Embodied Self-Compassion: The What, Why & How (Part I)

What a retreat, a Velcro suit, and a scared child taught me about embodied self-compassion

Anxiety followed me throughout my life. From the shy kid who kept to himself during primary school lunch breaks. To the middle-aged man stuck in a full-blown nervous breakdown.

It kept me from doing things I wanted to do. It left me feeling trapped inside myself, unable to share my authenticity. I felt deeply defective because of it. Layering self-criticism on top only compounded and amplified it.

I’ll always remember the first time I truly felt compassion for the anxious part of me. When I stopped hating it and learned to give it the love it always needed.

It was on a seven-day retreat, a prerequisite for my Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program.

In a dialogue with fellow practitioners, I shared that I had made friends with my anxiety. But later, while doing walking meditation in a park near my house, I realized that statement wasn’t true.

My anxiety wasn’t a friend. It was more like an old buddy from high school with whom I no longer had much in common. But he needed a place to stay. So I let him sleep on my couch. He left his stuff everywhere, snored loudly, and had other bad habits that disrupted my life.

In other words, he was something I’d learned to put up with. I’d managed to get him out of my head. But now he was like a fire that lived in my belly and twisted it into knots daily.

As the retreat went on, I spent time getting to know my anxiety better—mainly through visualization. First, the guy on the couch turned into a person in a Velcro suit, leaping at a wall and sticking to it. It was sticky, with barbs that clung to me.

Slowly and sweetly, as I stayed with that image over days, the Velcro caricature morphed into a small child. A terrified kid who needed embracing to feel safe.

So I wrapped my arms around myself and held that child. As I did so, my whole body felt a tremendous sense of ease. Tears ran down my cheeks. I let them be there.

This was my first experience with embodied self-compassion. And it was transformational.

The Body Keeps the Score

Self-compassion, as it’s commonly practiced, is mind-oriented.

Self-compassion, like the popular Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, tends to focus on how we view and interpret our struggles. We work to change those thoughts. We try to shift our inner dialogue from self-criticism to a more supportive view.

Instead of framing mistakes as evidence of personal failure, we train ourselves to see them as part of the shared human experience. Something everyone encounters at times.

Don’t get me wrong. This kind of work is invaluable and a critical starting point. It can help us recognize and accept our imperfections without being consumed by shame and avoidance in the process.

The challenge with this cognitive approach is that it can leave people with self-compassion as an abstract idea. Something understood in the mind, not experienced in the body.

That’s where embodied self-compassion comes in. It turns kind thoughts and self-compassionate responses into physical realities felt in the body as a sense of ease, opening, or release.

While the mind may seem all-powerful, the body keeps the score (as Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s book reminds us). It’s where we encode our deepest memories and where our greatest potential for transformation lives.

To feel self-compassion in the body is to know and own that sensation for life.

Getting to Know and Tolerate the Embodied Critic

Practicing embodied self-compassion starts with learning to notice how the body responds to self-criticism.

Harsh inner dialogue never lives in the mind. We might believe it does, often because we’ve lost touch with our bodies due to the discomfort of these sensations.

But whether we’re aware of it or not, when those mean words run through our mind, our body responds in kind. It could be a clenched jaw. A tight chest. A stomach in knots. Clenched fingers or toes.

These sensations are the body’s way of letting us know there’s something that needs our attention.

Embodied self-compassion teaches us that these sensations, even if they feel unpleasant, shouldn't be ignored or pushed away. The work is to learn to tolerate them. Then to embrace them and show them the care they so badly need.

So we pause long enough to feel the tension, heat, heaviness—whatever sensation is present—without trying to suppress or fix it.

We set an intention to allow the sensation to be present for as long as we’re able. This isn’t about passive resignation. It's a way of granting the experience the dignity of being felt instead of sending it into exile.

Planting the Seeds of Transformation

The process of noticing how the inner critic shows up in the body, and permitting it to be there without judgment or suppression, can take time.

Your personal history plays a big role in this. If you’ve faced trauma, it could take weeks, months, or longer to find the inner permission and stability to be with your experiences. (Going slow here is critical. Rushing ahead can be overwhelming and counterproductive.)

While it might feel like a heavy lift, the results can be profound. When we can be with the sensations for longer periods, we've got the opportunity to learn from them.

We can learn why they’re here and what they need to feel safe. Then, we can offer ourselves what we need to heal. This creates fertile ground for transformation.

(If you're feeling called to do this work, having a supportive coach who's been there is invaluable for navigating this process. I know it was for me. )

In Part II, we’ll explore the final two stages of this process: getting curious about the embodied inner critic and discovering how to care for it.