Out of Love: Finding Your Way Back to Self-Compassion

Guest Bio: Marianne Ingheim

Marianne Ingheim is a Danish-Norwegian American writer, teacher, and Ph.D. student at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and stepson.

Marianne Ingheim knows what it means to face adversity and tragedy. Raised in a rigid religious household, depression, and anxiety were constants in her life. Diagnosed with breast cancer, she underwent a double mastectomy at 41. After that, her husband, whom she had decided to divorce, committed suicide. These challenges prompted her to probe her own psychological patterns and coping mechanisms. She soon realized that her brutal inner dialog and lack of self-compassion were under-recognized sources of suffering. They undermined her ability to face tough circumstances and made her feel as though happiness—even when life took turns for the positive—was out of reach. She committed to self-compassion, collected, and customized a number of exercises to practice it, and saw changes in almost every area of her life. “What’s so amazing about self-compassion is that I can be the container for myself, taking care of me even when the world around me seems to be falling apart,” says Ingheim.

In Out of Love: Finding Your Way Back to Self-Compassion, she shows readers how to be as kind to themselves as they are to others. It is written in 67 vignettes, which share stories from her personal journey and offer exercises, tips, and insights for cultivating self-compassion.