Treating yourself with the same kindness you would offer a good friend.
I'm a trained Mindful Self-Compassion teacher (with Trained-Teacher status at the CMSC) and an experimental social psychologist who studies self-compassion in the lab. Both halves of that sentence inform the other. What follows is a short tour of how I came to MSC, what the practice actually is, and where you can take it further with me.
How a practice became a research program.
Well... it started on the cushion, not in the lab. I began meditating first — long before I had any professional stake in it — and you cannot meditate with any seriousness for long before bumping into self-compassion. And bump into it I did! With gusto, I especially love practicing loving-kindness meditation. I suppose I became my own research program with an N = 1! And the effects were... well, impossible to ignore: the harsh inner critic that had been doggedly scoffing at me since childhood softened, life's daily hassles became... less of a hassle, and the warmth and tenderness I was learning to extend inward, quietly changed how I moved through the world and, most importantly, how I related to others. My experience was transformative.
So... the social psychologist in me wanted to know why. As it happens, I had somewhere to look. Kristin Neff had defined self-compassion as a coherent, measurable psychological construct some twenty years ago (Neff, 2003), and a deep empirical literature had grown up around it since. The more I read, the more my own practice and the science seemed to be describing the same thing from two directions. To the extent that self-compassion does what both the cushion and the data suggest, it is one of the most quietly powerful resources a person can cultivate — and so my practice became a research program. Along the way I completed the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion's teacher training pathway, and I now teach the eight-week Mindful Self-Compassion course developed by Neff and Christopher Germer, alongside shorter workshops, introductory sessions, and one-on-one consultation, in person and online. The practice keeps the research honest; the research deepens the practice.
If you want to work with me on self-compassion as a practice — not as a paper — that work lives at Self-Compassion NYC.
Three components. One practice.
Mindful Self-Compassion was developed by Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer and grew out of Neff's foundational work defining self-compassion as a coherent psychological construct. The model has three intertwined components — distinct in theory, inseparable in practice.
Self-kindness
Meeting your own suffering with warmth rather than harsh self-criticism — speaking to yourself the way you would speak to someone you love.
Common humanity
Recognizing that struggle, failure, and pain are part of being human — not evidence that you are uniquely broken or alone.
Mindfulness
Holding painful experience in balanced awareness — neither suppressing it nor being swept away by it. You can't soothe what you can't see.
Indeed, the research is remarkably consistent: across hundreds of studies, self-compassion is associated with lower depression and anxiety, greater wellbeing, healthier relationships, and even greater motivation to change — the opposite of the common worry that self-kindness will make you soft. MSC is the protocol that translates these findings into something a person can actually practice in their kitchen on a Tuesday morning.
Where my research meets the practice.
My empirical work sits at the intersection of self-compassion and identities that don't always make room for it. I am particularly interested in masculinity — the cultural script that equates being a man with toughness, emotional suppression, and dominance — and in how self-compassion might offer men a more expansive and humane vision of themselves. A current line of work examines whether self-compassion in men extends outward to compassion for non-human animals, and what that says about the moral psychology of plant-based living.
Of particular interest, I recently reported that self-identified Christians scored higher on self-compassion than self-identified atheists — and simultaneously higher on grandiose narcissism (Magee, 2025) — suggesting that religious belief may support self-kindness and self-enhancement at the same time, two things social psychology has tended to treat as opposites.
For the full record of empirical work, see Publications and Posters. For the practice side — courses, workshops, sessions — keep reading.