The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And will smile at the other’s welcome
—DEREK WALCOTT, poet
The best way to understand self-compassion practice is that by doing it we’re strengthening the wish to alleviate our own suffering. From this basic desire arise countless practical ways of taking care of ourselves. Self-compassion feels good when we practice it wisely, and the more we do, the more we want to do it. Over time a positive cycle develops, strengthening and deepening the initial motivation to practice. We just need to start somewhere.
The fact that you’re alive shows that you’re already taking good care of yourself. But beyond basic self-preservation, what are you doing to enhance your sense of well-being? Are you doing anything that’s not in your best interest? How do we cultivate positive emotions—those that make us happy—without falling into old habits of resisting pain in the process? Finally, is it possible to leave our past—mental patterns that only feed suffering—behind? In this chapter we’ll take a look at a wide spectrum of ways that will enable you to bring self-compassion into your life and free yourself from the clutches of unnecessary distress.
There are five key ways in which we can bring self-compassion into our lives: (1) physically, (2) mentally, (3) emotionally, (4) relationally, and (5) spiritually. Each area offers numerous practice options. Following are some preliminary ideas for how to implement them in your own life.
How do you care for yourself physically? How do you relate to your body when it’s under stress? A compassionate response involves softening into physical discomfort—not tightening up. Compassion is soft and tender. When the going gets tough, the soft get going.
Our muscles protect the body from potential danger by creating a hard shield against the world. Unfortunately, the brain doesn’t easily distinguish between a threat coming from the inside and one coming from the outside, so even if you’re worried about your performance on an exam, your muscles will become hard like a knot. Over time, tense muscles can put unnecessary stress on all the systems in the body.
If you’re feeling tense during meditation or while sitting quietly, try softening your belly. Let it be loose and at ease. If you notice another body part that’s tight, allow it to soften too. This is like the “Soften, Allow, and Love” exercise you tried in Chapter 3. With softening you’re not “trying to relax,” which puts pressure on you to feel something you’re not. Just soften.
Do the same with your breath. When you’re tense, your breath will become short and shallow. Try softening the breath a bit, perhaps by extending your belly outward as you inhale and exhale very slowly. Exhale twice as long as you inhale. Don’t worry if you return to shallow breathing when you’re done.
Anything you can do to soothe or comfort the body when you’re under stress fits into the category of physical self-compassion. Perhaps you need to take a nap, eat nourishing food, get exercise, take a warm bath, have sex, bask in the sun, go on vacation, pet the dog, or get a massage? Allow yourself a few minutes to imagine what might help tight areas soften.
Taking care of yourself physically can also clear the mind. Are you sleeping long enough, eating properly, and getting enough exercise? There’s often an inverse relationship between the mind and the body when it comes to exercise: the mind races when the body is inactive, and the mind calms down when the body starts moving.
In a Yale University study, Lawrence Williams and John Bargh discovered that warm hands enhance a person’s emotional warmth. Forty-one undergraduates were asked to briefly hold a cup of either hot or cold coffee as they rode up an elevator with the experimenter. Afterward, in the study room, the students rated a hypothetical person on ten different personality traits. The people who had held warm coffee in their hands gave warmer ratings (generous, caring) than those who held the cold coffee.
In a second study, participants were given a bogus instruction to rate the effectiveness of a therapeutic pad—either hot or cold—that they held in their hands. As a reward for participating in the study, they were given treats they could either consume themselves or give to a friend. Those students who held and evaluated the cold pad were more likely to take the reward for themselves and those who held the hot pad were more likely to give their reward to a friend.
It appears that physical warmth is closely related to mental warmth, perhaps from associations made in childhood between physical warmth and caretaking. Recent research suggests that the insula is involved in the perception of both physical and psychological warmth. Therefore, we’re likely to warm ourselves up emotionally when we drink a cup of hot tea or take a warm bath.
Some people wonder how taking antidepressant or anti-anxiety medication fits in with self-compassion practice. It’s simple: ask yourself what’s the most compassionate thing to do. Denying ourselves necessary medication can be a form of self-punishment or a way of ignoring our needs out of shame or obsessive concern for a “natural” body. The reverse is also true: medication can be a subtle form of emotional avoidance. Consider whether medication allows you to function better and pursue healthy behavior changes. If you feel you’re ready to live without medication, please discuss it with your doctor.
The most natural way to practice self-compassion is what you’re already doing. By acknowledging how we care for ourselves now, we can build on our strengths and remind ourselves of our good habits when we’re under pressure. Please think in terms of genuine care—the kind that makes you feel truly good inside. For example, you may enjoy a cup of hot chocolate in the morning more than a cup of coffee, even though more adults drink coffee. Give yourself credit for knowing exactly what soothes and comforts you. Some people love to have a massage, and others would rather take a nap. How about you? Pay special attention to what you need when you’re under severe stress or when things go really wrong.
How do you care for yourself physically?
Can you think of new ways to release the tension and stress that builds up in your body?
How do you care for yourself mentally, especially when your mind is preoccupied or racing with thoughts? The compassionate response is to step back and “allow” your thoughts to come and go—to stop resisting. We want to create mental space where upsetting ideas can slip in and out of our minds naturally and easily.
What does it take to let go of unnecessary daily concerns? An ancient strategy is to use a mantra, which literally means “tool for the mind.” You don’t need a foreign-sounding word to benefit from this technique. Familiar mantras are “This too will pass” and “One day at a time.” Doris Day sang the mantra Que sera sera, “Whatever will be will be.” Repeating these phrases calms the mind, due to their meaning and the power of concentration. Whenever we return our attention to a single word or phrase, we’re unhooking from our thoughts. Some people benefit by simply repeating the word “Yes” over and over in their minds. Pessimists seem to especially enjoy the mantra “If it ain’t one thing, it’s another!”
You can experiment with mantras that allow you to cope with different mental states. For example, a mantra that helps people stop obsessing about important decisions is “Don’t know … don’t know … don’t know.” A mantra for shame is “How could I have known?” A humorous mantra for the fear of disapproval is “So sue me!” Experiment with your tone of voice when you use a mantra. “So sue me” is cocky and “How could I have known?” is humble. To cultivate self-kindness, try “Be good to yourself” or “Be careful with me.”
Visualizations also help us to let go of disturbing thoughts. For example, imagine your thoughts as leaves flowing down a stream, with each leaf carrying away what is on your mind. Or imagine yourself as the sky, with your thoughts as passing clouds, some dark and foreboding, some light and airy, all passing by.
A powerful strategy to hold our thoughts more lightly is to contemplate death. “How would I feel about this if I had only 1 month to live?” In the context of death, very few of our concerns seem to matter. Similarly, if we ask ourselves what we value most in life—happy kids, good health, peace of mind—we can let go of the small stuff.
How do you care for your mind, especially when you’re under stress?
Is there a new strategy you’d like to try to let your thoughts come and go more easily?
Finally, when we suffer from troubling thoughts, we can cultivate compassion for our brains. The brain comprises only 2% of our body weight, but it works so hard that it needs 25% of our oxygen. Sometimes our overactive brains keep us awake at night simply to complete the work of the day. I know a physician who alleviated his obsessive-compulsive tendency by cultivating compassion for his overworked brain. Whenever he had an obsessive thought, he said, “Poor brain, it’s happening again—so much hard unnecessary work!”
How do you care for your emotional state? The compassionate way is to befriend painful emotions—to stop fighting them. There are many words for this: empathy, concern, kindness, care, forgiveness, mercy, benevolence, thoughtfulness, tolerance, supportiveness, acceptance, understanding, friendliness, sympathy.
Brian was a middle-aged guy who worried obsessively about his health. He went straight to the doctor whenever he felt pain. To manage his anxiety, Brian learned mindfulness meditation from a local meditation center. I taught him self-compassion techniques. After a few months of what his wife and I thought was steady progress, Brian declared to me, “You know, none of those things I’ve learned do me any good!”
So I asked him, “How are they not helping?” He responded, “Well, I’m just as anxious about every ache and pain, expecting it’ll kill me! And my wife is getting sick of it, since I go to her for reassurance every time.”
This led us to a much deeper discussion about Brian’s anxiety, touching on the following important points:
He came by his anxiety naturally, due to severe health problems in his childhood and obsessive-compulsive disorder in his family history.
Anxiety happens in life whether we like it or not.
Brian’s favorite form of anxiety is obsessing.
We can’t argue with emotions—that will only make them worse.
Everyone suffers in life—health anxiety is his particular hardship.
Our therapy goal was to become more accepting of anxiety, not to have less anxiety per se.
He needed to learn to hold anxiety with more kindness and less aversion.
Then Brian said, “You mean I should just let myself feel sorry for myself?” I replied, “Well, yes, that’s a start.”
Brian had a moment of “creative hopelessness,” as psychologist Steven Hayes might say, and the road to recovery began with tenderness toward his own plight.
Like the sympathy Brian learned to give himself, forgiveness is an important aspect of emotional self-care. Many of us find it hard to forgive ourselves when we make mistakes. We extend no mercy to ourselves. One way to forgive oneself is to ask, “What would my best friend say?” Or, as the saying goes, “What would Jesus [Buddha, Krishna] say?” By taking the more benign perspective of others, we can extract ourselves from our ruminations.
Most of this book is about how to become friendlier toward uncomfortable emotions, and toward ourselves. Treating ourselves to enjoyable activities can help. Examples are:
Listening to music
Going on vacation
Flying kites
Going to church
Thinking about sex
Reading a novel
Buying CDs
Driving
Working in the garden
Riding a bike
Going to the movies
Cooking delicious food
Collecting shells
Engaging in activities that are intrinsically enjoyable, rather than those that feel like work, is a way to care for ourselves emotionally.
The following two chapters will introduce a core practice for caring for ourselves emotionally—loving-kindness meditation—that you can practice anytime, night or day.
Connecting with others is another form of self-care—to stop isolating. Remember that feeling connected to other human beings is a component of Neff’s definition of self-compassion. We can feel isolated from others whether we are actually alone or not.
A sense of isolation can turn even ordinary unhappiness into despair or minor anxiety into dread. This is how elderly people often feel when they live alone and encounter health problems—each new symptom is a sign of imminent disaster. We may not notice when our support network is growing thin because isolation is an error of omission—it’s a problem you can’t see. Therefore, we should give special attention to our relational world.
How we relate to others has a huge impact on how we feel inside too. For example, we’re unlikely to have a good night’s sleep after a day of lying, stealing, and cheating. Such behavior may promote survival in the short term, but it does little for our emotional well-being. For starters, it puts us at a distance from ourselves—makes us argue with ourselves—which puts us at a distance from others.
Kindness in relationship means that our actions are guided by the wish to help others and refrain from harming them. The Dalai Lama calls this “wisely selfish” because it inspires people to be kind to us in return. The memory of a warm interaction can also give us lasting happiness.
I’m reminded of a story about a 9-year-old girl named Shanti from a well-to-do family in Mumbai, India. Shanti was walking along the beach with her father on her birthday. There are always poor people begging and doing tricks on the beach there for money. Shanti asked her father for a treat—an ice cream—since it was her birthday. Her father agreed. As they were walking toward the ice cream stand, a beggar cried out to them. Shanti then asked her father to give money to the beggar. Her father gave her a choice: spend the money on an ice cream or give it to the beggar. Shanti thought for a moment and then asked her father to help the stranger. Later that evening, as her father was putting her to bed, Shanti said sweetly, “You know, giving to the beggar was the best part of my day!” She had discovered at an early age the long-term happiness in kindness to others.
Our behavior has an impact on others—for better or worse—in many different ways. For instance, our survival depends on killing and eating other living beings or plants. I knew a psychiatrist from Kansas who treated immigrants who worked at a slaughterhouse. He told me that his patients are traumatized from killing animals all day long, 5 days a week. When we eat, we usually don’t think of the emotional impact that providing our food might have on the people who do it. But since we’re part of the cycle of life, we should try to reduce suffering whenever we can and forgive ourselves for how we harm others, intentionally and inadvertently. We do this for our own good.
How or when do you relate to others that brings you genuine happiness?
Is there any way that you’d like to enrich these connections?
Elizabeth Dunn, a psychologist from the University of British Columbia in Canada, and colleagues reported in Science that spending money on others makes us happier than spending it on ourselves, once our basic needs are met. They explored this hypothesis in three ways: in a national survey, in a survey of people who received a profit-sharing bonus from their company, and by giving people money to spend and measuring how they felt at the end of the day.
In the survey study, 632 Americans were asked to rate their general happiness, declare their income, and identify what they spend their money on. Money spent on others (charity, gifts) was correlated with happiness, and money spent on themselves (bills, expenses, gifts to oneself) was unrelated to happiness, regardless of how much money people earned. In the study of people who had an economic windfall, employees who contributed more of their bonus to others experienced greater happiness 6–8 weeks later, and how they spent the money was a stronger predictor of their happiness than the size of the bonus itself. Finally, when people were given $5 or $20 to spend on themselves or others by 5:00 P.M. the same evening, giving away as little as $5 a day made a significant difference in how happy they felt.
Trying to be helpful to others can become a habit and even bring happiness at the time of death. A Zen master once gave the following advice on how to die without fear: Ask the question “How can I help?” with your very last breath. Imagine having no concern for yourself in your final moments: How peaceful would you feel?
By “spirituality,” we typically mean the intangible aspects of our lives: God, soul, values (love, peace, truth), or sacred connections. For most people, spiritual practice is about cultivating closeness to an ideal transcendent being, a process that, one hopes, reduces our selfish desires and personal limitations. That’s a top-down approach to spirituality. Others take a bottom-up approach, where intimate contact with the miracle of daily life—the imperfect reality happening right in front of our noses—is the way. Most spiritually minded people see the need for both approaches in their lives: to be uplifted by a transcendent ideal and yet to remain grounded in ordinary reality.
These two approaches share a common process: taking ourselves more lightly. The “self” gets whittled away by loving God as well as through deep appreciation of the precious, fleeting nature of worldly existence. The result is that we have less “self” to protect and promote in the world. What a relief that can be, to ourselves and others. The principle behind spiritual self-care is commitment to our values—to stop “selfing.”
Some people believe it’s against their religion to care for themselves. Most religious traditions emphasize the importance of compassion for others: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But even the man who spoke those words escaped into the mountains when the crowds became too big. We read in Proverbs 11:17, “The merciful man does himself good, But the cruel man does himself harm.”
What’s implied in most religions is that you already love yourself. In the words of the Buddha:
On traversing all directions with the mind
One finds no one anywhere dearer than oneself
Likewise everyone holds himself most dear,
Hence one who loves himself should not harm another.
In fact, loving oneself is often given as an example of what it means to love others. It’s the standard: “In the same way, husbands must love their wives as they love their own bodies. A man who loves his wife loves himself” (Ephesians 5:28).
But people feel ambivalent about themselves nowadays. It can’t be assumed anymore that we love ourselves. This book was written to fill that gap. Perhaps a better example of spontaneous, unqualified love might be how we naturally feel toward a beloved pet or an innocent child. Tracking this feeling can teach us how to love ourselves better. Once we’ve relearned to love ourselves, we can extend it more fully to others.
What do you do to care for yourself spiritually?
If you’ve been neglecting your spiritual side, is there anything you’d like to remember to do?
Spiritual self-care usually means taking the time to cultivate the values that we hold dear. If you don’t attend to your values, you’ll unconsciously absorb the values of our consumer culture: pleasure-seeking, materialism. Are you regularly meeting with people who share your faith? If you enjoy connecting with nature, do you get outdoors once a week? Is your religious practice nourishing you, or are you just doing it out of obligation? Are you learning to relate to yourself and others with more kindness and ease?
Just as a parent tries to attend to every aspect of a child’s life— physical, mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual—we can cultivate those skills toward ourselves. If you didn’t get this kind of care, or if you learned those skills and they fell into disuse after you reached adulthood, you can relearn them now. All it takes is willingness and a little creativity.
At its most basic level, the practice of self-compassion means not harming ourselves. It’s often easier to notice when we’re harming ourselves than it is to discover ways of being nicer to ourselves. Consider the following:
How do you brush your teeth? Gently? Harshly?
Do you rush around in the morning?
Does your body feel tense or stiff from lack of exercise?
Are you fatigued?
Do you overeat?
Do you get stuck in front of the computer?
Do you have sex just because you feel you should?
Do you resent going to so many social events?
Do you rage at politicians on TV?
Do you overspend on the holidays?
Do you have to speak with your mother every Sunday?
The devil is in the details. Most of the harmful things we do to ourselves are unconscious habits. We don’t stop and ask ourselves what we want or whether there’s a good reason for it. The first question to ask when you start practicing self-compassion is “Is this harming me?” If it is, drop it. When you know how it feels to feel good, and think you deserve it, a red flag will go up when you’re harming yourself and you’ll probably stop what you’re doing.
We also have mental habits, mostly unconscious, that cause us trouble. For example, if your attention is unrestrained, jumping from one thing to another, you’ll suffer from mental agitation. And a perfectly good day can be spoiled if you find yourself entangled in disturbing emotions—brooding about the past or worrying about the future. An awareness practice like mindfulness meditation is a useful antidote to these common types of mental suffering.
One mental habit that can wreak havoc in our lives is self-judgment. If you watch your mind for 10 minutes after something goes wrong, you’ll probably notice that you’re criticizing yourself. It’s undoubtedly useful to know what went wrong and to correct our mistakes, but usually we go way beyond that. What can we do about self-judgment? It doesn’t work to “just stop judging yourself” because you’re likely to judge yourself for judging yourself. (Remember, what we resist persists.) The best solution is simply to “witness” judgments, letting them come and go.
TRY THIS: Counting Self-Judgments
Mark out 15 minutes in the course of an ordinary day for this exercise. Choose a time when your mind might wander, maybe while you’re driving a car or eating a meal alone. Say to yourself, “Over the next 15 minutes, I’ll check every minute or so to see if I’m having a self-critical thought.” If you have an electronic device that beeps, you can program it to ring every minute. Don’t worry about remembering the content of your thoughts. Make a mental tally, perhaps counting on your fingers, of how many times you criticize yourself.
It’s not easy to recognize self-critical thoughts because they happen so quickly. Sometimes it helps to focus on the body; if there’s a little tension in your stomach, perhaps you were having a critical thought. It’s okay to go back a few seconds to what you were thinking a moment before you felt physical tension. Ironically, the intention to be aware of self-judgment starts to eliminate the habit, even if you miss most of what’s happening in your mind.
Savoring refers to the “capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experiences in one’s life.” It’s a self-kindness to savor. The opposite of savoring is raining on your own parade. Consider the following questions:
Do you let yourself enjoy a compliment?
Have you lingered over a delicious meal lately?
Can you revel in the love you feel for certain people?
Are you prone to take a deep breath of fresh autumn air?
Do you let yourself laugh out loud when you’re happy?
Is it okay to feel pride in accomplishment?
Do you take pictures to remember great times?
Do you have friends who really know how to enjoy themselves?
We shouldn’t cling too tightly to positive experiences because that will cause suffering when they disappear. But we don’t want to avoid happy moments because we’re afraid of losing them either. It takes courage to savor positive experiences.
Emily Dickinson wrote:
I can wade Grief—
Whole Pools of it—
I’m used to that—
But the least push of Joy
Breaks up my feet—
And I tip—drunken—
Are you ready to open the door to both positive and negative experiences?
Savoring is a variation on mindfulness. When we savor, there’s the intention to enter fully into the experience, rather than cling to it or drag it out. The goal of mindfulness is not to get “hooked” by positive or negative experiences—to let things be just as they are, fully and completely. In an advanced state of mind, we can savor grief and sorrow too. Research has shown that the savoring of pleasant experiences can become a habit that elevates our baseline level of daily happiness.
Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, and colleagues tested the effectiveness of five different strategies to increase happiness. Five hundred seventy-seven participants volunteered on the Internet to do an exercise for 1 week. There were six groups, including a comparison group, each with a different assignment. Two of the assignments significantly increased happiness and decreased depression. They were:
Using signature strengths in a new way. Participants took an online test to learn about their top five personal strengths— “their signature strengths.” Examples are “humility,” “playfulness,” and “love of learning.” Participants were then asked to use their strengths in a new and different way every day of the week.
Listing three good things in life. Participants wrote down three good things that happened to them that day and were asked to consider why they happened every night for a week.
Interestingly, the largest initial increase in happiness came after yet another strategy, the “gratitude visit,” in which participants wrote a letter to someone who had been especially kind to them (and had not been thanked), and they delivered it. However, this emotional boost didn’t last beyond 3 months. The other two techniques still had a positive effect 6 months later. Many participants continued to do their happiness interventions beyond the first week, even though they promised not to, and they were rated the happiest of all.
You can also savor your own personal qualities. Enjoying what you do well doesn’t mean you have to be arrogant about it. If you wish, you can take a scientifically valid inventory of your “signature strengths.” Please go to www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx and click on VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire. It’s free of charge, and your strengths will only be ranked against one another for yourself, so you needn’t be worried about what you might learn.
After you’ve identified your strengths, you can intentionally apply them in your daily life. For example, if you’re naturally “curious,” create opportunities to learn new things. If “humor” is your strength, let yourself be entertained. Also, when you’re going through a tough time, remind yourself of your strengths. If “bravery” is your strength, use that special quality when you’re in need. If it’s “humility,” find your way through with humility.
Our emotional landscape consists of positive emotions—those that make us happy—and negative emotions—those that make us suffer. Cultivating positive emotions is therefore a compassionate thing to do for ourselves. But let’s do it mindfully—not pushing negative emotions away, not clinging to positive ones. As you’ll see, it’s good to understand the value of positive emotions and to enjoy them.
Positive emotions have at least two noteworthy qualities: they feel good and they reach beyond the individual. Examples include affection, cheerfulness, zest, hope, surprise, and awe. Happy people feel connected to their environment, and unhappy people feel separated from it. Most positive emotions include regard for other people. Compassion, for example, is an emotion that keeps us in touch with others even when it’s difficult to stay connected.
Negative emotions feel bad, and they separate us from others. Examples include hatred, anger, disgust, guilt, sadness, shame, anxiety, and pity. Anger pushes people away, and sadness disconnects us if our response is to curl up within ourselves. Pity, for example, is a slightly less positive emotion than compassion because pity implies a feeling of separateness from the suffering individual. When we “take pity on” someone, we’re moved to help, but we probably don’t feel as if we’re equals—on the same level.
Sadness is a “soft” emotion—there can be an opening to others, a readiness to receive help. Anger and hatred, in contrast, are “hard” emotions that flatly reject others. Soft feelings—sadness, guilt, rejection, embarrassment—require that we befriend them and go through them, feel them until they pass on their own. Hard feelings like anger require different treatment. We “let go” or “abandon” anger and hatred, whereas soft feelings become workable when we pass through them. When we let go of hard feelings, we usually discover soft feelings underneath. For example, beneath anger is often longing for connection, fear, sadness, or loss.
Negative emotions serve a useful function by alerting us to a problem. Our emotional or physical well-being might be in jeopardy when we feel negative emotions, and we should take heed. For example, bodyguards know that a sense of fear is a better defense against getting mugged than a black belt in karate. Fear will tell us where not to go and when to run. Likewise, sadness can alert us to a disconnection in relationship that could, left undetected, jeopardize the well-being of our families. We don’t want to eliminate negative feelings—we just don’t want to get stuck on them.
It appears that positive emotions have ample benefits. A review of over 225 published papers showed that positive emotions are related to happiness, and happy people are more likely to be successful in life and resilient in the face of misfortune. They’re often more creative, less racially biased, more likely to succeed at work, and have more satisfactory relationships.
Emotions originate in the midbrain, in the limbic system.
The limbic system developed in mammals, which needed to bond with their young, work together in groups, and communicate in elaborate ways with one another. Contrast this to the emotional displays of a crocodile, whose survival depends mainly on fear, hunger, and sex. Reptiles have rudimentary elements of the limbic system, but not enough to add emotions to instinctual urges. Humans have the most elaborate brain, including a layer of nerve cells covering the entire brain—the neocortex—that allows us to think rationally and experience consciousness.
Signals from the emotional brain are analyzed by the neocortex, which communicates back to the emotional centers. For example, the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure deep in the middle of the brain, may quickly analyze a piece of rope lying on the road as a dangerous snake. The amygdala signals the body to flee, as it also sends a message to the neocortex for further analysis. If the neocortex determines that the snake is only a rope, it communicates back to the amygdala to turn off the alarm. In this way, our rational mind can control emotional reactivity.
Human beings are not built for happiness; we’re built for survival. Those of us with uncommunicative limbic systems probably did not live to see another day. The limbic system signals us to resist and avoid physical discomfort at every turn. Unfortunately, it does the same for emotional discomfort. We need a substantial intellectual override— activation of the neocortex—to teach our limbic system that resisting emotional pain is counterproductive.
This was the challenge that faced the Buddha 2,500 years ago. When he taught that resistance to pain multiplies our problems, he was trying to overcome 5 million years of human evolution. His life goal was to discover a practical psychology that would lead to freedom from suffering. Buddhist psychology and the science of mindfulness and acceptance-based psychotherapy prime the neocortex to take emotional discomfort “under advisement” rather than slavishly try to eliminate it. Neuroscientific studies by Sara Lazar, Richard Davidson, Norman Farb, and their colleagues demonstrate how mindfulness and compassion meditation can change the functioning and structure of the limbic system.
Psychologists LeeAnne Harker and Dacher Keltner wondered whether emotional differences between people shape the outcome of their lives. They measured the intensity of smiles of 21-year-old women from their 1958 and 1960 college yearbook photographs. An intense smile had crinkled skin in the corners of the eyes, like crow’s feet, and an upturned angle of the lips. Later, at ages 27, 43, and 52, the women were asked about their health and well-being. Women with intense smiles in their college yearbooks were happier at every age point. (The effect of physical attractiveness, which is related to happiness, was controlled in the data analysis.) Strong smilers were “more organized, mentally focused, and achievement oriented and less susceptible to repeated and prolonged experiences of negative affect.” They were also more likely to be married by age 27 and to have satisfying marriages 30 years later.
In another surprising study, Deborah Danner and colleagues at the University of Kentucky examined autobiographies of 180 Catholic nuns, written when they were about 22 years old as they entered the convent in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Their handwritten life sketches were coded according to positive or negative emotional content. For example:
Sister 1 (low positive emotion): “I was born on September 26, 1909, the eldest of seven children, five girls and two boys…. My candidate year was spent in the Motherhouse, teaching Chemistry and Second Year Latin at Notre Dame Institute. With God’s grace, I intend to do my best for our Order, for the spread of religion and for my personal sanctification.”
Sister 2 (high positive emotion): “God started my life off well by bestowing upon me a grace of inestimable value…. The past year which I have spent as a candidate studying at Notre Dame College has been a very happy one. Now I look forward with eager joy to receiving the Holy Habit of Our Lady and to a life of union with Love Divine.”
Sixty years later, the researchers discovered that 54% of the nuns with relatively few positive emotion sentences in their autobiographies had died, compared to 24% of those with mostly positive emotion sentences. Positive emotions in early adulthood appears to be strongly associated with longevity.
The research also shows that positive emotions allow us to see the big picture. Our vision is not narrowed by survival-based self-interest. This suggests that if we want to be mindful of whatever arises in our field of awareness, a minimum standard of happiness must exist. Meditation teachers know this: they often give love and support in personal interviews before sending students back out to meditate. Psychotherapy operates similarly—it makes a person a little happier and supplies the courage (from the French coeur, meaning “heart”) to explore and master life’s problems.
The question is how to mindfully shift the balance of emotions toward the positive. There’s a story to illustrate this.
One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all.
“One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.
“The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
How do we feed emotions? An emotion is essentially a habit that we can either strengthen or weaken. It’s not a “thing” or a “substance.” For example, the hydraulic model, where anger is a reservoir of emotion waiting to be siphoned off, simply doesn’t fit the data. Research shows that expressing anger actually increases the likelihood that we’ll get angry again. The only way to reduce anger is to stop practicing it—to stop feeding the emotional habit.
So how do we unwittingly feed a negative emotion like anger? When we struggle with anger by obsessing why such-and-such happened and what we’re going to do about it, we’re feeding it. When we turn away in denial, but it lingers in the back of our minds, we’re feeding it. When we hang on to anger because it makes us feel strong and certain, we’re feeding it. In sum, resistance feeds negative emotions. They weaken if we stop regurgitating them in our minds and maintain a mindful, compassionate attitude.
And how do we feed positive emotions? Positive emotions naturally arise when we embrace our moment-to-moment experience fully and completely. Even anger can be transformed into something positive when we don’t resist it because anger communicates important information about our world. The habit of relating to all our experience with mindfulness and compassion is the foundation for positive emotions (that is, emotional habits) like joy, peace, generosity, and love.
A flexible sense of self is necessary to cultivate positive feelings. The less “self” we have to defend and protect, the more likely it is that socially positive emotions like tolerance, generosity, and acceptance will emerge. In contrast, if we identify with a fixed image of ourselves, or a particular ideology, we may feel the need to incessantly fight for our psychological survival.
Wisdom includes the direct realization of how everything changes, including ourselves. The modern Indian sage Nisagradatta Maharaj wrote:
Love says, “I am everything.”
Wisdom says, “I am nothing.”
Between these two my life flows.
When we make the shift to seeing ourselves as transitory events—as verbs rather than as nouns—we can step back and allow the flow to continue. Our efforts shift from controlling the circumstances of our lives to learning how to meet each brief moment fully and wholeheartedly.
There appear to be two neurologically distinct ways of relating to personal experience: (1) moment to moment, or “experiential” and (2) as a “self,” or “narrative.” Norman Farb and colleagues at the University of Toronto scanned people’s brains as they did tasks that evoked each of these two modes. Participants saw adjectives like “confident” and “melancholy” and were asked either (1) to sense what was going on in their body and mind or (2) to judge whether the trait applied to them.
As expected, the latter, “self”-oriented task activated brain areas associated with the “default network” and the wandering mind (see Chapter 2). Present-moment awareness, in contrast, helped participants disengage the medial prefrontal cortex of the default network (areas that link the past to the future and give coherence to the “self”) and instead engage the insula and lateral brain areas (regions more closely associated with body awareness). Of particular interest is that people trained in mindfulness meditation were able to achieve this uncoupling more readily than novices. This research suggests that we can train our brains to be less preoccupied with narrative thinking— how daily events affect the “self”—and instead experience the emotional freedom of moment-to-moment awareness.
Is it actually possible to raise our happiness level? Aren’t the emotional patterns laid down in childhood and through family genetics too strong to overcome? And how do children learn to be kind to themselves?
New research by psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky and her colleagues shows that our overall happiness level is determined by our genes, circumstances, and intentional activity. “Happy genes” account for about half of our happiness (50%). “Circumstances”—the conditions of one’s childhood and present circumstances like being married, well-paid, religious, and healthy—cover a mere 10%. The most interesting category is the 40% that refers to “intentional activity”— our activities and outlook. That’s what we do, such as exercising and spending time with friends; how we think, such as cultivating gratitude or kindness; and how engaged we are in our interests and values.
This means that, in contrast with what a lot of us believe, winning the lottery (circumstances) isn’t going to make you happy for life. You’ll probably return to your old happiness set point (determined by genes and the rest of your circumstances) unless you use the money to do what you like, like learning to play the mandolin or volunteering at your church, temple, or mosque (intentional activity). If you want to feel measurably happier, you should invest in intentional activity—how you spend your time and how you think—rather than simply acquiring a particular object or life circumstance like a BMW or a new spouse. If you do acquire a BMW or a new spouse, learn to savor those things for a long time to elevate your happiness level. Cultivating intentional activity is an antidote to the hedonic treadmill described in Chapter 1.
Self-compassion practice is an intentional activity, and it’s closely tied to our early childhood experience. How we treat ourselves depends, in part, on how we were treated by our parents. Therefore, the circumstances of our early lives affect our ability to fully utilize the power of self-compassion.
The scientific study of how a child adapts to his or her caregivers is known as “attachment theory” and was pioneered by John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, and Mary Main. For example, if the primary caregiver is emotionally responsive and can “mirror” the emotions of the child (“Yes, I know you’re feeling sad, dear”), the child learns what it means to be sad, angry, afraid, excited, joyful, tired, and so forth, and that it’s okay to feel a wide range of feelings. If, in contrast, the caregiver becomes enraged whenever the child is angry, the child will push anger underground because it threatens the bond with the parent. As an adult, such a child is likely to criticize him- or herself for being angry, rather than responding to anger with self-kindness.
If the parent patiently acknowledges when the child is expressing negative emotion, the child can grow in self-awareness without danger. Such children feel secure with others. For example, a young child with secure attachment will explore a roomful of toys, and when the parent leaves the room, the child will express distress. When the parent returns, the child will initiate physical contact and return to play after he or she has settled down. These children learn to appreciate connection with others.
A child who shows no distress when the parent leaves, and seeks no contact when he or she returns, may grow up to be isolated or dismissive of relationships. A child who is unduly concerned about the parent’s leaving, who can’t explore his or her surroundings, and who isn’t comforted when the parent returns, is likely to become an angry, passive, or fearful adult who has difficulty calming or soothing him- or herself. Such nonverbal emotional habits are transferred from childhood into adulthood.
We also internalize images of caregivers who mattered to us when we were young. If a girl’s mother was patient and interested in her, she’s likely to carry that role model inside her and relate to herself and others in the same way. Having an inconsistent or abusive parent deprives the child of knowing how to be kind to him- or herself, perhaps even of knowing that feeling good is an acceptable emotional state. I know adults who were abused as children who feel that they need to work themselves to the bone or they risk being called “lazy” or “bad.” They feel like robots and resent others who work much less and still feel okay about themselves. We carry these internalized images of our caregivers, and the thoughts and behaviors attached to them, long into adulthood. A former client of mine, Andrew, is an example.
Andrew telephoned late one winter evening in despair. He was driving home from work in his truck, just after a light rain had begun to freeze on the road. As he tried to slow down for a stoplight, his truck slid straight into the car stopped before him. No one was hurt, but he crumpled the trunk of the car ahead of him. This accident happened one week after Andrew had argued successfully with his wife to raise their auto insurance deductible to $1,000. Andrew was upset, but not quite so much about the money as about the mishap.
As a little boy, Andrew had often felt unwanted. He recalls that when he went to college, his parents refused to let him come home for the holidays, falsely claiming it was too expensive. Andrew would have taken a 12-hour bus ride home from college if he had been allowed to do so.
It was an important step for Andrew to call me. When things went wrong, Andrew usually reacted with isolation and self-judgment. He was learning that these reactions were self-harming, and he didn’t want to repeat them any longer. In our phone conversation, Andrew reflected on what he might have said to a friend who had a similar problem. Would he have told a friend that he was stupid to drive on the ice? No, never! Andrew recognized that his car problem could have happened to anyone—that it was just that, a car problem.
Before we hung up, Andrew recalled that he had been verbally abused whenever he inconvenienced his mother—for example, when he crashed his bicycle into a curb and bent the wheel rim. Andrew felt he was having an emotional memory and was mimicking the treatment he received as a child. Andrew vowed to respond with “compassion first” when difficulties like this happened again.
In this example, Andrew was learning how to meet his emotional habits from childhood with a new intention: self-compassion. We can learn to deal with whatever arises in the present moment even if our caregivers didn’t show us how. The influence of both genetics and a difficult childhood can be softened if we relate to our moment-to-moment experience with more mindfulness and greater kindness.
You now have a broad overview of how self-compassion can be integrated into your life and why it matters. But reading about self-compassion is like scanning a recipe: it may pique your appetite, but it can’t satisfy your hunger. The next two chapters will focus on the practice of loving-kindness. This is an ancient practice for developing compassion at a very deep level of your mind. You’ll recognize all the mindfulness and self-compassion principles mentioned so far bundled into this one practice. Please plan to give yourself some time to actually do the practice—to feel how loving-kindness works inside your body and mind. You deserve it.