There are four skills in this approach, and they are meant to be used in a particular order.

The four are mindfulness, compassion, insight, and reframing.

The Four Skills

1. Mindfulness is the skill of becoming aware of what is happening around you and within you. What you are feeling in your body. What emotion those feelings add up to. What you believe. What you are being pulled to do.
2. Compassion is the skill of setting the intention to be kind and helpful, toward yourself and toward other people. It is what lets you look at what you found without turning it into evidence against yourself.
3. Insight is the skill of understanding what is actually driving all of it. Not just that you felt something, but which belief produced it, where that belief came from, and what it has been doing to you.
4. Reframing is the skill of shifting an unbalanced belief into something more reasonable and better supported by evidence. Not positive thinking. Something you can actually hold, because the evidence backs it.

Why Compassion Comes Second

It would be reasonable to assume the order is arbitrary, or that you could pick whichever skill appeals to you most. You cannot, and I learned that the hard way.

When I first started developing mindfulness, I got better at noticing. I could hear my own running commentary much more clearly than before. At first that felt like progress.

What I was not prepared for was how brutal that commentary was.

I would walk down the street and catch myself criticizing everyone I passed. How they looked. What they were wearing. And then I started noticing the same voice turned inward. The same sharpness, aimed at me.

The moment it really landed was catching my own reflection in a window, and hearing, almost in real time, the stream of nasty things I was saying about what I saw. I had not realized I was doing that. But I was, all the time.

So that was the first problem. Mindfulness without compassion meant I could see everything more clearly and had no kindness to meet it with. The awareness just gave my inner critic better material.

The second problem was worse. When something difficult came up while I was practicing, a strange thought or an exaggerated fear, I would immediately hear, see how broken you are, you have not figured anything out. I was trying to learn a skill in order to understand myself, and the act of learning it was triggering self-attack.

That is why compassion comes second. When you judge what comes up, you stop looking. Not because you cannot see it, but because seeing it hurts. And insight needs those things to surface. They will only surface if it is safe for them to show up.

Once I started being kinder to myself about what I was noticing, the insight started flowing. I could look at a difficult thought and let it be there. I could notice a pattern I did not like and get curious about it instead of disgusted.

So mindfulness is what lets you see what is there, and compassion is what makes it possible to keep looking without turning on yourself.

Why Insight Comes Before Reframing

Insight has to come before reframing for a simpler reason. You cannot change a belief you have not found.

If you skip the finding and go straight to building something better, you end up arguing with a belief you never actually identified, which is why that kind of effort usually does not hold.

That is the reason for the order. Each step gives the next one something it needs in order to work.