The Mama Judy and Jill Podcast

Episode 27: Self Compassion: a Vital Ingredient to Creativity

• Jill Gottenstrater

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In this episode, Mama Judy and I explore the importance of extending compassion to ourselves in order for our creative lives to flourish. 

We chat about the differences between internal and external criticism and how neglecting self-compassion for both can swiftly dim your creative spark.

Tune in for practical tips on cultivating self-compassion daily, unlocking the door to a more resilient and flourishing creative spirit. 


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Speaker 1:

Oh good, you made it. We are so glad you're here. Welcome to the Mama Judy and Jill podcast, an intergenerational chat about life, art and the creative process. I'm your host, Jill, and joining me is my wonderful co-host and bonus mom, Mama Judy.

Speaker 2:

Let's get started Well, hi everyone. We are so glad you're here joining us today, mama Judy, and I decided today that we are going to be talking about the magic of self-competition, and this is, if you know anything about self-compassion, and you'll learn more today about that. It is such an essential ingredient in our lives as creatives for not only creative expression, but also for our well-being as humans, wouldn't you agree, mama Judy?

Speaker 3:

Oh, absolutely 100%.

Speaker 2:

And so, mama Judy, I would like to ask you I thought it would be fun to start with can you think of a time in your life where you needed to give yourself some self-compassion? And one thing I think I want to say first is it's so interesting how we can extend compassion to people around us, other people we love but to give it to ourself sometimes is a hard thing to do or we don't think we deserve it. And so, if that's you listening, if you've ever felt that, I just want you to really like sit down and sit with us today and listen, and hopefully you'll hear something that, if you have not been able to extend yourself self-compassion, we hope that you'll hear something today that will help you do that for yourself, because it is something that we all need. So, mama Judy, can you think of a time or a story that you could share with us where this was an illustration?

Speaker 3:

Well, probably from the time I was born.

Speaker 3:

So I mean, we all need to give ourselves self-compassion just every day, but for me, probably one of the most recent ones was learning to deal with the condition called glupus, and I had to learn to take care of myself, give myself self-compassion, because I was a person who likes to be independent and okay, well, I can still do everything that I thought I could do. And I had to take myself by the hand and give myself compassion to change my life. And that sounds strange to give yourself compassion to change your life. But I think, going back to what you said, jill, we don't give ourselves self-compassion and we're always, if I can use the word, competing with our prior vision of ourselves. So maybe if we find something that we can no longer do it physically, or even psychologically or emotionally, we just try to power through it, instead of sitting down and saying, okay, how can I treat myself with sympathy like I would somebody else who has the same issue going on? So probably that's the last one, although I will say also it creeps over into my art creating.

Speaker 2:

How does that look with the art creating? Tell me about that.

Speaker 3:

Well, what that looks like is when I make something that I don't think is good enough, then I'm judging myself. Let me give you an example. If you came to me with something that you had created and you wanted my feedback, and I wanted to give you feedback without tearing you down, I would be very compassionate in the way that I said it, I would be very gentle in the way that I said it and still give you good, constructive information With ourselves. We don't do that. We tear ourselves down. Oh, that's not good enough. You don't know what you're doing. You'll never be good.

Speaker 3:

I just don't get yet even as much as I've thought about this why it's so hard for individuals to give themselves self-compassion. What self-compassion to me is in our art is it's taking care of that inner child, because that's where we all start, that's where we start from in being creative. We start with that inner child, and we don't give that inner child the empathy, this empathy, the compassion that she needs to continually grow. Why is that? Why is that such a hard thing for us humans to do?

Speaker 2:

Well, and you said earlier, I sometimes have to take myself by the hand and to be compassionate. And, speaking about the inner child, to me it makes it easier to be compassionate with myself if I think of myself as a child, if I look at myself like I'm not this grown woman that I'm giving compassion to, but if I think about the little girl Jill, or the inner child, that sort of thing, I can extend compassion to that little girl. And so sometimes maybe it's just that, because a lot of times when we need to give ourselves compassion, it might be that we did flub up or we've done something and so, whether this is artistic or not, this is just in life in general, we have to give ourselves a break. But if we can imagine ourselves as that little child, that innocent, pure person, and we're not doing anything out of malice or anything like that, that to me makes it a whole heck of a lot easier to give myself compassion.

Speaker 3:

It is because you and I can see that and I do this thing, thing I often take that little girl by the hand or sit down and talk with her. We have a visualization. That's easier for us to do that when we can visualize an individual and what we're doing is we are visualizing that individual as our younger self. Now, if we don't do that, if we don't show self compassion, what happens is, I believe, we kill our creativity. We've touched on this at various times, very briefly, but never under the umbrella of give yourself self compassion. Be kind to that young, aspiring and I use the word young and you know I'm going to be 79 in March. I still use the word young. Young in the creative development is what I'm referring to. So I don't care how old you are, it could be 120.

Speaker 3:

If you're just beginning your artistic journey, you're a young artist. You're blossoming, you're growing, you're blooming. Well, let's say you have a garden and you go out and you want flowers to grow. What do you do with them? You give them the elements that they need to grow. You give them natural fertilizer, you feed them, you water them. You do not go out and stomp across them and yelling, grow, grow, grow. They're not going to grow. Somehow we have a tendency to stomp across ourselves and it's very debilitating to the creative process. You and I have talked about feedback. We've gotten from our listeners and our viewers about incidents that have external, incidents that have stifled their creativity. But this is not about external. This is about internal, internal criticism. Not showing yourself compassion for what you're doing when you make a mistake will kill your creativity just as fast as the external will.

Speaker 2:

Right, and but also that internal will come from the external forces too. For example, a lot of our listeners including you know us, you know have had to deal with traumas in our life or abusive people in our lives. So yes, that still can enter in, because if you're abused and told your, your or your this or your that or not, you're not treated right, then your own internal voice, kind of that's what they learn how to treat you. So it, so it is connected. But yet I understand what you're saying about the difference between the two. But we often do learn things from abuse and how people put us down, and then we end up just transferring that right over to ourselves internally as well.

Speaker 3:

That's an excellent, excellent point. Interestingly enough, I've just watched the autobiography on Netflix called Sly, on Sylvester Stallone, and he talks about something similar because he grew up in a very abusive environment. And how it does? You're right, it translates to how you see yourself. But once we know that, once we are aware of that, we've had to deal with those circumstances, that's an example of where we have to show our self-compassion even more importantly. But even without that, let's just go to we've all had perfect lives, nothing traumatic in them. We will still show compassion to others before we will show compassion to ourselves.

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 3:

There is something inherent that we just don't feel like we deserve what we will give to somebody else. I just think we're upside down in that area and I think, for all of our listeners and viewers, we need to develop a routine, a habit. Now, self-compassion also includes under that umbrella self-care. But you really have to start with self-compassion to develop self-care. From my point of view, you have to learn that when you come up against something that you hear that voice inside of you giving critical evaluation, stop and choose tenderness in regards to yourself. You can still give yourself the same important feedback on your creativity that you need to, but it's what you say and how you deliver it to that young, creative person that makes all the difference in the world.

Speaker 2:

So how would you develop that? I know one part of it would be to catch ourselves. When we see ourselves not being compassionate with ourselves, catch ourselves, call it out and say what it is and say whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, I'm not being very compassionate. And then also and this is not artistically, but I'm just going to use more of a human term here let's say you made a mistake, you did something wrong. Or let's say, you even lied to someone, and so there's a difference there too, where, yes, you should say I did not do a good thing there, I should not have done that, but that's it. It's not like harshly abusing yourself versus giving yourself self-compassion, and a lot of times there's nothing that even needs to be reprimanded or straightened out. It's just us coming to this place of almost like a negativity on ourselves or something.

Speaker 3:

Oh we are. We're very negative when it comes to ourselves. We might love the whole world, but we will be negative to ourselves. And you know, perhaps it's just even part of culture and growing up, where we're taught almost without realizing that we need to give to other people. Well, we are part of those other people. So we just got to learn to be more compassionate with ourselves. And that compassion is so viable, regardless of whether you're also like with. I have an extenuating physical limitation in that I have had to show compassion to myself in many ways, but even without that, I still need to learn to develop compassion. When I look at my art and my creativity I don't want to the image that I had suddenly in my mind was of, let's say, a vein, a life source.

Speaker 3:

And someone came along and pinched it off and held it there. What's going to happen to the life? It's going to wither and die. Well, that's what I see our lack of self-compassion doing to our artistic endeavors. If we don't, if we pinch it off, if we're always telling that you're not good enough, all those things we've talked about in the other episodes imposter, fear, all those things come into play. At the bottom of that, what we need to do is go, wait a minute, I am worthy of it, Of self-compassion. Oh, I just used the word that maybe is at the root of all this in our humanness. We don't feel worthy of self-compassion.

Speaker 3:

How screwed up, is that?

Speaker 2:

I know it seems like we should start there, like be self-compassionate so that we can be an even bigger compassionate vessel to other people.

Speaker 3:

Well it's true, I think we even use the story one time in one of our podcasts where I said when you go on an airplane, what do they tell you about the oxygen masks? Put it on yourself first Put yours on her, or you can't tell anybody else.

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 3:

Well, it's the same thing with self-compassion. If I give myself compassion in my life, whatever I'm doing in my creativity, I'm coming from a nurturing, sympathetic, understanding point of view. If I develop that in myself and in my art, I can then send it out to somebody else. Going back to the example of you coming to me, let's say, and asking me to critique something you've done, if I don't have self-compassion and I'm always listening to the negative voice, that voice is what I'm going to extend, probably to the outer world. So again, sometimes we will give compassion to people and sometimes our negativity that we've developed for ourselves will extend to other people. Both of those are examples of why I think self-compassion is so important to all of us.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I was just thinking about some people might not even realize if they're being compassionate or not. But one thing is have you ever heard of loving kindness meditation? It's an actual type of meditation. So I can't remember exactly how it goes, but I've tried it before in the past. But it's basically where you start out by. I think you start out extending loving thoughts to the world, to the edges of the world, and then you bring it down into a country and then into the state, and then into your city and then to your neighborhood and then to yourself, and so it feels like start with the smaller and then go out. And maybe that's how some people do with loving kindness meditation, but I think all of us could. That could be a way to encourage that self-compassionist to do loving kindness meditation. Practice that, because it teaches you how to be compassionate to others as well as to yourself.

Speaker 3:

I love that concept, but that's a good example of what we were just talking about. That meditation that you just described started with the world, and then the last person was yourself. And I agree let's start with ourselves, and that same loving compassion we give ourselves, let's extend it out to the world. It's just a different way of looking at it.

Speaker 2:

And I also want to verify one thing, though, on that. It might be that start with your neighbor, then go. I don't remember Like I may have been wrong about starting with the other way, so it could have been the other way. So if somebody is really doing that kind of, you may say that is completely wrong. But anyway, look that up.

Speaker 2:

Regardless, you're still extending compassion to a lot of people, as well as to yourself, and I think that's just a critical part. Or even when you're showing up at your studio, at your table, wherever you're doing your art, your easel. Just, you said earlier about being I don't know if you use the word gentle, but you know, just being gentle, say a gentle word to yourself, tell yourself you love yourself, or something like that to give that self-compassion, because the more we do it it's almost like the more we like a friend. They just grow on us more and more and more, and the more that we extend love to ourselves in that way, the easier it will be and the less that that self-compassion will be hard to give to ourselves.

Speaker 3:

Yes, and it kind of goes back on a very global scale to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and the first one is love and acceptance. And so if we don't love and accept ourselves, that's the pillar that we're going into the world with. But let's go back, if we can, for just a moment, because I do have a tendency to get to the global. I want to go back to our art, okay, and you asked the question well, how do we? How do we do that when we see ourselves giving criticism? And one of the things that I learned in an entirely different when I was learning self-compassion coming out of an abusive marriage, one of the techniques was see a stop sign. So I say to myself wow, that is a horrible piece of art. Well, I've done it so much that what automatically shows up is a stop sign. That's my cue.

Speaker 3:

I have learned to rephrase what I just said, to rework the words. Okay. So I say to myself, wow, that is a horrible piece of art. Stop sign shows up. I then say you know that art has. That piece that I've just done has some good components in it, but this area over here could use a rework. I've now changed the whole scenario on how I see my art. I'm compassionate To that young artist. I'm not destroying them with my statement that's a horrible piece. I'm just saying you know this over here looks great, but this, this area over here, you could redo. Most people can accept that. If it was coming from a teacher, that would be fine, well instructive criticism Constructive and come across.

Speaker 2:

So and it's great. And if we can give ourselves that constructive criticism, compassion helps us grow and develop as artists too, of course, because we're not gonna get stuck, we're gonna go oh yeah, that's right, and then go off and try something different. Or maybe, you know, maybe fix something I mean even fix sounds like a bad word to use, but maybe fix something or change something or do something different and we're growing and that's right, and so what we've done is we've just changed the wording so you can learn to do to recognize when you're giving yourself negative criticism.

Speaker 3:

See that stop sign as a visual to remind you change your wording.

Speaker 3:

The other thing is that if you catch yourself let's say you haven't developed that habit yet and so you just torn your piece of art to pieces you can then at any time, revisualize your response to that. This can be to your art piece or to any situation when you go over in your mind and you visualize a different outcome. Okay, so I was really hard on myself. Let me see if I can't go back and redo that scene in my mind, because the mind is so powerful and by Revisiting something and redoing the outcome is a very powerful technique for changing negativity of any kind.

Speaker 2:

Well, it's like the rewiring of the neuro pathways in our brain, like it is, that happens and that is important for humans to be able to do that, and even if it is Surrounding our art you know, just our art practices and that sort of thing. I totally agree with that.

Speaker 3:

I guess that's the whole thing, jill. All of this is a human part of the artist that we want to be, and so self-compassion is very, very important. It's, it's critical. It is critical to developing our art.

Speaker 3:

Yes and self-care is Underneath. Self-compassion and self-care can be Okay. Self-care can be things like you're doing this afternoon You're going for a massage. That's a matter of self-care, something that I do for myself. For self-care is I will turn on my favorite music. Just listening to that makes me feel good. Listening to your body it feels out of whack. Take it for a walk, whatever, those are all self-care, which is part of self-compassion. Mm-hmm. And I think the bottom line is we all need to love ourselves. We are perfectly imperfect. Every single one of us, our art, is perfectly imperfect. Yes, we've talked about perfection before. If we achieve perfection, there is no growth. Yes, so we all know we're not perfect. We need to grow. Let's not kill the bud by stomping on it as it's trying to grow Exactly. Can't you just see William going out to his garden as it's growing with big army boots on and stomping across them? Going, grow, grow, grow. Uh-huh. That won't work.

Speaker 2:

One thing, too, that just popped into my mind. You know, my friend Linda. I was at Linda's house this was several months ago, I don't remember exactly, but I think we were talking about giving ourselves some self-love and self-compassion, and I had just done a yoga class an online yoga class, like the day before that or something and one of the moves that the yoga instructor had us do was to take our arms and really wrap them. You know, take them and give yourself like so that your hands are wrapped around to your back, and give yourself a tight hug and like, hold it for 20 seconds. So we, linda and I, standing in her kitchen at her house, both did that together and even we're Mom and Judy and I are doing this now. So if you're seeing us on YouTube, you can see this.

Speaker 2:

We are actually doing this as we're talking on the podcast. I'm already feeling. I kind of feel like I want to cry actually. So that tells you something. So I'm going to stop hugging myself right now and maybe I'll do it later, but but it feels so good, and even my emotions, what just happened? I think I wanted to feel like I was going to start crying. I think because I felt like I was loving myself.

Speaker 3:

I needed that hug Absolutely. If you were to hug me right now, you probably would not cry. But when we hug ourselves and we feel the need to cry to me what that tells me? That child within us needed to feel the love. Yes, which, by the way, folks, this is a side tidbit If you hold a hug for 22 or more seconds, it literally, physiologically, changes the endorphins in the body. You want a natural high. Go hug somebody for 30 seconds or yourself.

Speaker 2:

Right, it doesn't have to be another person.

Speaker 3:

Right, yeah, no, I think. Look at me, I just undid everything we talked about. She on me, oh naughty, naughty. Okay so let me rephrase that go hug yourself.

Speaker 2:

Yes, no, and I really want our listeners to do that. Wait till, like maybe just we're going to be done here with this recording and do this yourself. The favor of, give yourself a hug it for 22 to 30 seconds and just see what happens. And if you're in a space where, if you feel like crying or it just makes you feel good, like, let that out and let that go, be compassionate to yourself to allow what needs to come, come and so it's pretty powerful it is.

Speaker 3:

And before we sign off on this, I do want to give a shout out to Instagram community. There are many, many people out there who are phenomenal about giving good, positive feedback to somebody else's feed, and my only hope is that those people are giving themselves the same kind of feedback.

Speaker 2:

I agree, and and not taking someone else's lovely feedback as more important than your own feedback to yourself. Right.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I agree. Right, all right. Well, this has been a very moving session. Yeah, I hope people find something out of this that they can relate to, perhaps a new thought, perhaps a new technique to try. It is for me a reminder never to lose those techniques that I have learned along my journey.

Speaker 2:

I agree. Yeah, this was good. This feels good. All right, everyone, go out there, be compassionate to yourself, love yourself, give yourself a hug, and, mama Judy, I'm giving you a virtual hug too.

Speaker 3:

Yes, and I'll be that woman in black skipping down the road hugging herself. Just smile if you go by.

Speaker 2:

A few weeks ago on the podcast, we talked about hugging trees. Now we're hugging ourselves. We don't know where this is going next week.

Speaker 3:

We like hugs. What can I say? Gotta change my endorphins, yes.

Speaker 2:

Well, thank you everyone. Next week we hope you will share this episode with a friend and we appreciate you so much and love you, Mama Judy. Love you too, my dear. Okay, talk to you later. Bye.