Self-compassion is a surprising way to regulate our unpleasant emotions. It helps to ease them, but it is important to remember that it does not push them away in a dismissive way. This process can easily confuse us, as conventional wisdom tells us to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. The problem with this is that the more we try to eliminate the negative, the more it backfires:

suffering = pain x resistance.

Our subconscious senses any avoidance or repression, so what we try to avoid is amplified. Psychological research has clearly shown that we have no conscious ability to block out unwanted thoughts and emotions.

Self-compassionate people are less likely to suppress unwanted thoughts and emotions. They are more willing to experience them, to accept that these feelings are real and important. The sense of safety that self-compassion provides helps them to do this: facing pain is not so scary if we know we are supported in the process.

The special beauty of self-compassion is that instead of exchanging unpleasant emotions for pleasant ones, new pleasant emotions emerge during its practice, precisely by embracing the unpleasant emotions

When we are in a state of self-compassion, sunshine and shadow are experienced simultaneously. This may sound like an unreal poetics, but as soon as it becomes a real experience, we are amazed. In this fascination lies a deep sustaining power that helps us not to be dominated by unpleasant emotions. Self-compassion is a specific form of high emotional intelligence: we are aware of our emotions, even the unpleasant ones, but we do not allow ourselves to be led by them.

In contrast to so-called positive thinking, where we try to convince ourselves that everything is fine when we know, both with our rationally and in our gut, that it is not, self-compassion allows us to admit and accept that life can sometimes be difficult. The key to self-compassion is not to deny suffering, but to recognise that suffering is a perfectly normal part of human life. This recognition does not mean a passive resignation. We remain committed to alleviating suffering of all kinds. But there is a particular complexity in our approach: on the one hand, we are deeply aware that suffering is a natural part of life, and on the other hand, we do our best to alleviate it.

To illustrate with a picture, we could say that our unpleasant emotions are like a large mass of swirling, dark liquid. Positive thinking wants to illuminate this liquid. Self-compassion forms a precious vessel around this liquid, which can contain it. It is still there, but it no longer fills everything, and it is no longer so spectacular, no longer so darkening, no longer so uncomfortable, because the beauty of this beautiful vessel distracts us from it and floods us with light. But it's also true that self-compassion is not just a distraction from painful realities, but also contributes to pain relief on a neurological level.

When we want to replace unpleasant emotions with pleasant ones, we want to regulate our red system with the blue system. In the short term, this strategy can be useful, but in the long term we need our green system to create emotional balance. And our green system does not override the other two systems, allowing us to have both pleasant and unpleasant emotions, which do not completely cancel each other out, but the intensity of suffering is reduced as our red system is reduced. This ability is an important part of our emotional maturity.

With gentle attention, we can observe how in the practice of self-compassion we can experience both pleasant and unpleasant emotions, and how our suffering is alleviated in this seemingly paradoxical process.