The Fulcrum of Self-Compassion

This website revolves around a common idea—that the shadows are tied to the light. Not that life's sweetnesses or what meaning we draw from our experiences can ever remove the gaps or dark spaces, the anguish of our losses—but that they coexist. With help, we can see the dark is full of constellations. 

Whatever suffering we experience (and whatever joy) is tethered to its counterpart. Something we care deeply for. But it can be very difficult to see the lines that connect them. 

In pain, our whole sky feels like our whole life, doesn’t it? 

How do we learn the shape of the pain and then turn to look for its sister inside us? Isn't there a mechanism by which we can pivot to expand our view so we can understand with new eyes? What is our loss tethered to? Where does our frustration point us? Our shame? What is our fear signaling about our deepest loves, our deepest needs? Where is the heart of our longing pulling us? 

With perspective, we may discover that our sorrows are also sacred messengers. Grief helps us know how deep our love runs and how much it connects us. Fear helps us know what we most want to protect. Sadness helps us know what is precious and what we yearn for. 

To begin to see, we may do deep analytical work, a friend may hold up a mirror, or a therapist…but perhaps the easiest way, the method you can carry and employ at any moment, is self-compassion.

Self-compassion is the fulcrum by which we turn from the pain and enlarge our view. 

Compassion’s root means “to suffer with.” Consider what happens just before we feel compassion. We see it. We recognize it as suffering. Then we care, we act. Imagine for a moment you see a child at the grocery store, clearly all alone, crying, tears streaming down their face. That impulse to go to the child, to help, it’s in the same part of our brain, the vagus nerve, that controls our need to breathe, digest food, and reproduce.*source below  It’s basic to our survival. So first we recognize the suffering as suffering, and then we go and help. We suffer with. In gentleness and in action. 

So to practice self-compassion is to first see, then to suffer with yourself, to care. Finally, to take action. Does this sound pitiful to you? The idea of self-compassion may draw up feelings of resistance. Don’t wallow in it. Don’t become paralyzed. Don’t be a baby. Don’t be soft. Hold yourself accountable. Just be positive. Muscle through. Have some grit.

But studies show self-compassion is not a permission slip to continue messing up or a net that mires you in bad feelings. 

"The core of mental toughness is actually self-compassion,” Brown said. “People who are mentally tough stay mentally tough because they don’t slip easily into shame or self-criticism or self-loathing.” The science backs this up, according to research from Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education.

Those who practice self-compassion can hold themselves more accountable and affect more change in their lives than those who are more self-punishing. (research below) We tend to have a blind spot here. We worry we’ll succumb to our weaknesses or slip into self-pity. But true self-compassion is the strong back of forward motion. By giving ourselves gentleness in our moments of suffering, we can soften around the problem, see clearly, take ourselves in hand, and move forward toward how we hope to be. 

Self-compassion can’t remove the suffering, but it doesn’t compound it. It stops the second arrow.

 It’s simple but powerful—acknowledging the suffering without ruminating alleviates it. Thich Nhat Hanh writes:

There is a Buddhist teaching found in the Sallatha Sutta, known as The Arrow. It says if an arrow hits you, you will feel pain in that part of your body where the arrow hit; and then if a second arrow comes and strikes exactly at the same spot, the pain will not be only double, it will become at least ten times more intense.

The unwelcome things that sometimes happen in life—being rejected, losing a valuable object, failing a test, getting injured in an accident—are analogous to the first arrow. They cause some pain. The second arrow, fired by our own selves, is our reaction, our storyline, and our anxiety. All these things magnify the suffering. Many times, the ultimate disaster we’re ruminating upon hasn’t even happened.

We may worry, for example, that we have cancer and that we’re going to die soon. We don’t know, and our fear of the unknown makes the pain grow even bigger.

The second arrow may take the form of judgment (“how could I have been so stupid?”), fear (“what if the pain doesn’t go away?”), or anger (“I hate that I’m in pain. I don’t deserve this!”). We can quickly conjure up a hell realm of negativity in our minds that multiplies the stress of the actual event, by ten times or even more. Part of the art of suffering well is learning not to magnify our pain by getting carried away in fear, anger, and despair. 

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If we let suffering come up and just take over our mind, we can be quickly overwhelmed by it. So we have to invite another energy to come up at the same time, the energy of mindfulness. The function of mindfulness is, first, to recognize the suffering and then to take care of the suffering. The work of mindfulness is first to recognize the suffering and second to embrace it. A mother taking care of a crying baby will naturally take the child into her arms without suppressing, judging it, or ignoring the crying. Mindfulness is like that mother, recognizing and embracing suffering without judgment. 

So the practice is not to fight or suppress the feeling, but rather to cradle it with a lot of tenderness. When a mother embraces her child, that energy of tenderness begins to penetrate into the body of the child. Even if the mother doesn't understand at first why the child is suffering and she needs some time to find out what the difficulty is, just her act of taking the child into her arms with tenderness can already bring relief. If we can recognize and cradle the suffering while we breathe mindfully, there is relief already...

Once you offer your acknowledgment and care to this suffering, it naturally will become less impenetrable and more workable; and then you have the chance to look into it deeply, with kindness (but still always with a solid ground of mindful breathing to support you), and find out why it has come to you. It is trying to get your attention, to tell you something, and now you can take the opportunity to listen. You can ask someone to look with you—a  teacher, a friend, a psychotherapist...

You can discover how, through looking deeply, you can transform this organic "garbage" into compost, which in turn may become many beautiful flowers of understanding, compassion, and joy. 

-Thich Nhat Hanh | No Mud No Lotus | The Art of Transforming Suffering

So you see how we find the lines between our light and shadow. Self-compassion is the fulcrum by which we turn from the pain and enlarge our view. Now we see that the night sky is only on one side of the earth. Now we see clearly how our pain is born out of our deepest needs and loves. We are reminded of our humanity.

Like a parent guiding their sleepwalking child back to bed, self-compassion is gentle but strong. It can see clearly. I know, darling. I see what’s happening here. Let’s go this way. 

Softening around our suffering actually provides the springboard we need to make things better for ourselves. Let’s call it a supreme adaption. 

*Research on compassion as instinctual and basic to survival in the vagus nerve: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_compassionate_species

Further Reading: 

⏦  Kristin Neff, Self-Compassion | The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself

⏦  Thich Nhat Hanh | No Mud No Lotus | The Art of Transforming Suffering

Image: Kristin Neff

Self-Compassion Research, Guides, and Alternate On-ramps:

To get started, we can first understand what compassion is not: https://self-compassion.org/what-self-compassion-is-not-2/

"The core of mental toughness is actually self-compassion,” Brown said. “People who are mentally tough stay mentally tough because they don’t slip easily into shame or self-criticism or self-loathing.” The science backs this up, according to research from Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education.

The 3 elements of self-compassion:

1. See and recognize there is suffering

2. Know you are not alone in suffering and others suffer similarly, both now around the world and in the past. Suffering is part of our common humanity

3. May you be kind to yourself in your suffering. The key here is not to ruminate but to feel it in your body. You can't skip this part because the more we resist feeling the suffering, the more it compounds. Once fully felt, you can discover what you need.

Guided meditations and exercises: 

Dr. Kristin Neff website: https://self-compassion.org/category/exercises/# 

Center for Mindful Self-Compassion website: https://centerformsc.org/practice-msc/guided-meditations-and-exercises/

The Ultimate Teacher | Thich Nhat Hanh:

⏦  How do I love myself? | Thich Nhat Hanh answers questions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMoRtJhVoxc

⏦  Guided Loving-Kindness Meditation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5luvQp--B8U

Elizabeth Gilbert | Trying on the voice of love:

⏦  https://www.elizabethgilbert.com/the-most-important-words-of-my-life-dear-ones-some-of-you-may-remember-th/

⏦  https://insighttimer.com/blog/elizabeth-gilbert-fear-compassion/

The Research:

For research and expert-guided self-compassion practice, Dr.Kristin Neff is the leader in the field. She received her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, and is currently an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Kristin is a pioneer in the field of self-compassion research. She is the author of the book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. 

Kristin Neff & Colleagues’ Research:

https://self-compassion.org/the-research/

More Research:

 https://www.forbes.com/sites/amymorin/2015/10/01/science-explains-the-link-between-self-compassion-and-success/?sh=48a62c9a2384

Alternate On-ramps | Ways to back into self-compassion if it feels too difficult, false, or indulgent:

1. If you can’t seem to access tenderness toward yourself, maybe you can practice a bird’s eye view. Pulling back from yourself and watching yourself from outside. Be objective like a watchful observer. Focus on curiosity as the prime function. Curiosity allows us to ask, What is going on here? What is this human needing?  You might think of it in a more removed way. Think of self-compassion as a mechanism you are only trying. An experiment maybe you don’t feel, but a hypothesis you would like to test. 

2. One other technique is to try to sidle up to kindness towards yourself is by simply focusing on “respect.”  What would a respectful response to suffering be? What would be decent? If it were someone else, how would we show a basic regard for their humanity? Even if we thought their suffering might be caused by their own actions, exaggerated, or a painpoint of their own shortsightedness? What base level considerations would be warranted?

3. You may need to slowly bring the circle of self-compassion toward you. Think of your pet or a child you know. Do you think they deserve to be free from suffering, happy, safe, and loved? Just because they are here? You can wish them well. You can focus sending them loving kindness. Over time, you can grow that loving-kindness a little bit closer to yourself. A friend. A family member. Then one day, you can wish both of you ease, happiness, safety, love. Because you’ll then have an awareness of how you both need those things to do well, to take good care of each other. Because you'll understand then, your happiness belongs to others, too. 

Does this help you befriend yourself just the smallest bit? You can grow this perspective by practicing it. Slowly, over months, you can take yourself in hand. It will become less uncomfortable. Perhaps one of our greatest and most important tasks is to grow a friendship with ourselves. After all, it is only ourselves who is here with us our whole lives, every moment. We may as well kindle an affection for the one we are forever tied to.  From here, we have more gentleness for everyone. Not passivity, but deep understanding.

Think of yourself as a practitioner

Like any practice, we waver. We are unpracticed. We go off track. 

And so we begin again. You can see within this practice is something we do all our lives. Returning again and again. To our values, to ourselves, to our most tender places. To our true homes.

If the heart wanders or is distracted,  bring it back to the point quite gently…And even if you do nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

-St. Francis de Sales

On how to feel less pain, by actually feeling it...

Lessons for my children. Lessons for me. Lessons for us.

Excerpt of transcript from Brene Brown interview with neuroscientist Dr. Amishi Jha from her book Peak Mind:

To feel less pain, practice focusing on it, non-elaboratively. Don’t make up a story about it, simply observe it and notice how it changes over time. Do not run from it. You can try and you will fail. It’s such a common thing to think you can run from it, suppress it, medicate it, whatever it is to not feel it. And this other approach feels like the wrong thing to do, but it is actually going to help you a lot more. 

Recently, my son had gone away to college, and I kept feeling that tug at my heart, I felt so sad. I would well up with tears feeling so sad, and I knew I wanted them to have that life, but it was a real feeling of pain and I’m like, “No, don’t think about it, don’t think about it,” I then thought, “Oh, I can actually take a different approach here. So I made that feeling the focus of my attention. It’s almost a body scan where you’re really getting granular, what is this experience? My heart feels tender, my face feels flushed, my stomach feels a little jittery, I feel sad, and then just kind of getting back into the sensory aspect to it, realizing it’s like a wave and it ran its course, and it didn’t keep yanking at me anymore. I felt it, I honored it. I looked at it without flinching, I just experienced it. In some sense, bathed in it, I was fully in the floodlight of my pain. But I wasn’t reacting to it, I wasn’t elaborating, I wasn’t trying to justify, I wasn’t fighting it, I was being with it, and then it moved on, and I moved on.

BB: I think about the energy that we spend trying to outrun and outsmart pain or vulnerability or uncertainty. Instead of just facing toward it and bathing in it a little bit.

AJ: Yeah, but bathing it in a very specific way—it’s not thinking, it’s actually dialing down thinking. And most of us don’t even know what that means. “What do you mean don’t think about the pain? What else is there?” Feel the pain, physically…In the sensations you are experiencing associated with the pain. Or take the bird’s eye view, watch the pain. But neither of those are elaborating on the mental content, the conceptual thoughts that actually are associated with the pain. That’s what gets us into a lot of exhaustion because you’re using that executive control endlessly to try to generate and go places with it that aren’t going to serve you.

BB: I think the opposite of bathing in it is ruminating in it. They’re very different things, it’s paying attention to it, but not elaboratively and not ruminating. It’s feeling it and letting go.

AJ: And you can even watch your own rumination, like, “There I go.” But you’re watching it, “Oh, there I go, I’m looping.” And just taking that small step away, like you said, floating above, you can actually see that you’re participating. This is important, you’re using your attention to ruminate. It’s fueling the rumination. Now, if I pull away, I’m actually giving it less fuel…And it will dissipate.

Poetry | Prayer

Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision–a faith, to use an old-fashioned term. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed.  -Mary Oliver

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Poems are prayers. Poetry never wants to be compromised by any church. 

Poets were here before the church was here. - Jim Bodeen

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Poetry, like all art, has a trinitarian function: creative, redemptive, and sanctifying. It is creative because it takes the raw materials of fact and feeling and makes them into that which is neither fact nor feeling. Redemptive because it transforms pain, ugliness of life into joy, beauty. Sanctifying because it gives the transitory a relative form of meaning. - Vassar Miller

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There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is, now and again, to visit that inner kind of sanctuary. - John O’Donohue

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Poetry instead treats words with care. They are slowly fashioned into lanterns — things that can illuminate and guide. Debate certainly matters. Arguments matter. But when the urgent controversies of the day seem like all there is to say about life and death or love or God, poetry reminds me of those mysterious truths that can’t be reduced solely to linear thought.

Poems slow us down…Poetry calls us back to notice and attend to the embodied world around us and to our internal lives.

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In this way, poetry is like prayer, a comparison many have made. Both poetry and prayer remind us that there is more to say about reality than can be said in words though, in both, we use words to try to glimpse what is beyond words. And they both make space to name our deepest longings, lamentations, and loves. Perhaps this is why the poetry of the Psalms became the first prayer book of the church. - Tish Harrison Warren

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The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way...to see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one. -John Ruskin

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Read selected poetry, here.

What We Talk About When We Talk About God

Here, for us, ideas for god transcend our history and reach out to the corners of the universe. Whether god is real or just our miraculous, unexplained consciousness trying to make meaning as its wired to do—it does seem that when we believe in something bigger and connective—when our view doesn’t exclude or divide or claim anyone or any group—we do better. 

⏦ Whether you believe god is some basic altruism imbued through evolution that ensures our own survival.

⏦ Or some remembrance of our belonging to each other, before.

⏦ Whether you believe it’s about returning in some long arc outside of time that isn’t ours to know. 

⏦ Or only something eternal, like matter never being destroyed…something more mysterious but real: dark energy, dark matter, pinning and connecting all things through forces we don’t yet have eyes for.

⏦ Or maybe just our wish to have some harmony.

⏦ Whether you believe god is the unconscious dance of subatomic particles, how they are drawn to each other, exchange, and continue. 

⏦ Or just how whatever is eternal…reflected photons, polypeptides, amino acids, exhaled carbon dioxide…how all of it changes forms and continues. How that is holy for the continuation alone. 

⏦ Whether you believe god is not a person, say, but some broad affection that somehow brings more ease, less friction.

⏦ Or maybe you simply cannot deny the beautiful mechanisms of matter transfigured—the compost to rose. Impermanence and our knowing we are impermanent, too.

⏦ Or that god may be our taking part in our impermanence, through our practice of compassion to transform suffering. Helping something give way to something else.

⏦ Maybe the desire for peace, for metta, that is god.

⏦ Maybe how you feel when you hold your child, that is god.

⏦ Maybe how you feel when a piano or a cello or a voice soaring sends chills up your back, that is god.

⏦ Maybe walking by the water, that is god.

⏦ Maybe kissing your beloved, or wanting the kiss of the beloved, that is god.

⏦ Or how the energy of light is somehow warm and we need it, and the universe is suffused with it.

⏦ Maybe you think the divine spark is in us and it all wants to return to itself.

⏦ Or maybe you like to think of god as simply Love with agency, to save us with our help.

⏦ Or maybe you are here in god, now.

When we talk about god here, we can’t deny the throughline of spiritual longing and belonging written into every story of humans. And we can’t divorce god from the mystery. We only acknowledge that our making room for something bigger than us that we share—giving it place in our lives as humans have done throughout known history—it seems to be vital to our makeup. And however we may be wrong, we take better care and we suffer less when we look out and up.

Thin Spaces, Holy Sparks, & Sweetnesses are all the ways we touch the seen and unseen.

Would you like help? Thich Nhat Hanh gently removes the distances. There is room for all of this, taught beautifully here: Thich Nhat Hanh on God | https://plumvillage.app/thich-nhat-hanh-on-god/

In Praise of Darkness

Sometimes, as I turn off the lights and lie with my daughter in the dark, I tell her

We’re going to rest in the soft, comfortable dark. 

I want her to remember the before time, to not fear the dark.

To know darkness as home.

“The first sound that a human hears is the sound of the mother's heartbeat in the dark lake water of womb.” - John O’Donohue

And maybe, we can remember the darkness even before the womb, that first darkness.

Soft and beautiful things can grow in the dark. 

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Proof

Honey, how can it be that half of you

lived hidden in me, held in dark velvet,

a person unbloomed.

Doesn’t this mean that all that time,

I was never bad, that

the flaw I was afraid would be found out—

my wrongness, my innermost failing—

was never there 

because you

are everything good.

-kcmp

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You Darkness 

You darkness from which I come,

I love you more than all the fires

that fence out the world,

for the fire makes a circle

for everyone

so that no one sees you anymore.

But darkness holds it all:

the shape and the flame,

the animal and myself,

how it holds them,

all powers, all sight —

and it is possible: its great strength

is breaking into my body.

I have faith in the night.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by David Whyte 

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Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home

tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.

The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

- David Whyte  

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I always think that that’s the secret of change: that there are huge gestations and fermentations going on in us that we are not even aware of; and then sometimes, when we come to a threshold, crossing over, which we need to become different, that we’ll be able to be different, because secret work has been done in us of which we’ve had no inkling. 

- John O’Donohue

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There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is, now and again, to visit that inner kind of sanctuary. 

- John O’Donohue

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The next time you are in the dark, 

may you remember that soft, comfortable

velvet of darkness full of mystery and beauty.

May you remember a place you’ve known before you came here.

May beauty grow inside your darkness,

and may you recognize it when you find it there.

-kcmp