By George Marino CPC, CMMT
July 16,2021
Self-compassion is all about mindfully giving ourselves what we need. To do this, we need to know what we value most. Someone recently told me that what she really wanted to do was to clean up her e-mail inbox and eliminate the “junk.” I asked her what was important about that. After exploring this question, she discovered what was important to her about cleaning out her inbox was a sense of freedom.
For some, simple everyday tasks like reading or eliminating e-mails reflect much more than the task; they reflect a deep value of living in freedom, which is often the hidden value underneath all our distractions. Freedom from what, you might ask. Ultimately, it is our mind and related difficult emotional patterns. The value of freedom and other things—like integrity, community, contribution, connection, play, well-being, and meaning—reflect something essential about human nature. These values also reflect choice, which is one of five core elements of mindfulness.
Paradoxically, our difficult moments in life very much depend on our core values. For example, when connection is one of your core values, an abrupt ending of a relationship without adequate closure can leave you struggling for a while to make sense of what happened. Or if you value vacation and weekends, like many of us do, getting a promotion requiring you to be on call and work over the weekend can be troublesome. If you do not know your core values, your unconscious mind will remind you from time to time. Our feelings of frustration and anxiety often arise out of the awareness that we are not living in accordance with our values.
I help people in a coaching partnership connect to what is most important to them in a deep way, so their actions and goals are in alignment with their core needs and values.