How can you become a self-compassion ninja when you have a baby or toddler?

A self-compassion ninja is someone who keeps on returning to the practice of self-compassion (even though she also constantly forgets about how important self-compassion is)

I use the old Japanese word ninja to mean a practitioner of stealthy persistence, who regularly brings her attention back to her own body and mind. A self-compassion ninja finds clever and creative ways to combat a terrible enemy, which is unkindness by oneself towards oneself.

As we care for our baby or toddler, it's best to become very good at caring for ourselves, too, with deeply tender and encouraging self-talk and small, kind acts of self-care. Self-compassion is a powerful medicine for upset minds and distressed emotions, including during the perinatal period.

Of course, we can never perfect the art of self-compassion. But according to my definition, a self-compassion ninja is someone who keeps on remembering to practice self-compassion. If you’re like me, you’ll start – then forget in less than a minute, distracted by something else in my mind or my life. The triumph is that I remember again in a while (sometimes in a long while) and then bravely begin to practice self-compassion all over again. By my own criteria, this makes me an epic self-compassion ninja!

The first rather tricky step towards being a self-compassion ninja is to realise that unkindness by oneself towards oneself is not really a 'terrible enemy', even though I just wrote that at the beginning. It's actually a normal part of being human.

To be human is to be profoundly imperfect. We try so hard, and yet we suffer and struggle so much. We are often very unkind to ourselves.

Humans are also highly social creatures - our brains are hardwired that way. We care about each other as a default biological setting. This is why Homo sapiens has thrived on the Earth, despite everything. The culture at large tends to focus on how destructive humans can be to each other and to the planet, because it horrifies us. But before all else, most humans are caring of other humans, most of the time.

We have to learn to hold two truths about being human alongside each other. These are

• Much of what humans spend time doing is devoted to the wellbeing of others

• And humans can be destructive towards each other, too.

Self-compassion asks us to direct this human gift of caring deeply for others back towards ourselves. Self-compassion practice is not fluffy, soft, or weak. Self-compassion practice is committed. It is gritty, tough, pragmatic. Every time we realise we've forgotten to be kind to ourselves, we begin again.

In this set of articles called Your self-compassion superpowers, I offer you the steps of self-compassion practice which are increasingly shown in the research to protect the emotional wellbeing and mental health of women in the perinatal period.

A side-effect of practicing self-compassion is that we find ourselves behaving more compassionately towards others, too. For this reason, the practice of self-compassion is profoundly important not just in the perinatal period but throughout the rest of our lives, for the sake of our children's future, and for the sake of our planet.

A little family story about my own need to practice self-compassion practice as a mother, still!

The video, below, is light-hearted so you might not be in the space for it right now. If you are - here's the story.

My son Tom made this video, in which he deploys butter knives, for the guests at my 60th birthday party. It's about how he became The Butter Ninja. He is celebrating a certain butter knife incident, which needless to say remains private, and which occurred when he was about 12 years old. I'd like to emphasise this an extremely long time ago but unfortunately he hasn't forgotten about it, so far. There's still hope he might forget, I suppose. A tub of butter was also involved. I acknowledge that the combined butter knife and tub of butter incident was a low point in my parenting journey. I try to practice self-compassion about it, which is why it's relevant to this article. (Luckily, he seemed to turn out alright, anyway.)

Recommended resources, acknowledgements, and selected references for the articles in the Caring for you section of The Possums Sleep Program are found here, including selected research evaluations of both Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Compassion-focused Therapy in the perinatal period.