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How we can each build a loving relationship first and foremost to ourselves, creating the foundation for a happy, meaningful life with those around us? For the end of the year, we’re bringing back one of my favorite guests, Tenzin Chogkyi, to talk about self compassion.

Tenzin Chogkyi has been a practicing Buddhist since the 1970s. She spent 20 years as a Buddhist nun ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself. In fact, that’s the reason why she shares her first name Tenzin with His Holiness.

She’s also one of the most thoughtful, independent thinkers I know. And a person of extraordinary integrity who has dedicated her life to both inner development and advancing fairness and equality in the outer world. And this year, she joined us as one of the teachers guiding meditations from time to time in our Train a Happy Mind community.

When did you lack self-compassion?

[00:02:04] Scott Snibbe: Tenzin Chogkyi, it’s a delight to have you back on How to Train a Happy Mind. We’re talking about self-compassion—and I can answer the same question if you want—but was there a time in your life you lacked self-compassion?

[00:02:28] Tenzin Chogkyi: Well, until about 15 years ago. I have struggled a lot. I luckily had a conversation with my father before he passed away about this, but you heard a lot more about what you didn’t do right than you did what you did right. I think I really internalized that and had a very harsh inner critic.

The turnaround for me came when I was in long meditation retreat and I found that my harsh inner critic also really projected outward and I had so much criticism and judgment towards others. I had an epiphany that self-kindness and self-forgiveness would heal both my own self-judgment and self-criticism. It really worked in accepting the parts of myself that I was rejecting. It magically kind of tempered that judgmental critical mind that was focused outward. It was really the pain of my harsh inner critic and my outward judgment that really shifted things.

I had an epiphany that self-kindness and self-forgiveness would heal both my own self-judgment and self-criticism.

[00:03:49] Scott Snibbe: Yeah, it’s funny growing up, I remember my dad used to send me to go look for something in his shop, it was kind of disorganized shop. He was like, Get me the swizzle swazzle, I’m like, Okay, and then I’d be looking and looking and then I’d come back. He’d be like, It was right on that third shelf. Then he’d come back like, It’s right here, it’s on the second shelf. Like, What are you a complete idiot? I remember hearing that all the time and thinking like, No, I’m not a complete idiot, but it’s messages like that when you’re young that I think start to start to pile up.

[00:04:31] Tenzin Chogkyi: Yeah, they really do. My poor dad, like when I talked to him about it, he really hadn’t understood the impact of those kind of things. He said, Oh, I was just kind of trying to be a good dad. I thought that was my job as a father to kind of correct you. But I ended up with this intense kind of imposter syndrome of like people would see me as capable and confident and blah, blah, blah and all the things. For the longest time I had this story of like, Oh, if they only knew—it’s not just us, Scott, obviously many people from our culture have the same kind of struggle.

What does a lack of self-compassion look like?

[00:05:10] Scott Snibbe: For a person who doesn’t feel self-compassion for themselves right now, can you paint a picture of what it feels like in your head as you go through your day? Because we’re saying something to ourselves all day long.

[00:05:24] Tenzin Chogkyi: Sometimes those self-critical voices combine a little bit when we start studying Buddhism. I remember our teacher, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, used to say things like, Don’t waste even an instant of this precious human rebirth. Our culture, not only do we have that harsh inner critic often from our upbringing, but our culture has this very strong kind of like Protestant work ethic.

Don’t waste even an instant of this precious human rebirth.

You can’t really be a virtuous person if you’re having too good of a time. You need to be sort of striving and pushing. For me, it’s been a question of becoming aware of that and providing the counter narrative to that through a lot of deep investigation of some of these narratives and stories that are part of my culture and part of my upbringing. It’s okay to rest. It’s okay to be happy. It’s okay to prioritize connection.

Master Shantideva is teaching the Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life and one of the things that I love that he says is kind of use your joy as a litmus test of if you’re still benefiting beings and feeling joyful about it. When you lose your joy, then you need to rest.

When you lose your joy, then you need to rest.

There’s a researcher, Kristen Neff, who’s devoted her career to self-compassion. One of the biggest obstacles that she found in the research of why people don’t practice self-kindness and self-compassion is because we think we need that harsh inner critic to motivate us. She’s found that not true at all because it discourages us.

She uses this great analogy of like, you have a middle school student who comes home with a failing math grade. What is going to motivate them more? If you shout at them and just go, You’re such an idiot. You’re always be a failure. Or if you say, Hey, I’ve got your back. We’re in this together. I’ll get you a tutor. We’ll make it through. She goes, Why would we think it would be any different our own self-talk? They found through the research how discouraging this is. But that’s one of the reasons we won’t let it go because we think It motivates us to succeed

[00:07:36] Scott Snibbe: My daughter’s really good at that. She’s very funny like, You can do it. This is what you trained for.

[00:07:47] Tenzin Chogkyi: That’s so cute. Does she get that in school? I’m curious because you have this young daughter.

[00:07:54] Scott Snibbe: Luckily, she has gone to schools that are very socially, emotionally intelligent, and of course we try very hard to stay constructive. I learned some of this from Richard Prinz, who’s really great with kids, and to start, the best thing you can do really is like, even if a kid’s done something “wrong,” it’s like, Oh, you know, it’s okay. You’re feeling bad. Like you can tell when a kid’s done something wrong, they also actually feel really bad about it usually. So there’s no reason to make them feel worse.

[00:08:25] Tenzin Chogkyi: One of the things both Kristin Neff and Paul Gilbert have found is just thinking that self-criticism is a motivator, thinking that self-compassion means selfishness, thinking that it’s weakness, those are some of the things that come up a lot, that people resist doing it. But the research has been really consistent and then showing that it’s not a motivator at all.

Does everyone want to be happy?

[00:08:57] Scott Snibbe: What shocked me is that, I gave a lecture kind of on self-compassion recently at The Buddhist Center in Santa Fe. And I got a lot of pushback from this guy who just interrupted the whole talk and said, I don’t want to be happy? One or two people every once in a while in meditation, they’re like, I don’t want to be happy, and these people are Buddhists too. They’re people who call themselves Buddhists. Even as a Buddhist to have this kind of self-flagellating, like, I don’t want to be happy. Have you encountered that?

[00:09:37] Tenzin Chogkyi: Oh, 100 percent, definitely. We’re hearing the word happiness and we feel either undeserving of it or we feel that it’s worldly and a distraction and we’re not looking deeper into what the real causes of that more deep genuine well-being are.

[00:09:54] Scott Snibbe: I had this long debate with this guy, he kind of derailed the whole lecture, but it was interesting. He was like, I want to achieve the stages of the path and things like that. But I was like, Well, I’m not sure you can achieve them without being happy. As a Buddhist, for many of us, it’s the very first thought we have when we wake up is like, may all beings be happy.

That’s so then I went and researched a little later. I was like, am I like missing something? His Holiness the Dalai Lama writes an article, the purpose of our life is to be happy, like he couldn’t have said it more clearly.

Where does self-compassion fit on the Buddhist path?

Self-compassion on the Buddhist path

[00:10:46] Tenzin Chogkyi: It reminds me, Scott, of this conversation I had. Many years ago, and I’ve never forgotten this, I was teaching a big introductory class on Buddhism in Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha was enlightened. It was 50 or 60 people, this big 10-day intro class, and people from all different countries and all different cultures.

I remember saying something about how in the Buddhist scriptural languages, there wasn’t a word that exactly corresponded to the idea of shame or guilt. This one Brazilian guy, who’s still a friend of mine, raised his hand and goes, I don’t believe they didn’t have shame and guilt. We got into this big discussion and one of the students said, Oh, when you feel like you’ve done something wrong and done something harmful, how do you feel?

There was this woman there from Korea and she said, Oh, I just feel like inside I’m really a Buddha and I just made a mistake. And the Brazilian guys like, What, excuse me? So we got into this kind of conversation about what is our feeling of what human nature is and the original sin idea versus—as Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called it—original goodness.

One time I was teaching in Australia, this is many years ago, this one older woman, she was about 10 years older than me, asked to see me to talk about her practice. We met the day after my teaching and I’d never met her before. She just looks at me and she just goes, Last night in the teaching, you said that it’s okay to be happy. She goes, Is it really okay to be happy? My heart just broke. Oh my God, she’s like 65 and she just never felt like it was really okay.

Is it really okay to be happy?

I’m flying back to New Zealand tomorrow. I may never see this woman again. I kind of grabbed her by the shoulders and I get really close to her. I was like, I need to give her the message right now. I just was like, It’s really okay to be happy. It’s really okay. She’d spent her whole life serving others and probably feeling like it was selfish to do anything for herself beyond the most basic self care to keep herself alive so she could serve her family. Service is gorgeous and beautiful, but the problem is it’s not sustainable unless we balance it with some self-care and self-compassion.

Service is gorgeous and beautiful, but the problem is it’s not sustainable unless we balance it with some self-care and self-compassion.

The permission to relax

[00:13:32] Scott Snibbe: My wife’s often very surprised by how I spend my time, because I get a lot done, I’m generally a very productive person. But she’s often quite surprised because if I’m tired, I just go take a nap. I’ll take it. I’ll take a nap after lunch for two hours or something. She’s like, You do that? I was like, Yeah, if you’re tired, take a nap, or like, if I get too much work, I’ll take a day off and go spend the whole day with a friend.

But she’s often quite surprised because if I’m tired, I just go take a nap.

[00:13:58] Tenzin Chogkyi: I’d love to hear about that for you, what’s been your journey that you can even allow yourself to do that, because you must have done some transformative work to feel that it’s okay to do that. So many people don’t.

[00:14:23] Scott Snibbe: I really got it from my parents because my parents, they both had very overbearing parents, my dad’s father was a very powerful architect and wanted him to become an architect. My mom’s parents are Jews that managed to like crawl to have a beautiful bourgeois existence in New York and really wanted her to be proper and follow all the rules and be an upstanding New Yorker.

But they wanted to be artists and creative. So they always told us as kids, whatever you do with your life, we’re fine with it. Whether you become a truck driver or a professor, whatever you do, it’s fine. They also taught us to really relax too. My parents relax to a level that I never do. We never even went on a hike when we were kids. When we went to nature, we would just sit on the sit on the edge of a lake, like for eight hours and watch dragonflies and have sandwiches. As children of the 60s, they’re pretty good at hanging out.

They taught me those skills, and I passed them, it’s so mind blowing. Like the role that I play for a lot of people in life is so funny. Like you were saying, just giving them permission. I remember my girlfriend in college, she was on a pre med track to become a doctor. Her parents wanted her to become a doctor. I was taking animation classes at the art school next door. She’s like, Oh, that seems really fun, I could see doing that.

Then she took a class and liked it. She was like, Oh gosh, I wish I could go to art school, and I said, You’re an adult, I was like, you can do it. You can transfer and go to art school. She was like, Really? I said, Yeah. And then she did it. She transferred and then she became it. She did her whole career.

But it’s really funny. I find people just need somebody, and we do live in a very hierarchical authoritarian, patriarchal, whatever, a lot of those words we use today, but it’s bizarre how you can just—I’m not their authority, but they need somebody to say, Hey, take the day off.

[00:16:37] Tenzin Chogkyi: My student that I was talking to earlier this week, Vinny, left me a message saying, I just called my family and told them that I had your permission to take a break. I was just like, Wait. I wasn’t thinking that he was needing my permission. I was just encouraging him. Hey, you’re burning out and you’ve got these health things going on and you need to take care of yourself. If you have this longing to do retreat and put everything on pause for a while, do it. But we kind of feel we need permission from some authority to even do that, which I didn’t even realize was happening in that conversation. Isn’t it funny?

[00:17:19] Scott Snibbe: Oh yeah. But the other thing is also just like a different, even before I was a Buddhist to have a little bit more of a different sense of yourself. I had a really hard driving advisor in college. I worked in this research lab and he was just like, 100% effort, just work, if you just work harder.

That was the place where I started pulling all-nighters. He’d be like, We have this meeting on Monday, you got to stay up all night. And I’d stay up all night trying to fix something in computer code. It wouldn’t work. Finally go to sleep, just sleep a couple hours, wake up, and I had the answer.

I realized, wait a minute, there’s never a point to do this. Go to bed at a normal time, get a full night’s sleep, and you’ll just wake up with the answer. But it requires starting to see a different sense of yourself, you’re more like managing some kind of amorphous team. Your mind works in mysterious ways, your body, you need to give it good foods, give it rest. And then it surprises you too. Take time off, relax, have fun with friends.

Take time off, relax, have fun with friends.

[00:18:31] Tenzin Chogkyi: Exactly what you say, our attitude towards ourselves, kind of like that original sin versus original goodness, that’s something I’m learning over the course of my spiritual life. If I allow more space for that original goodness to just become manifest, rather than trying to fix myself. I think I started the spiritual path just going like, Oh, I’ve got all these things I want to fix and become kinder and become wiser and I was just a project that I needed like a total overhaul, like I was a total fixer upper.

But over time, just saying, Oh, I need space to actually allow. Because sometimes I think we get so striving and so busy because we’re afraid if we allow space to listen, we’re afraid of what we’re going to hear. Instead of trusting that if we allow the space, what we’re actually going to hear is the inner wisdom and the inner kindness and the inner compassion.

[00:19:43] Scott Snibbe: That’s a very good point. Something kind of sad, both about Donald Trump and Elon Musk, they can’t stand to be alone. They have to always be with another person. I think we all feel that at some times. But it’s really critical to have that time by yourself, to, and to be gentle with yourself and to start seeing, you know, Yeah, what are some of the things I want to let go of?

Something kind of sad, both about Donald Trump and Elon Musk, they can’t stand to be alone. They have to always be with another person. I think we all feel that at some times.

What are the things I want to cultivate? What even am I? Who am I? Of course, it’d be quite scary, for either of them to confront those questions, because they don’t even probably know what they are anymore, because there’s so much projection from outside of us.

Social connection as a self-compassion practice

Tenzin Chogkyi: It’s so sad. It’s so tragic. The other day, I felt some things bubbling up, and my self-compassion practice was taking my journal and a cup of coffee, sitting outside on my deck, and just journaling for a while, letting things emerge. One other thing about self-compassion that I think makes us suspicious, is there’s a lot of talk about self care.

The other day, I felt some things bubbling up, and my self-compassion practice was taking my journal and a cup of coffee, sitting outside on my deck, and just journaling for a while, letting things emerge.

A lot of social justice activists nowadays are also talking about community care because they say in our hyper individualized society, often we only think of self-compassion and self-care as an individual project. We’re not seeing it as a community project and something that’s in relation to others. So, widening and understanding that a part of self-compassion and self-care too is our connection.

I was in a meeting once the local hospice here in Santa Cruz had meetings periodically before COVID of different faith leaders who are doing end of life care in the community. There were these beautiful meetings where we’d all get together and then they would sometimes have a certain presentation. I remember one of the meetings was on the topic of resilience and self-care, like what do you do to take care of yourselves? We were having a brainstorm of the faith leaders were calling out the things that they did and they’re writing on the flip charts.

There was two or three pages of take a walk, meditate, take a nap, and none of it was relational. Finally, by the third flip chart page, I raised my hand and I said, Do any of you find that some of your self care practices is like being with your friends, and in connection to others? Then the light bulb kind of went off. Even for the faith leaders, it wasn’t their go to self-compassion strategy to be with friends that really see you and get you. And not in a Donald Trump, Elon Musk way, but like feel that sense of connection.

Do any of you find that some of your self care practices is like being with your friends, and in connection to others?

So often our spiritual paths can be so isolated and individual. I often say, Westerners, we take refuge in the two jewels of Buddha and Dharma, and then the Sangha jewel, the community jewel, we just bypass all together. We’ll recite it when we’re reciting the prayers, but we’re not really engaging in connection and community. I think that’s a very overlooked aspect of self-kindness and self-compassion and self-care, and it builds our resilience, feeling like we’re not going through this alone.

[00:23:24] Scott Snibbe: That’s definitely one of my practices I don’t give up. My wife’s kind of surprised, because a couple times a week I’ll make time to see a friend. A friend or Dharma friend, it doesn’t matter. But somebody who you really care for. There’s a wonderful definition of friendship I saw recently, which is a person who you spend time with for no reason.

There’s a wonderful definition of friendship I saw recently, which is a person who you spend time with for no reason.

[00:23:47] Tenzin Chogkyi: That’s awesome. I love that.

[00:23:49] Scott Snibbe: There’s no agenda. It’s to listen to each other and to be there. I always find that I feel so nourished. I also sleep so well, on the nights like that. We had a nice dinner party with some friends over. I noticed I sleep so soundly and I feel so good the next day.

[00:24:10] Tenzin Chogkyi: Community care. I was talking to a friend who’d lost a relative recently and they lived in this small town. It reminded me of where my grandparents lived, suddenly everybody starts showing up with casseroles, because there’s been a loss, and of course you’re not going to spend your time cooking, you’re grieving, and then the whole community shows up.

We’ve just kind of lost that community care. I’m just such a big fan of Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General. He does a lot of work about loneliness, because when he became Surgeon General first under President Obama, he and his team went out to try and find the biggest health care needs, and he thought it was going to be combating obesity, the opioid epidemic, or smoking cessation; but it was the epidemic of loneliness.

He spent a lot of time thinking about it and wrote this book called Together, which is all about how many, a shocking percentage of Americans, feel they don’t even have one person who really is somebody they can turn to. You’re prioritizing that in your own life of the people who there isn’t an agenda around, that’s somebody who just gets me and sees me and has my back.

A shocking percentage of Americans feel they don’t even have one person who really is somebody they can turn to.

[00:25:36] Scott Snibbe: I remember reading quite some time ago that the majority of men over 40 in the United States have no friends. They have zero friends, which just broke my heart. And it explains a lot. It explains a lot of the suffering and pornography and violence and all the different things that make people even less happy.

[00:25:57] Tenzin Chogkyi: Wow, I practiced as a monastic for about 20 years. I remember early on in my Buddhist study, I met this Australian monk and we got to be friends and we were talking and he said he felt like a lot of monks gave up their vows and got into a relationship, but it wasn’t about sex, it’s about connection. Because for so many men their intimate partner is the only person they talk to about their life and their feelings.

A lot of monks gave up their vows and got into a relationship, not for sex, but for connection.

He said, I’ve lived in monasteries with other men my age. They don’t know a thing about what’s going on for me. They don’t know anything about my life. We don’t have that level of connection and it’s just too lonely. You give up your vows to get into a relationship mostly just because of your need for connection. I’ve never forgotten him saying that. It goes along with what you say about people who are socialized male, they may be suspicious of connection of other men or it just wasn’t anything that they’d had modeled for them in a healthy way.

Self-compassion practices

[00:27:18] Scott Snibbe: Can you talk just a little bit about practicing self-compassion? Simple ways of thinking in everyday life that can start to become habits?

[00:27:38] Tenzin Chogkyi: Yeah, one of the things I like a lot in the meditation that I led that accompanies this interview is one I learned from Kristin Neff, and she calls it a “self-compassion break.” One of the things she suggests—there’s some physiology that goes along with this that has to do with the vagus nerve—is to do something physical, like putting your hands on your chest, even cupping your face, putting your hands on your forehead or giving yourself a hug. She said, there’s something about that that enables the self-compassion to work even better and so I love teaching this practice because you can do it really quickly.

Then another one that I really like to emphasize for people is kind of attuning to the somatic sense of what gives you joy or what’s energizing. Our mutual friend Venerable Thubten Chodron often says, We’ve gotta quit “shoulding” ourselves. When you feel like you’re pushing against resistance to do something that you feel that you “should” do, really listen to what your body is telling you. If you need to take a nap, lie down for an hour. Attune to what gives us joy and energy.

We’ve gotta quit “shoulding” ourselves.

I really recommend people doing that when they’re making decisions, like sometimes people will say, Oh, I really want to serve, what’s best? Is it hospice or prison work or kids or this or that? I go, What gives you energy? What enlivens you? What energizes you? Pay attention to that, because I think we have so much wisdom about what we need, and that’s the practice of self-compassion too, just get used to attuning to that somatic felt sense. Then feeling like it’s okay, giving yourself permission to follow whatever that is.

One of my favorite quotes, there was a civil rights activist called Howard Thurman, who was also a Protestant minister. He said, Don’t ask the world what the world needs, ask what you need to come alive. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

[00:30:05] Scott Snibbe: Really, really wise. We’re painting a bit of a rosy picture now, a little bit, but it is quite difficult actually to practice. Where do you see these practices fail for people? Where are they not working? What do people do when they don’t?

[00:30:24] Tenzin Chogkyi: I think really understanding that self-compassion is not even self-esteem because psychologists are really falling out of love with the idea of self-esteem because it still means you have to be worthy in some way and that you’ve produced something. So self-compassion isn’t the same as self-esteem. It’s not the same as self-pity. People resist because they think it’s going to be self-pity or self -bsorption. Or it’s going to make me sorry for myself if I’m self-compassionate, it’s not selfishness or weakness.

[00:31:03] Scott Snibbe: That’s the hardest one really. We are in the society of “boys don’t cry, be a good girl.” Don’t show your weaknesses. Well, you’re going to lead this meditation. You led it for our community and you’re going to lead them. We’re going to play it in the next episode. Is there anything else you’d like to say about self compassion?

[00:31:28] Tenzin Chogkyi: Thank you so much for inviting me to have this conversation. I always love being in conversation with you and I just love hearing your own journey about self-compassion and how you’ve kind of related to it. I always learn something new whenever I have a conversation with you. My last message is the one I had for the woman in Australia. It’s really okay to be happy. It’s really okay to be happy. Allow ourselves the happiness that we wish for and that we deserve.

[00:32:07] Scott Snibbe: Great. Well, Tenzin Chogkyi, thank you again for another wonderful conversation. For helping our community, leading meditations and all the great work you do in the world.

[00:32:16] Tenzin Chogkyi: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you so much, Scott.

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