Reflections on the Worldwide Growth of Mindful Self-Compassion
By Chris Germer, PhD, CMSC Co-Founder
Even 16 years after Kristin Neff and I started teaching MSC (Mindful Self-Compassion), whenever I hear those words, my whole body relaxes and I breathe a sigh of relief. Giving ourselves permission to love ourselves is a radical act of compassion for most people. A similar sentiment was captured in a poem by Ana Maria Sáenz Velásquez during a MSC Teacher Training in Medellín, Colombia. The last verse reads:
But, above all, I give myself permission
that, without a doubt or a second thought,
in response to my slightest call, my answer will always be:
to relieve my suffering with love.
Learning to do this is the beginning, middle and end of self-compassion training.
MSC training has spread throughout the world at a remarkable pace. Someone once asked us, in all seriousness, “What’s your marketing strategy?” Kristin’s reply was, “This stuff works!” But works for what? Even though each person comes to a MSC class with a unique set of challenges, what do they all have in common? Inevitably, everyone wishes for their experience to be other than it is, or that they might become better than they are. Either way, it’s a great relief to discover that everything can stay the same, and also that everything changes, when we learn to love ourselves. When we asked MSC participants years after they took MSC what they got out of the course, they often said, “MSC gave me permission to love myself” or “MSC reminded me to love myself.”
I’ve had the privilege of teaching MSC throughout the world, on all continents (except Antarctica – the penguins don’t seem to suffer like we do). I’ve seen firsthand that in every culture people are far more compassionate toward others than themselves. Research shows that when we correct this imbalance, other positive qualities have a chance to emerge (e.g., happiness, wisdom, creativity, and coping) and distress diminishes (e.g., anxiety, depression, rumination, or shame). You could say that MSC sells itself.
There are certainly cultural differences in how people respond to MSC. For example, halfway through a MSC Intensive in Iceland I lamented to my co-teacher, “This isn’t working—this is the first time MSC is not working!” My concern was that very few people were sharing their experience in class. She replied, “Wait.” Remarkably, the very next day, the whole class opened up like they were long-lost friends. I can honestly say that, to this day, MSC works for the vast majority of people who have the courage to take the course.
The MSC program has been in existence since 2010. The first person to teach it independently of Kristin and me was Michelle Becker at the Center for Mindfulness, University of San Diego. When her boss, Steve Hickman, heard people laughing and crying in the next room, he inquired and then asked to teach the MSC course with Michelle. Soon thereafter, as interest in MSC continued to grow, Kristin and I realized there was a need for an organization to support the integrity and dissemination of the work. In 2012, the nonprofit Center for Mindful Self-Compassion (CMSC) was established with Kristy Arbon’s administrative leadership, and Steve became our first Executive Director. The first countries outside the USA where we taught MSC, and eventually held MSC Teacher Trainings, were the United Kingdom, Germany, Holland and Spain.
Since then, MSC has continued to grow through the dedication of more than 3,000 teachers and trainers around the world, and through international partner organizations that have emerged in countries such as Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, China, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and French-speaking Europe and Québec. CMSC is doing its best to serve as a hub for this growing global ecosystem, especially by maintaining the integrity, quality, safety, and consistency of the MSC curriculum and training.
Alongside this grassroots international growth, research has accelerated the pace of dissemination of MSC around the world. There are now over 80 studies on MSC or adaptations of MSC (see https://self-compassion.org/publications-on-msc/). When Kristin published her first article on self-compassion in 2003, there was only one article on self-compassion—hers. Now you can find over 10,000 publications on Google Scholar with self-compassion in the title. Science is the language of truth in modern culture, for better or worse, so when the research gets out into mainstream media it changes attitudes. When Kristin published her first book, Self-Compassion, someone responded, “Oh great, just what we need, a nation of sissies!” We don’t hear much of that anymore.
As interest in MSC continued to grow around the world, Kristin and I wanted more people to have access to self-compassion training. However, we worried that if we published the curriculum, it might undermine the efforts of our trained teachers. We took a leap of faith after Wibo Koole, a MSC teacher and business consultant in the Netherlands, told us, “Content creates demand.” Subsequently, the MSC workbook was published in 2018, and the MSC textbook for professionals came a year later. Those books have now been translated into 21 different languages, including Chinese, Ukrainian, Farsi, Icelandic, Russian, and Vietnamese. Additionally, the 8-week MSC curriculum has been translated and taught in more than 30 other languages, such as Hebrew, Serbian, Swahili and Basque, and in 60 different countries.
A central feature of teaching MSC is the teacher’s personal practice. Teaching is a heart-to-heart transmission. As we say in MSC teacher trainings: “Love ‘em up and trust the curriculum!” Over the years, teams of MSC teachers have skillfully translated the compassionate tone of MSC into their own languages. For example, there are different words for “goodwill” in German, but the one chosen by our first translator, Hilde Steinhauser, captures the benevolent aspect of goodwill—Wohlwollen. In this way, the spirit of MSC is kept alive in far-flung parts of the world.
The MSC program is based on the 8-week format of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. Jon developed his training in 1979 and MSC arrived 31 years later. However, the world has dramatically changed since both these programs were created, especially since the COVID pandemic. People are currently bombarded with information on the internet, attention is fragmented, and people require shorter, targeted trainings to fit into their busy lives. Furthermore, mindfulness and self-compassion are everywhere. Therefore, the future of self-compassion training is in adaptations of the 8-week MSC curriculum (the “mothership”), tailored for specific needs and populations.
The vision of CMSC is to nurture a worldwide movement of self-compassion trainings to meet people where they are. For example, the 6-hour Self-Compassion in Healthcare Communities (SCHC) program is currently being taught to physicians in many different countries. The pressing need of our time to take positive action in the world was the motivation behind Kristin’s new Fierce Self-Compassion course, while my clinical work with shame over many years led me and a team of MSC teachers to develop the Self-Compassion for Shame course. Other new trainings are Self-Compassion for Work Stress and Burnout by Evelyn Rodtmann and Regine Bruns, and Queer MSC by Markus Bohlman, Wiebke Pausch and Armel Wraight.
Why do all this work? Everyone’s motivation is different, but for me the greatest joy is in the connection it brings. As a MSC teacher, it’s such a privilege to bear witness to people shedding decades of unnecessary grief as they learn to love themselves just as they are. It’s also a gift to be part of a global community of people who want to bring more compassion into the world, starting with ourselves.
At this time in human history, when global problems defy our human capacity to solve them, offering compassion is something each of us can still do to become part of the solution. With compassion, anything is possible, and the easiest way to grow in compassion is by cultivating self-compassion.
The wish to be loved is universal, and discovering that we can also love ourselves may be why self-compassion resonates across so many cultures and languages. A moment of self-compassion can change your entire day. A string of such moments can change the course of your life.
I think we’re on the right track.
Christopher Germer, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, lecturer on psychiatry (part-time) at Harvard Medical School, and co-developer of the Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) program with Kristin Neff. He is the author of The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion and co-author of The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook, Mindful Self-Compassion for Burnout, and Teaching the Mindful Self-Compassion Program. His upcoming book, Self-Compassion for Shame, will be released this fall. Dr. Germer teaches and leads workshops internationally and has a small psychotherapy practice in Massachusetts, USA.
