Affectionate Breathing Practice with Dr. Kristin Neff

As a growing number of people have been experiencing, Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) can greatly enhance our capacity to comfort, soothe, and validate ourselves — and there are a number of distinct practices in MSC that can help this along.

The upcoming MSC Core Skills Workshop will be an amazing opportunity to gain familiarity with some of these practices, including the one we’d like to share below called Affectionate Breathing. Dr. Kristin Neff describes this practice as a variation on breathing meditation in which we intentionally incorporate the self-compassionate qualities of warmth and soothing.

I hope you find this helpful today!

Coming up! The Mindful Self-Compassion Core Skills Workshop

If you’ve been looking for an opportunity to get started with Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC), or could use a refresher on some of the key points, I want to be sure you know about this upcoming online program from our friends at the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion.

The MSC Core Skills Workshop is a live online intensive led by Dr. Kristin Neff and Dr. Chris Germer that will meet for four, 3-hour sessions scheduled for August 10, 12, 17, and 19, 2022. It’s an incredible opportunity to immerse yourself in some of the key practices and exercises of the full 8-week MSC program in an intensive online format, and is intended for the general public as well as for people wanting to integrate self-compassion into their professional work (CE credits are available).

Learn More and Register for the MSC Core Skills Workshop >>

About Kristin Neff

Kristin Neff, PhD received her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, studying moral development. She did two years of postdoctoral study at the University of Denver studying self-concept development. She is currently an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

During Kristin’s last year of graduate school she became interested in Buddhism and has been practicing meditation in the Insight Meditation tradition ever since. While doing her post-doctoral work she decided to conduct research on self-compassion – a central construct in Buddhist psychology and one that had not yet been examined empirically. Kristin is a pioneer in the field of self-compassion research, creating a scale to measure the construct over fifteen years ago. In addition to writing numerous academic articles and book chapters on the topic, she is author of the book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, released by William Morrow.

In conjunction with her colleague Dr. Chris Germer, she has developed an empirically supported training program called Mindful Self-Compassion, which is taught by thousands of teachers worldwide. They co-authored The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook as well as Teaching the Mindful Self-Compassion Program: A Guide for Professionals, both published by Guilford. She is also co-founder and board president of the nonprofit Center for Mindful Self-Compassion.