Threat, drive, and soothe: learning self-compassion in an academic writing retreat

ABSTRACT

As an experienced participant in academic writing retreats, I became aware of conflicting feelings during retreats between ideas of restorative practice and the pressure to produce outputs. Through autoethnographic inquiry, I examined this conflict. I wrote a reflective journal to describe my lived experience of a recent retreat and analysed the text using a self-compassion framework of Gilbert’s emotional regulation systems: drive, threat and soothe. Using these three systems as three characters within myself, I explored the influences of the neoliberal university context on my lived experience and sense of my academic identity and well-being. I used these insights to develop a transformed writing identity and practice. I moved from uncritical awareness of my internalisation of neoliberal values of isolation and output, to a more self-nurturing and connected practice. This research offers encouragement to other educators seeking transformative potential through examining their experiences, contexts, identity, and well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• Autoethnography
• reflective practice
• writing retreat
• emotional regulation
• self-compassion
• neoliberal university

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviews for their compassionate and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).