:08
Speaker
May you be free from suffering. May you find joy and happiness. Now that we're at the end of this exercise, I just want you to send some final time
00:30:31
Speaker
Wishing to end all suffering, suffering for all the beings in the world, for that suffering to be relieved. Just as I wish to have peace and happiness and be free from suffering, I wish this for all beings. Just as I wish to have peace, happiness, and to be free from suffering,
00:31:01
Speaker
So do all beings. Continue to just sit there, breathing in and breathing out. Thinking of the compassion that we have been discussing here for others, and also to recognize the compassion that you are allowed to have for yourself. Thinking I
00:31:29
Speaker
want to be free from suffering, I deserve peace. I deserve happiness. I deserve joy. I deserve to be free from suffering. Breathing in and breathing out.
00:32:04
Speaker
Now slowly bring your attention back to the room around you, bringing your awareness away from just your body to your wider surroundings, feeling the chair beneath your legs, the sounds that you may hear in the room around you. And when you are comfortable, open your eyes and come back to the room.
00:32:37
Speaker
So I just wanted to take this time to thank you all for sitting through this being kind of a different episode, you know, taking even the fact that we're splitting this between Alex and I because we wanted to get this out and it was very important for Alex to be able to get that piece that he had written down.
00:32:55
Speaker
And when I listened to it, it just struck me at why we're doing this cast and why this cast is so important and why I just love and appreciate working with Alex and with our guests and just everything that's been going on in the world and with this cast in particular and for us.
00:33:13
Speaker
in the last couple of months.
Future Episodes and Promotions
00:33:17
Speaker
Once again, we are the Goblin War podcast. I'm Hobbs Q. You heard Alex at the beginning. We will be back again. Our next episodes are going to be back with our friend Chase who's coming on to talk about depression. We're going to have her on for another one of our good mental health episodes.
00:33:34
Speaker
And I also again want to give a shout out to Grinding Coffee Company, which is a black owned LGBT ran coffee roaster. You can find their information on our page. We're going to be adding them into our outro at some point. But I just want to make sure that we're giving them a shout out as they are supporting gamers.
00:33:52
Speaker
And their mission statement is just, it's very important to work that they're doing for black creators and creators of color and women. And we just want to support them. And like I said, if you want some good coffee, I highly recommend it. But until we meet next time, I want everybody to just kind of keep those thoughts of self-compassion in your mind. Be gentle with yourself and realize you are deserving too.