A Meditation for Working With Our Self-Judging Voice with Diana Winston

Nov 21, 2025

In this enlightening conversation, Diana Winston, Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center, explores the crucial difference between self-compassion and self-esteem. She discusses how mindfulness can help us recognize self-judging thoughts without getting overwhelmed by them. Listeners learn to embrace their flaws with kindness, using soft labels for negative thoughts. The practice culminates in a silent meditation that fosters self-love and compassion, leaving us with heartfelt techniques to wish kindness to ourselves and others.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Self-Compassion Vs. Self-Esteem

Self-compassion differs from self-esteem by not depending on external validation.
It accepts flaws while recognizing inherent worth and belonging.

ADVICE

Label Your Inner Critic

Notice self-critical voices and label them to create distance.
Use mindfulness to recognize judging thoughts so you don't get carried away by them.

ADVICE

Get Off The Thought Train

When you notice a thought spiraling, tell yourself you're 'on the train' and step off.
Stay on the platform and let thoughts pass instead of following them.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

As today's teacher notes, self-compassion is different from self-esteem. Relying on building up our self-esteem tends to lead us to need a lot of external validation in order to feel ok. Instead, self-compassion is the idea that even with all of our flaws, we can still care about ourselves and see ourselves as infinitely worthy of love and belonging.

In this extended 30-minute practice, mindfulness teacher Diana Winston guides us through a process to get familiar with our self-judging voice and how we relate to our flaws, so that we can nurture compassion and recognize our own worthiness.

Diana Winston is the Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center and author of several books including The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering your Natural Awareness.

Note that there is an extended silent pause in the middle of this recording to give extra time to practice.

The transcription of this guided meditation will be online at Mindful.org next week.

Stay curious, stay inspired. Join our community by signing up for our free newsletter: mindful.org/signup

Show Notes

Find more from Diana Winston here.

Go Deeper

We all have an interior voice that keeps a running commentary on everything we do. Occasionally that voice is encouraging or kind, but often it isn't. The thing is, most of us aren't even consciously aware of this constant internal chatter. We just think it's reality. Mindfulness gives us the tools to notice, recognize, and work with this mental monologue in ways that improve our ability to learn from mistakes, be accountable, make amends, and grow as people. To learn more about the Inner Critic and how to tame it, check out these resources from the website:

And for more ways to work with that pesky internal voice, try this practice: A Basic Meditation to Tame Your Inner Critic.

And more from Mindful here:

More episodes of 12 Minute Meditation

Let us know what you thought of this episode of 12 Minute Meditation by leaving a review or by emailing yourwords@mindful.org.