Self Compassion

Hi from Eve! This blog post is on the topic of self compassion – a conscious practice that can really change how we relate to our own pain, and bring a lot of peace.

How can self compassion help us?

The literal translation from Latin of the word compassion is ‘to suffer with’. I understand this to mean that when we are in a place of compassion, we have the courage to stay present with suffering (rather than deny it, minimize it, or avoid it). There is an inherent kindness in this courageous presence. So I see compassion as a combination of courage, presence, and kindness in the face of suffering.

It is very common to respond to suffering by denying it (‘I don’t really feel that bad’; ‘this is not my problem’; ‘there’s nothing wrong’); avoiding it (addictions of all kinds; escaping into heady/intellectual thinking rather than feeling into the body; ‘tuning out’ with television, books etc.); or going to blame (self blame or other blame, a function of the inner critic/judgmental mind). Other ways we can attempt to avoid or minimize suffering are to ‘fix’ (rush in with a ‘solution’) or care-take (giving life energy or money outward that we don’t really have to give, thus depleting ourselves). These can all be attempts to avoid suffering, or at least feel less of it.

I am not suggesting that compassion means we do not try to resolve suffering. But I AM suggesting that compassion itself is a ‘staying with’ pain rather than an immediate reaction to try to make it go away. When we stay present with pain, after a while a truly skillful and transformative response will often arise.

So I define compassion as nothing more or less that staying present with suffering.  This is actually, when you think about it, an unusual response to pain; and again, one that takes presence (aka mindfulness), courage, and kindness. Mindfulness so that we know pain is happening and we are not in automatic, unconscious reaction to it; and courage to choose to stay present rather than run away. The courage part of compassion can be supported by a faith that there is value in staying present with suffering (that it is not simply an act of self torture!). This faith becomes knowledge once we have tried it out, but at the beginning, when what we are used to is trying to avoid pain, some faith in the process can be helpful.  Courage to stay with suffering can also be supported by remembering our interconnectedness –many other beings are having a similar experience of suffering, and we are not alone. And finally kindness: once we are there with pain, we do not aggravate it or build on it with negative judgments. Instead, we simply bring kindness.

Thich Nhat Hahn tells a beautiful parable about compassion. A mindful parent is in the kitchen making soup, while their infant child is sleeping in the other room. The child begins to cry. The parent turns off the stove, puts down the soup spoon, goes into the other room, and picks up the child. The parent holds the child until the child, in its own time, is soothed and falls back to sleep. Then the parent puts the child back in the bed and returns to the soup.

The parent is bringing presence, or mindfulness, to the sound of suffering from the other room. The parent is bringing the courage to put down what may seem important (making the soup) in order to tend to the suffering, and stay present with what may be a screaming child. And, once with the suffering, the parent is bringing a kind, comforting energy. Kind, patient presence in the face of suffering. That is compassion.

It is often easier to understand the value of compassion when we imagine applying it to someone else (in particular when we imagine applying it to helpless others like infants, children and animals). But what I am suggesting here is that we learn to apply the energy of compassion to ourselves. Why?

Because:  You are in charge of your own well being. No one else is in charge of that. You have a responsibility to love and take care of yourself. You do not have to let yourself be buffeted by whatever life throws at you, including your own conditioning. It is your responsibility to make the choices that will bring you contentment. It is your responsibility to be the ‘parent’, the decision-maker, the guide for your own soul.

(I would like to note here that many of us have a deep, not always conscious belief that we are not worthy of our own excellent self care. If there is or may be a voice like that in your head, I urge you to not believe it – because it isn’t true – and find skillful ways to work with it, such as various forms of counseling and support. I will address that voice further in other blog posts).

When you learn to be a kind and wise guide for your own journey, you will begin to feel some ease and relief in this life.  When we look at examples of kind and wise guides, both in our own lives and historically, compassion is a central part of how they operate. They have the courage and patience to stay present with suffering. You can too.

Your own heart, body and mind suffer at times. You may handle this by avoiding through addiction, blame, or self blame – which ultimately exacerbate and inflame the pain. Or you can have the courage to simply stay present with the pain. Bring curiosity and kindness to it. Even when the compassion does not transform the pain, something else wonderful is happening – you are strengthening your capacity to see clearly, to ‘stay in your seat’, to wait with patience for a skillful response.

If the notion of staying present with pain seems overwhelming, that is okay. You can try it in tiny increments. Let’s say, for instance, that Carmen has woken up in the night with anxiety about money issues. What she has been doing to manage this is take an herbal sleeping aid. She is interested in trying self compassion, but she’s afraid of being really consumed by anxiety and is not confident that she can stay with the degree of pain that comes up when she wakes in the night concerned about money. So, she tries it for one minute. For one minute, she brings presence and kindness to the pain. She feels what is happening in her body. She notices a churning in her belly. She whispers, ‘May I hold this pain in kindness’.

I think of it like working out at a gym. (Not that I work out at a gym, but it’s a metaphor). Say  I can’t handle the five pound weights yet, but I can handle the one pound weights, for like five minutes. So that’s what I do. At some point I will work up to the five pound weights.  It’s the same with self compassion – we can start small and build up over time.

And as we come to know our own pain, through the ‘abiding’ of compassion, we develop our capacity for deep empathy. Once you have compassion for yourself, you will have it for everyone else. You will be less reactive to and judgmental of other people’s pain and their strategies for avoiding it, and more able to bring a truly healing presence.

And your life, and the lives of those around you, will become happier.

So, GO SELF COMPASSION!!!! YAY!!!

To close, here is a beautiful exercise adapted from the work of Kristen Neff and Christopher Germer called ‘Self Compassion Break’. This is one concrete way to begin practicing self compassion.

When you encounter suffering, try this three step process:

  1. Say to yourself: “This is a moment of suffering” – thus increasing your awareness and capacity to bring presence/mindfulness to the moment.
  2. Say to yourself: “Suffering is a part of life”- thus reminding yourself that you are in no way alone with this pain. Many uncountable others experience something similar. With the understanding that we are not alone, we can feel more courage to stay present with pain.
  3. Say to yourself: “May I be kind to myself”- thus reminding yourself to bring the energy of kindness, rather than judgment or denial, to the moment of suffering.

Importance of Intention in Self Love

“One who truly cares for themselves could never harm another.”the Buddha

“With our thoughts we make the world” – the Buddha

Deciding to love yourself, rather than waiting for it to happen when you have become some marvelous person you hope to be one day, is a key part of well being. Loving yourself as you are now, warts and all. “What?!? “  -shouts the inner critic- “I am not deserving of my own constant love and care. I must be tormented and scolded, or I will sink into a quagmire of pathetic insufficiency!”

Nope.

Unconditional self love does not mean passively accepting our own self destructive or hurtful habits. It means working consistently, and with love and patience, toward our own potentials – and also recognizing our strengths. Our self-corrective times do not come from self hate, but from self love. Our self-celebrating times do not come from grandiosity but from gratitude for being a complex and miraculous part of the natural world. Loving your own successes in the same way you might love a sunset.

Imagine a really great parent. Imagine the levels of patience, of clarity, of kindness, of guidance a great parent would give a child finding their way. Self love looks like becoming that great parent for ourselves. And intending to create that for ourselves is the first step in allowing it to happen.

When we consciously intend to love ourselves, we plant a powerful seed that has the potential to bring previously unknown levels of well being into our daily lives. Why? Because when we love ourselves, then the person who knows us the most intimately truly loves us, has our back, and is there for us with genuine kindness. And when we are present for ourselves with kindness, life is more pleasant. Well being increases.

The more you do something, the easier it gets. The more you can remind yourself of your intention to love yourself, the more the possibilities for offering yourself care and kindness – both in your inner words to yourself and in your outer actions – will arise. In James Baraz’s book, Awakening Joy, he quotes Dr. Daniel Siegel (clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute): “Intentions create an integrated state of priming, a gearing up of our neural system to be in the mode of that specific intention : we can be readying to receive, to sense, to focus, to behave in a certain manner.” As I said…setting an intention plants a powerful seed.

Try this two step process:

1. Find a way to phrase an intention of self love (self-acceptance, self-compassion, self-kindness) that you at least somewhat resonate with. Keep it simple, in the positive, and don’t use qualifiers like “I’ll try to…” or “a little..”.

2. Read your intention aloud to yourself every day for at least a week. Think of it as a Harry Potter type of spell; a kind of magic that may really bring about positive change in your life.

Intention is powerful. Why not try? Loving yourself more might help this short life be more fun, and bring you more happiness. Go for it!

Love, Eve

 

Safe Person Tool

There are many tools we can use to achieve unconditional self love; mindfulness and lovingkindness practices are primary in Buddhist philosophy. I will be posting here about those and many other means I use and teach to move toward inner and outer peace. In this blog entry my topic is ‘safe person’. Please feel welcome to comment about this post and about your own practices to help you with self acceptance.

Last night my friend Shahara Godfrey and I taught about compassion and lovingkindess, particularly as they apply to our own selves, at the East Bay Meditation Center. I have co-led two daylong teachings there before (‘Dharma and Music’ with Anushka Fernandopulle and ‘A Day with Kwan Yin’ with Shahara) but this was my first time teaching as a potential regular teacher there (I will co-teach twice there this year, then, in the new year, will be teaching on my own).

So there I am. I’ve been a meditation practitioner for 22 years; a music and drama teacher all of my adult life; a performer since childhood; a dharma teacher since 2006; an ‘official’ (i.e. trained and certified) dharma teacher for a year. Thousands of hours of reading philosophy and psychology; being in therapy, and going to twelve step groups. Every day I meditate and pray. I am sitting next to a friend for whom I feel real love.

And I am seized with the conviction that I am not good enough.

I developed this ‘core belief’ in childhood, at times when my needs were not met. You know how it is with kids. When our lives hurt we usually figure it’s our fault. Problem is, that kind of core belief sticks around long after childhood fades and we realize that our childhood pain was not our fault.

I’ve learned through years of work that a crucial tool for dealing with the triggering of a negative core belief is to talk about it with a safe person. So, step one: have a safe person. For some this is easy and obvious, but for some it is not. How to have a safe person? Be authentic and keep reaching out, even when it means some people will reject you. Eventually someone will ‘get’ you. Then, keep coming back to that/those people. The ones who are safe and kind and don’t secretly scare you a little bit.

My girlfriend Diane is a safe person for me. So I came home from teaching, all triggered out, and just told her about my experience and feelings. She said nice things, but she didn’t have to. All she really had to do was listen, which she did. I told the whole story, and she didn’t reject me. And within an hour I realized that in fact I had done a great job, that what I teach about (unconditional self love) is a beautiful and important thing. I have very wonderful quotes and poems and readings and songs to share as a part of my teaching. Also, I was with Shahara, and she is a wonderful teacher. The trigger for feeling ‘not good enough’ is sometimes just being my authentic, enthused self in front of a group of strangers.

But I can have faith in the intention and beauty of the path I am on with many others, and my own imperfect self on that path. Sometimes walking toward real healing and goodness – in my own heart and in what I share with others – feels like walking through peanut butter. It is so slow and laborious. But I keep heading forward because what are the other choices? I don’t want to pretend and I don’t want to give up.

Loving ourselves is a prerequisite to truly loving the world. We need to love ourselves without aggrandizement or denial. Then we can love everyone else with so much less judgment and barrier. Letting each other be who we are with genuine presence and love. Doesn’t that sound good? Like, what we need?

There are so many different tools I use and teach to head toward this goal. One of them is the safe person tool. Even if you are frightened, it is so important to put yourself out there and find at least one safe person who can hear and hold your whole true self, your whole true experience. I know it can be really hard to do but if you don’t have a safe person in your life right now you can find one. They are there. We are there. Risk it, and be persistent, and be brave, and patient. We are there.

Let’s practice being that for each other.

Love, Eve

Welcome Blog

Hi! Welcome to my blog!

This will be a place where I write about dharma, music, and healing ourselves and the world.

The blog is called Simple Truth after a song that I wrote about self love. I wrote the song a few years ago for James Baraz’s class Awakening Joy (www.awakeningjoy.info). I am a singer for his class (it’s a class that meets ten times, and at each meeting there is a musician and a guest teacher. Each week has a topic related to awakening joy in one’s life).

That particular year, I was assigned to sing during the week James was teaching about self love as a doorway to bringing more happiness into one’s life. Not only did I not have a song about self love in the repertoire of songs that I had written, but I could not find or think of a single song about self love at all (since then someone pointed out to me that the song ‘The Greatest Love of All’ by Whitney Houston is about self love). So I set about to write one.

My song about self love (Simple Truth) came surprisingly easily. I had been on two eight day metta retreats (‘metta’ is a word in the Pali language that means ‘lovingkindness’) in recent years. Metta practice is an ancient Buddhist practice which leads to greater levels of both warm heartedness and abilities of concentration. In the traditional practice, there are a series of phrases and a series of people that you send the phrases to. There are many ways to say the phrases (and you can adapt them to languaging that most suits you) – the ones I often use, and a simple way to do them, goes ‘may you be happy, may you be safe, may you be healthy, may you be at ease’.

The series of people you send the metta phrases to traditionally go in this order: self, benefactor, dear friend, neutral person, difficult person, and all beings. I was taught that the list was set up this way in order to access the most easy people to love first, and then with practice to access a loving heart for even the most difficult people in our lives.

But my experience had been that the first person on the list, my own self, was not an instantaneously easy person for me to love. There was a lot of self judgment and self doubt, and even self hate, in the way.

On my first eight day metta retreat I dutifully went through all the categories. When I went on my second metta retreat, I told my teacher in our first interview that I had found sending metta to myself more challenging than sending metta to others. So she suggested that I spend the entire eight days sending metta to myself!

When I say eight days, I mean 12 – 16 hours a day sending these phrases to myself. At Spirit Rock Meditation Center, where I did the retreats, we are in silence all day long sending these phrases in our minds. They feed us delicious vegetarian meals, which we eat in silence. Other than that, we are sitting in a beautiful meditation hall, and walking on the beautiful land or in a beautiful room built just for quiet walking back and forth – saying the phrases.

I did it. I did eight days of sending metta to myself. I was not imbued with self love the whole time, but I did have moments. What I saw was, with genuine self love, two things happened. 1) Complete acceptance of my imperfect self, and 2) Instantaneous love for all others.

The Buddha taught, “One cannot harm another who truly loves themselves”. I see why. True self love is not narcissism, selfishness, or self obsession. True self love is seeing ourselves as we actually are and holding ourselves in great compassion and patience. When we can do that for ourselves, we automatically do it for others. When we can see that we are both miraculous and flawed, and that we are trying our best, and that we are very dear – we know it about every one and everything else, too. And we would never want to harm anyone because we see how tender and sweet and confused, and deserving of love, we all are.

So, having had that experience, writing a song about self love came relatively easy to me. After I sang it at the joy class, James and his wife Jane both told me how much they loved the song. And though I have written many songs that people have appreciated, this song Simple Truth has resonated more deeply with people than anything else I have sung.

I have come to understand that much of spiritual practice and healing modalities serve a purpose of walking us away from self hatred (inculcated by societal childhood conditioning, and experienced through the critical mind) and toward unconditional love. Once we are able to love and accept ourselves on the same level that we love and accept, say, a fawn in the forest or a little yellow bird singing in a tree, we have accessed the heart that can tolerate and love a great deal within our universe. Maybe not everything yet, but a lot.

So, welcome to my blog. I will be sharing the things I consider ‘simple truths’, along with practices I use to help myself and others head toward the north star of a heart that can experience and offer unconditional love.

Love,

Eve