Man always travels along precipices, and, whether he will or no, his truest obligation is to keep his balance.
—JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET, Spanish philosopher
The next step is to customize your self-compassion practice. A key element is to balance your personality style—how you typically deal with stress—so self-compassion can unfold naturally in your life. For example, a “caregiver” personality might easily feel compassion toward others but hold back on self-compassion. An “intellectual” may understand the concept of self-compassion but find it difficult to get on board with the emotional aspect. A “butterfly” can be enthusiastic about self-compassion practice at first, but fly away at the first sign of difficulty. By knowing how you’re built, you can make the most of your strengths and minimize obstacles that will invariably crop up.
There are also challenges that arise for all types of people while doing self-compassion practice. These are known as the “hindrances” in Buddhist psychology: grasping, aversion, weariness, agitation, and doubt. It helps to know when you’re caught in one of these mind states. You may be skeptical, for example, about whether a person who grew up in your family could ever develop self-compassion— that’s “doubt.” Or you may want to experience the fruits of the practice immediately—that’s “grasping.” Being able to name and work with the hindrances will make the practice go a lot more smoothly. Taken together, knowing your personality style and what’s hindering you from moment to moment can save you a heap of trouble.
When I first learned to meditate in 1976, I felt the most important thing in life was to become spiritually enlightened. I meditated with a vengeance, occasionally becoming quite anxious and irritable. After a few months, I realized I was learning a lot about the mind—not a bad idea for an aspiring psychologist—but I was becoming rather unpleasant to be with. Then I thought, “What’s the point? Why suffer now for rewards in the distant future? Isn’t it a better idea to cultivate well-being gradually, every moment of the day?” Kindness is both the means to and the end of practice. These days, when I find myself struggling too hard at meditation, I simply repeat the metta phrases “May I be happy, may I live with ease.” That immediately softens my body and mind. Your own meditation practice will be in balance when you experience the four cornerstones of loving-kindness—safety, happiness, health, and ease—in this very moment. That’s the goal.
The beauty of self-compassion practice is that you don’t need to look far to see if you’re on the right track. Are you meeting your daily experiences with kindness? Regardless of whether you’re meditating, putting your kids to bed, or stuck in a traffic jam, the question is “how” you’re doing it. Do you have good will toward yourself or not? It’s that simple. And when you detect discomfort—perhaps struggling for something you want or trying to avoid what you don’t want—can you feel compassion toward yourself and soften into the experience?
The expectation of well-being is your best teacher. Then, when safety, happiness, health, and ease are not happening, you’ll be alerted. Pay attention to the experience of discomfort. Then decide what to do. Should you focus on the breath to calm your mind? If you feel tense and contracted, should you open your awareness to other sensations? Should you just give yourself love? These options arise more easily when you have a standard of well-being with which to evaluate your mental condition.
When you experience the same kind of distress over and over— body tension, doubt, loneliness—it becomes time to examine your personality style. Are you striving too hard? Do you expect perfection? Are you lonely because you’re using meditation to avoid social contact? Although uneasiness is a natural occurrence in meditation, prolonged distress is a wake-up call to look at your invisible frame of reference: your personality. We all need to go there from time to time.
Our personalities are the containers for our attitudes, thoughts, feelings, and actions. They are what we call the individual “self.” Without your personality, you wouldn’t be you! The job of a meditation teacher is to work with each unique personality and find a way to make the practice happier and more fruitful. Usually that requires softening certain aspects of who we think we are. Knowing your personality style can help you become your own best teacher.
The following 12 personality styles are offered as aids to practice. They are anecdotal rather than scientifically derived. I could have used one of the existing personality typologies (such as the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), but none of those measures speak directly to the kinds of challenges that appear during self-compassion practice. You may see yourself in one or more of the following personality styles. Feel free to make a category of your own if you can’t identify with any of them.
Our personalities are built primarily around the need to survive rather than to be happy, so rest assured that some aspects of your personality will run counter to emotional well-being and the practice of self-kindness. Try to identify the personality styles that predominate in your own life and examine their impact on your practice.
As you review these categories, let yourself be good-natured about it. Nobody’s perfect. We all need conditioned ways of being in the world—we need a “self”—so we don’t have to reinvent ourselves every moment of our lives. But what worked for you as a child may not work so well when you’re an adult, and what works when you’re with your lover may not work when you’re trying to bargain down the price of a new car. The purpose of this chapter is not to change or critique your personality, but rather to balance the effect it might have on your self-compassion practice. Start by assuming that we’re continually slipping in and out of balance as we juggle the demands of daily life.
Does extending compassion to yourself immediately make you think of someone else who needs it more than you do? Caregivers find meaning in life by caring for others. They’re likely to thrive as a parent, nurse, or counselor. (The intrinsic satisfaction derived from helping others may compensate somewhat for the relative lack of monetary rewards in caregiving professions.) Women are more likely than men to be caregivers. Caregivers are good at compassion—accompanying another person, emotionally and physically, through periods of hardship and distress.
The main threat to the happiness of caregivers is attachment to the outcome of their labors. They find it hard to give love and not control how things will work out. I heard of one “helicopter parent” who went with her son to his first job interview after college and questioned the interviewer afterward about her son’s interviewing skills! Caregivers can also lose their peace of mind when they overidentify with the suffering of their loved ones, as reflected in the saying “A mother can only be as happy as her least happy child.”
Being compassionate with oneself is an effective balm for vicarious suffering, but caregivers often feel they’re abandoning their loved ones if they attend to themselves. Taken to an extreme, a caregiver may feel that she’s not a “caring person” if she isn’t struggling at the edge of her capacity. The thought is “If I worry enough, my son will be safe!” Some mothers find self-compassion comes more easily when they say, “Just as I wish that my daughter be safe and happy, so may I be safe and happy.” That comforts both sides of the worry equation—both subject and object—in the caregiver’s mind.
Caregivers may also deny their own suffering by saying “Yes, but he has it so much worse than I do.” Minimizing one’s own pain by comparing it to others interferes with self-compassion because we have to feel our pain in order to evoke compassion. How do we love others without losing ourselves? We start by practicing mindfulness of our own discomfort (“This hurts!”). Then we soften into the physical feelings and treat ourselves kindly in both word (“I love you!”) and deed (for example, a warm bath, a walk along a river). Embracing ourselves during hard times protects us from fatigue and resentment and gives us the energy to be present for others.
Does self-compassion practice seem too touchy-feely, requiring you to take leave of your mind? Intellectually inclined people use their rational minds to regulate emotions and solve problems. A fine example is the Dalai Lama, who recommends that we think about pain and suffering in the following way: “If there is a method of overcoming suffering or an opportunity to do so, you have no need to worry. If there is absolutely nothing you can do about it, worrying cannot help you at all.” Such clarity of thought can be a comfort to more emotionally reactive people, especially in times of crisis.
But intellectuals can get out of balance through too much thinking (the Dalai Lama excluded!). Lama Surya Das says, “The intellect is a good servant but a poor master.” When intellectuals are upset, they take the elevator to the top floor and can get stuck in their heads. Rational thought is an intellectual’s most reliable means of solving problems, but sometimes the problem must be handled lower down. For example, traumatic memories are often locked in the body, and the body needs to be soothed to release them. Obsessing can provide short-term relief from emotional pain—it’s a kind of escape—but it can also keep emotional problems simmering for a long, long time.
I’ve known a few intellectuals who never feel quite comfortable with loving-kindness practice. The phrases, such as “May I be safe,” didn’t seem credible. “Safe, you say? We’re all going to die, so no one is safe!” It’s especially difficult for the intellectual to grasp the difference between wishing and the object of wishing. Wishing is experienced in the chest region, not the head. It’s an attitude that we feel rather than a thought process. Fortunately, the sense of simply wishing, without being bound to the object of the wish (health, happiness), can be experienced by anyone after sufficient practice.
Some intellectuals recognize the value of self-compassion practice when they’re in dire distress—when thinking has not helped them escape their predicament. Even the most intellectual person is a sucker for love when he or she feels terrible. That’s when the intellectual settles for “care,” rather than “cure.” Other intellectuals develop a gradual appreciation of self-compassion through mindfulness practice. They discover that they need to add loving-kindness to the mix when confronted with deeply disturbing feelings or else they can’t think at all.
Intellectuals are also likely to have a problem with the notion of “self” in self-compassion. “Aren’t we reinforcing a fiction,” they ask, “that makes us feel even more separate and lonely? Isn’t it better to focus on moment-to-moment experience as it arises, without superimposing a ‘self’?” This point of view is entirely correct when we’re feeling good. When the sense of “self” is in pain, however, the healthiest response is to go where the pain is located. Our attention will automatically move beyond the limited “self” when disturbing emotions have subsided.
Are you frustrated by how un-self-compassionate you are, or by the stubbornness of old emotional habits? Perfectionists reap the benefits of high standards, but they continually fall short of their own expectations. When is “good enough” good enough? Probably when you’re younger, prettier, smarter, richer, stronger, healthier, and happier. The self-help industry is based on the cultural assumption that we’re never good enough. Women, in particular, are assaulted on all fronts by their supposed inadequacies.
Perfectionism begins in childhood. If a parent has excessively high standards for giving approval, the child can carry a sense of inadequacy long into adulthood. Alternatively, if there were no standards and the parent was emotionally distant, the child may develop unrealistic standards for him- or herself about what is required to receive love.
The main difficulty perfectionists have with self-compassion practice is their relentless need to improve: “I must be doing this wrong!” Remember that meditation is an even playing field; the only “experts” are those who are willing to return again and again to the practice. You’ll never meditate properly or be sufficiently self-compassionate, but you’ll also never fail as long as you stick with it. One extra moment of self-kindness during the day is enough. Criticizing yourself is the opposite of self-compassion. I’ve found that perfectionists become the most ardent practitioners of self-compassion once they break out of the self-improvement trap.
The only prerequisite for receiving compassion is suffering, and perfectionists suffer all the time from feelings of inadequacy. Perfectionists can start the practice right there, in the pain of never measuring up. Perfectionists can also balance their tendency to criticize themselves by forgiving themselves for their shortcomings, by training themselves to feel gratitude, and by savoring positive experiences (see Chapter 5). Those are all learnable skills.
Is it uncomfortable to explore your feelings when things go wrong or to share them with others? Individualists prefer to be independent and to conduct their lives without interference from others. They don’t expect to be helped when they’re in trouble, nor do they feel obligated to help others. “Each person is responsible for his or her own destiny,” they say. Individualists don’t need or want anyone’s pity.
Individualists are attractive to people who admire self-reliance. They take on seemingly insurmountable challenges without complaining. Since individualists don’t actively seek out comfort and support, they can secretly feel lonely or unappreciated when their efforts aren’t recognized. Loved ones often struggle to feel close to individualists and may eventually give up trying.
Individualists need to be strong and in control. I’ve known some individualists who take up self-compassion practice specifically so they won’t need to rely on other people. This doesn’t usually work because there’s a limit to how much we can let go internally if we think there’s no one to assist us in times of need. Many people have told me they wept after a loved one died only while in the company of others. If you’re an individualist, reflect on the people who rely on you and who might be honored to help you if you needed it. You might be less alone than you think.
Softening in response to pain is a foreign concept to the individualist. If you’re an individualist, remember that it’s not a sign of weakness to feel the gravity of your own struggle. Even the toughest characters can be broken-hearted and need support. There’s always another day to soldier on.
Do you feel you don’t deserve love and attention? Survivors suffer from what a pioneer in the field of self-compassion, Tara Brach, calls the “trance of unworthiness”; they don’t trust the validity of their own feelings or feel entitled to feel good. Some survivors have been neglected or abused as children and are struggling to create a life worth living. Survivors are often soulful individuals on a lifelong quest for deeper meaning. They can be quite compassionate toward others who suffer harm and injustice, acutely aware of the cruelty and suffering that people inflict on one another.
Many of the challenges that survivors face on the path to self-compassion have been mentioned earlier. Self-criticism is a common consequence of years of neglect or abuse (“I felt bad; therefore I am bad”), which can make it difficult to even start self-compassion practice. It’s obviously quite difficult to extend love to yourself if your mother said, “I wish I had never taken you home from the hospital.” An open heart can also cause “backdraft”: a burst of repressed memories. These memories can be intense and unpredictable, overwhelming our awareness. To make matters even worse, the survivor may shut down emotionally when feeling good, instinctively fearing punishment for not suffering. Love can be both unfamiliar and dangerous to the survivor.
Nevertheless, a therapeutic dose of self-compassion is balm for a survivor. Compassion is ready to flow because pain is a constant element in the life of a survivor, but it helps to first direct it toward others, especially a child or a pet. The survivor can eventually redirect kindness back to herself—tuck herself into the circle of love—in a safe and timely manner.
You can’t find time for self-compassion practice? “Work” refers to what we do for extrinsic goals, like money, power, or fame; “play” refers to what we do for its own sake, like enjoying flowers or reading a novel. On rare occasions, work is play: Confucius said, “Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Self-compassion practice should be understood as a time to enjoy being yourself—more like play than work.
Americans are a culture of workhorses. Twice as many Americans as Europeans work more than 50 hours a week. In our spare time, we try to improve ourselves as well—the self-improvement industry is worth over $9.6 billion annually. Workhorses plan every minute, multitask, and feel annoyed when their schedules are interrupted. They generally overwork despite the cost to their health and relationships.
The main challenge to a workhorse is stopping or slowing down. There’s never a good time for the workhorse to practice self-compassion, either formally or informally. When time allows, other goal-directed activities will immediately take priority: replying to an e-mail, catching up on world events, doing the laundry. Meditation is about “being.” Workhorses will turn “being” into “doing”—they will stress themselves while doing loving-kindness meditation.
The workhorse needs to get off the treadmill just long enough to feel the stress of the time-intensive lifestyle. Such moments come to everyone, perhaps on the occasion of one’s 50th birthday, when the doctor says it’s time to start blood pressure medication, or after a heated argument with an inconvenient teenage son. Mindfulness of “urgency”—the feeling of toppling forward—can be the first step toward reestablishing balance. Then we apply loving awareness to the difficult emotions that arise during quiet contemplation, perhaps feelings of anxiety, loneliness, or fear of dying. Self-compassion is a relatively safe way to meet these demons lurking in the heart of the workhorse.
The workhorse will try to achieve the goal of freedom from suffering in record time. Once the workhorse has begun to practice self-compassion, he or she should guard against becoming overly zealous about it. The workhorse needs to find a healthy balance between striving and leisure.
Will you likely grow tired of self-compassion practice soon after starting? Butterflies are charming, enthusiastic people who become easily engaged in new ideas. They’re delightful company because they devote their full attention to the people and situations in which they find themselves.
Consistency can be a problem for butterflies. They have difficulty seeing a project through to completion and keeping promises to themselves and others. Over the course of a lifetime, the butterfly may feel that he or she is continually starting over, making lateral moves in relationships, career, and residences. The butterfly is likely to skip from one meditation practice to another, like drilling for water 10 feet in 10 places, rather than 100 feet in one place. The butterfly sacrifices depth for breadth.
What does it take for a butterfly to stick with self-compassion practice? The butterfly first needs to experience the cost of flitting around: anxiety, loneliness, self-doubt. It’s unrealistic to expect a butterfly to work exclusively with one practice (for example, using the same metta phrases), but understanding the underlying principles, like talking kindly to oneself, can keep the butterfly engaged in the practice for a long time while changing the specific techniques along the way. The support of like-minded individuals is another ingredient that helps the butterfly maintain a consistent practice. More will be said about sustaining a practice in the next chapter.
Do you feel like you just don’t fit in? Being an outsider in our society can become a core aspect of one’s worldview. There are so many reasons to be marginalized by others: racial prejudice, homophobia, devaluation of women, invisibility of older people, insensitivity to poverty, religious intolerance, ethnic biases, and illness or disability. Is your family background at odds with your current living situation, perhaps because you’re from a foreign country, a different socioeconomic class, or you had a difficult childhood? Even exceptional personal strengths like artistic ability or spiritual sensitivity can be invalidated by the dominant culture and make us feel like outsiders.
It’s not necessarily bad to be an outsider. People living on the margins of society often have special insight into the unspoken assumptions of the majority. Martin Luther King said, “Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.” Compelling new music, writing, visual art, cutting-edge comedy, and social critique come from outside the mainstream. Besides, our materialistic cultural values are certainly not a prescription for happiness.
Nonetheless, the experience of disconnection from our culture can undermine one’s basic sense of wholeness. Consider the metaphor of a fish swimming in water: as the fish lives and breathes, it draws water through its own body. We’re like fish in the water of our culture, and when the water is polluted with racism, sexism, and ageism, we draw those prejudices inside. It’s very difficult to be gay in a homophobic society without experiencing internalized homophobia, or Asian in a Caucasian culture without carrying around anti-Asian stereotypes. Self-image is inseparable from the culture that creates it.
Socially and culturally generated pain must be recognized and held in kindly awareness. Responding with bitterness to messages of fear, anger, or hatred increases suffering, as does prejudice silently taking root within us. Simply feeling invisible to the outside world can cause tremendous pain. The Ecuadorian essayist Juan Montalvo wrote, “There is nothing harder than the softness of indifference.” If you feel like an outsider, start by noticing when you feel the pain and then respond to it with self-compassion: “May I be free from anger and fear.” “May I love myself, just as I am.”
Are you good at going with the flow and living in the moment? Floaters are generally agreeable people. They follow the tide and fit easily into new situations. They respect the opinions of others because every point of view is valid within a particular context. Their lives are directed more by synchronicity—seemingly random events coming together—than by personal goals and desires. They live in the present moment.
Taken to an extreme, floaters can be detached and noncommittal. For some floaters, “going with the flow” is an excuse for avoiding difficult challenges, resulting in passivity and lack of direction. The floater can become derailed during self-compassion practice when old emotional wounds surface.
The greatest challenge to a floater is commitment: identifying, trusting, and pursuing one’s deepest convictions. The floater should begin self-compassion practice by asking, “What’s my heart’s desire? What really matters in my life?” Deeply held values and commitments (for example, relationships, work, health, leisure) help us overcome obstacles along the way. For example, the pain of childbirth is easier if a woman desperately wants to be a mother, and a bad job is tolerable when you really need the money.
Cultivating self-compassion requires commitment because it goes against the tide—the tendency to resist emotional discomfort and blame ourselves when things go wrong. Given that the floater is already skilled at present-moment awareness and letting go, self-compassion practice can be smooth sailing once the goal is firmly established.
Do you become easily indignant with people when they behave badly? Moralists have a strong sense of right and wrong. They thrive in a parent role, such as law enforcement or clergy, where correct conduct and thinking are valued. Moralists can be relied upon to set clear standards and defend them against threat. The moralist attitude is often welcomed in times of political and social upheaval.
Moralists apply strict moral codes to themselves as well as to others. They’re often surprised when they realize that other people’s lives are conducted on an entirely different basis from their own. The poet George Herbert wrote, “Half the world knows not how the other half lives.” Moralists can get caught in “righteous indignation” when they perceive an ethical lapse in others and can become excessively self-critical when they detect their own shortcomings.
During self-compassion practice, it’s necessary for moralists to let go of preoccupation with how other people behave just long enough to discover how righteous indignation feels in their own bodies. The alternative to righteous indignation is not immorality but rather an assessment of what’s necessary to guide others into less harmful activities. A more benign standard of behavior than “right” versus “wrong” is whether an action decreases or increases suffering. We don’t need to stiffen ourselves in the presence of misbehavior to respond effectively.
A rigid ethical system also blinds us to unattractive parts of ourselves, such as lust, envy, greed, hatred, and selfishness, which makes them less manageable. We’re repeatedly assailed by news reports of holier-than-thou politicians who get caught in sexual imbroglios. When we learn to recognize these all-too-human tendencies in ourselves, without shame and denial, we have a chance to steer them in more beneficial directions.
Finally, the moralist is likely to feel that self-compassion is self-indulgent. The self-indulgence argument can also be a way of dodging the unlovely aspects of our own personalities: what we don’t know can’t hurt us. Unpleasant feelings like lust, anger, envy, and greed will definitely pop up in the course of self-compassion practice, and hopefully the moralist can suspend self-judgment long enough to work with them.
Do you enjoy your own inner life, or do you prefer to be around others? “Extraverts” are gregarious, generally happy people who prefer the company of others rather than being by themselves. They enjoy activities like acting, political organizing, social networking, and management. They tend to think on their feet. Extraverts become restless when alone and are relatively unaware of psychological needs and problems.
In contrast, “introverts” enjoy the inner life. They like relatively solitary professions such as writing, art, and science. Introverts tire easily in social gatherings because they become overstimulated. Introverts are not necessarily shy—afraid of being criticized by others—but simply prefer their own company. They like to mull over what they plan to say before they speak. Research shows that genetic and brain differences may partially account for the differences in temperament between introverts and extraverts.
It would appear that extraverts are ill-suited for contemplative practices like meditation. Most of us, however, fall somewhere along a continuum from introversion to extraversion—we like good company and we appreciate periods of solitude as well. Self-compassion practice, especially metta meditation, has something to offer both introverts and extraverts because it is both solitary and relational.
There are a number of ways to adapt self-compassion practice. The main challenge to extraverts is the uneasiness that can develop when sitting alone. The extravert should be encouraged to practice informally—during the day, while in the company of others— rather than tied to one place. For example, walking metta meditation (Chapter 7) fosters a sense of connection to others. When working with the loving-kindness phrases, the extravert can also emphasize the word “we” rather than “I” to feel connected with others (“May we be happy and free from suffering”). If you’re an extravert and want to do sitting meditation, it’s helpful to address uncomfortable feelings by labeling them as they arise (“bored,” “restless,” “anxious”). Finally, the extravert might enjoy the “Giving and Taking” meditation described in Appendix B. Giving and taking meditation is usually practiced in relationship to others, in both private and social settings, and it doesn’t require as much psychological mindedness as metta meditation.
The challenge of loving-kindness meditation to introverts is just the opposite: it’s often too relational, and the introvert needs to regulate just how much “relationship” feels comfortable. Since private meditation tends to come easily to introverts, they should be wary of using the practice to hide from social contact. Some introverts find that metta practice reduces their stress level in social settings when they send loving-kindness to the other people in the room. The goal for both introverts and extraverts is to maintain a healthy balance between solitude and engagement with others and to feel comfortable in both settings.
Once you understand your personality style, you can also benefit from knowing the five mental “hindrances” that everyone encounters on the road to self-compassion: grasping, aversion, weariness, agitation, and doubt. Different people tend to be vulnerable to some of these traps more than others. For example, the caregiver tends to suffer from grasping, the moralist from aversion, the floater from weariness, the workhorse from agitation, and the intellectual from doubt. A hindrance may crop up at any time, and when we can identify it (“Ah, clinging”; “Oh yes, doubt”), it begins to subside. We don’t want to battle the hindrances; rather, we want to accept their existence and work with them in skillful ways.
Start with the assumption that you can be free from suffering, in this very moment, right here, right now. Let a sense of well-being be the background of your practice. Then, when there’s “disturbance in the field,” ask yourself which of the following hindrances might be occurring. Bring mindfulness and loving-kindness to the hindrance, rather than trying to drive it out.
We instinctively grasp for pleasure and for things that we hope will give us pleasure. If we don’t get what we want, we feel disappointed. For example, imagine how you would feel if you discovered that your favorite musician would be playing in a nearby town, only to find out that the tickets were already sold out. A desire that hadn’t even existed before leaves you feeling disappointed.
We also cling to what we enjoy and feel sad when it ends. If you had a nice bowl of ice cream, you might have wanted to enjoy the taste forever and felt disappointed when you finished it.
Grasping and clinging are similar expressions of desire. The Buddha said that desire is like taking out a loan; it’s repaid by loss and separation when the pleasure is used up. Desire per se is not the problem; it’s when we become a slave to our desires that we experience unhappiness. We need to hold our desires lightly.
We should be especially wary of becoming too attached to the good feelings that will arise during self-compassion practice. If you cling to love and happiness, your practice will become more frustrating than uplifting. Good feelings will arise and disappear as night follows day. An antidote to the hindrance of clinging to pleasurable feelings is to return to the practice of cultivating good will for yourself in spite of how you feel. When you’re disappointed, exercise self-compassion because you feel disappointed.
This book is primarily about overcoming aversion. Other words for aversion are “avoidance,” “resistance,” “entanglement,” “disgust,” and “resentment.” Aversion is what we instinctively feel toward disturbing feelings. We can experience aversion toward an internal state, like anxiety or depression; toward an external object, like an open wound or spoiled food; toward other people, in the form of anger or fear; or toward ourselves. The Buddha called aversion a “sickness” because it ruins our health, and the antidote he prescribed was loving-kindness.
Aversion keeps us from seeing what’s bothering us, from understanding it, and from working with it skillfully. When aversion is directed toward ourselves, we lose the ability to comfort and forgive ourselves for our mistakes. Sharon Salzberg suggests that we look at anger and aversion from the perspective of a Martian who’s seeing them for the first time. “What is this?!” Curiosity is the first stage toward overcoming aversion. The subsequent stages, given in Chapter 1, are “tolerance,” “allowing,” and “friendship.” We can move gradually from timid curiosity about what ails us to appreciation and respect. The same is true for the shameful and unlovely parts of ourselves. Self-kindness gives us the chance to learn more about what’s bothering us, and ultimately to release it.
This hindrance is also known as “dullness of mind,” “mental inertia,” “sloth,” “torpor,” and “boredom”—lack of interest in the practice of self-compassion. The opposite of weariness is the sense of delight that a child feels when encountering a fascinating object for the first time.
Is it possible to keep self-compassion practice as interesting as it felt in the beginning, perhaps with eyes moist with tears the first time you realized its true promise? That’s unlikely, but it helps to remember why you started to practice. The reason was probably “to feel better!” Somewhere along the line you might have begun to practice in a mechanical fashion and forgotten your purpose. “I have to go to work … got to meditate first … can’t concentrate … 10 minutes to go….”
When you sit, see if you can really, REALLY, let yourself be happy and free from suffering. When discomfort arises, meet it with love and awareness and let it go. If you have a metta practice, savor the true meaning of the words and remind yourself of the target of the practice: yourself. Give yourself the experience of love and compassion however it comes most easily to you. Few of us can resist the attractive power of true love.
Weariness can descend upon the practitioner when the practice becomes too repetitive. The art of self-compassion, like all meditation, has an element of repetition. More than that, however, meditation is an active process of working with the skills of single-focus awareness, open-field awareness, and loving-kindness in creative sequences and combinations. Consider yourself like a captain on rough seas, always needing to make a course correction. Stay alert to the conditions that arise in each successive moment and make the most of them. You’ll get bored and have a rougher ride if you switch to autopilot.
Agitation is also known as “restlessness,” “remorse,” or “anxiety.” It refers to dissatisfaction with the way things are and the need to move on … somewhere, anywhere. The Buddha called agitation a tyrannical boss who’s never satisfied. Regret over the past or worry about the future keeps the practitioner perpetually agitated.
Agitation can be quelled in numerous ways. The first step is to live your life with the fewest regrets. You’ll feel the need to keep running if you leave a trail of misery behind you. Generous deeds can’t protect you from being mistreated (“No good deed goes unpunished”), but you’re more likely to feel peace of mind at the end of the day if you make others happy.
Another strategy for reducing restlessness is to appreciate the present moment. Ajahn Brahmavamso, a meditation teacher, said, “The fastest progress … is achieved by those who are content with the stage they are on now. It is the deepening of that contentment that ripens into the next stage.” How do we experience contentment in the present moment when the present moment doesn’t feel good? Rather than daydreaming about the future, we can reanchor ourselves in the present moment by labeling exactly what we’re feeling—“urgency,” “restlessness,” “anxiety”—and by softening into the physical experience of agitation. Restless legs? Clenched teeth? Deeper feelings may emerge when we don’t react to restlessness, such as fear of being forgotten or left behind. Once we contact the discomfort of restlessness, or the suffering behind it, compassion can flow naturally. And the agitated heart will rest when it feels truly loved.
The last hindrance, doubt, refers to skepticism about the practice or one’s ability to succeed at it. When the mind is doubting, it isn’t experiencing compassion or loving-kindness. Much time and energy are wasted in doubt.
The questions that most students bring to their meditation teachers are often tinged with doubt. For example, “Will I really make progress if just accept what I’m feeling in the present moment?” Teachers listen compassionately to their students’ experiences, validate positive changes, and generally leave their students feeling less alone and more optimistic. The Buddha said doubt was like being lost in a desert. Every student will get lost from time to time in the particulars of his or her experience and will need someone or something that reveals the bigger picture. Buddhist psychology is such a roadmap and has been guiding students for over 2,500 years.
The student can also document his or her own progress to see if the practice is effective. Have you had moments of unexpected happiness since beginning self-compassion practice? Has your inner dialogue become more benign? Are you becoming more sympathetic to the plight of others? Have old relationship conflicts begun to ease up? The next chapter will go into the matter of “progress” in greater detail.
The practice of mindfulness and self-compassion will gradually reshape your personality. That means that your usual ways of handling problems will become less automatic and you’ll have the freedom to choose how to respond to a given situation. Other people may say that you’ve changed, but you may just be feeling more and more like yourself.
To recap, the first step toward inner transformation is mindful awareness that you’re feeling emotional discomfort. The next step is self-compassion. That’s mostly what’s required to alleviate emotional suffering. With consistent practice, you’ll develop a habit of sensing uneasiness in your emotional landscape and make shifts in attitude and attention without even being consciously aware of it. It’s a new relationship with yourself that feels like having a loving companion by your side all day long.
There will always be times when conscious intention is required to deal with difficult emotions. The following four steps—F-A-C-E— can help you meet such challenges:
Feel the pain.
Accept it.
Compassionately respond.
Expect skillful action.
Step 1, feel the pain, refers to mindfulness: knowing what you’re experiencing while you’re experiencing it. You can’t work with pain if you’re hiding from it. Mindfulness of pain means we actually feel it, not just keep it at a distance.
Step 2, accept it, means active, nonjudgmental embracing of experience in the here and now. Acceptance reverses the impulse to fight discomfort and thereby make it worse.
There are a host of ways to meet emotional difficulties with mindfulness (Step 1) and acceptance (Step 2). Some techniques emphasized in this book are softening, allowing, and labeling, described in Chapters 2 and 3. “Softening” refers to accepting the bodily manifestation of stress. “Allowing” means accepting the emotional experience of discomfort—letting it be just as it is, free to come and go. “Labeling,” or naming how we feel, helps us disentangle from it.
Step 3, compassionately respond, means bearing witness to your own pain and responding with kindness and understanding. To do this, you can use the loving-kindness phrases or any of the other pathways to self-compassion mentioned in Chapter 5 or in Appendix B. The more we suffer, the more self-compassion we need, but sometimes that’s the hardest step to remember.
Step 4, expect skillful action, means you’ll be in the right mind-set to tackle even the trickiest dilemmas when you’re mindful and compassionate. This could mean getting out of an abusive relationship, changing your job, or letting go of your resentment and accepting someone’s shortcomings. Maybe you’ll want to apologize to someone and ask for forgiveness. The behavioral options are unlimited.
The conditions described in Chapter 1 of this book have their root in resistance to emotional distress. For example, Mira herniated a disk while doing yoga. It hurt physically, but, more than that, it signified to her the end of her vigorous lifestyle. That was a shocking and unacceptable possibility for Mira, so she became obsessed with the problem, blamed herself for her misfortune, and reduced her level of physical exercise, which led to tighter muscles and increased pain. The healing path began after Mira learned how fighting her condition only made it worse. Her progress went from Step 1, feeling the pain rather than trying to resist it; to Step 2, accepting what was happening to her; to Step 3, not beating up on herself emotionally; to Step 4, intelligently caring for herself with massage therapy and moderate exercise.
Insomnia treatment follows a similar pathway, assuming you’ve ruled out physical and environmental causes of insomnia. Rather than ruminating all night long about the consequences of not sleeping, which can keep the nervous system on high alert, you need to recognize how much emotional distress you feel in the very moment of ruminating (Step 1). Then you accept your sleeplessness as a fight you can’t win (Step 2) and respond with kindness (Step 3). One friend related the following incident when his wife had a cold and shifted about restlessly in bed beside him: “When I stopped wanting her to be more still, I started rubbing my head, got up to read a magazine, and, of course, quickly fell asleep in 5 minutes. If I kept ‘griping,’ I would have laid awake in bed for hours in frustrated resentment.” His acceptance of the situation led to a self-compassionate response—rubbing his head—which eventually led to falling asleep.
If you still can’t fall asleep when you accept your sleeplessness, it may be that the mind is troubled with overstimulating thoughts. You should then gently steer your attention to less energizing topics. One such exercise is simply to feel the sensation of each outbreath— mindfulness of breathing—and to recite a metta phrase with each exhalation. The loving-kindness phrases will take the edge off your struggle, and the boredom of repeating the mental exercise over and over will help you drift off to sleep, as long as you’re practicing this exercise for its own sake and not keeping yourself on edge by doing it to fall asleep.
Managing stage fright follows a similar trajectory. Let yourself be anxious, feel it in your body, expect that fear is a natural human response to speaking to a large number of strangers, give yourself some love for being in that uncomfortable position, and then, perhaps, refocus on what you have to say. Dedicating yourself to benefiting your audience with a few good ideas removes the “self” that feels the worry.
Self-compassion is no stranger to substance abuse treatment. When an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) member says at a meeting, “I’m an alcoholic,” he or she is speaking from a larger frame of self-acceptance—nothing to hide. Resisting the idea that one is an alcoholic, or becoming engulfed in shame when a relapse occurs, can be obstacles to staying clean and sober.
Alan Marlatt and colleagues at the University of Washington created a “mindfulness-based relapse prevention (MBRP)” program for alcohol and substance use disorders. It’s an 8-week program that combines Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness training with cognitive-behavioral techniques. Participants are taught about craving; they identify triggers for substance use—feeling, thoughts, and situations—and they learn to “urge surf.” Key features of the MBRP program are accepting one’s experience, seeing thoughts as just thoughts, taking care of oneself, and finding balance in life.
Another approach was developed by Kelly Avants, Arthur Margolin, and colleagues at Yale University School of Medicine: spiritual self-schema therapy (3-S+). It is intended for addiction and HIV-risk behavior in people of all faiths, although it’s based in Buddhist psychology. In this 12-session, manual-guided program, participants learn to move from the addict schema (“addict self”) to the schema of abstinence and harm prevention (the “spiritual self”). Metta meditation is taught in session 6 to increase awareness of harm caused by anger and hatred and to increase compassion. A research study designed by Zev Schuman-Olivier at Harvard Medical School showed that the 3-S+ program resulted in decreases in impulsivity and intoxicant use and greater motivation for abstinence compared to a standard care comparison group. One participant responded in the following way to a question about what she found helpful: “The meditation. That people deserve to be happy and free. My breathing, taking time out for myself, treating myself to something good sometimes.”
Finally, difficult relationships necessitate that we drop first into our own emotional pain, validate what we’re feeling, and then listen with kindness and understanding to what the other person has to say. We all have vulnerabilities that make us pull away from one another. In the episode described in Chapter 1 involving Michael and Suzanne, they witnessed how their vulnerabilities had pulled them apart (Michael pursuing his workaholic ways and Suzanne reacting with panic about their marriage), they felt the pain of disconnection from one another, accepted the pain as a sign of wanting to be closer, gave themselves credit for trying so hard to support the family, and learned to speak with one another in a less reactive, more positive manner: I miss you!
Sometimes we need a “time out” to disentangle from the automatic thoughts and feelings that rule our daily lives. I practice the following meditation in my own life, and I teach it to distraught clients in therapy. It takes only 5 minutes once you’re familiar with it, and it synthesizes much of what you’ve already learned in this book. You can also stretch this meditation to 30–45 minutes, as you like.
TRY THIS: Mindful Self-Compassion Meditation
Sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes, and take three deep relaxing breaths.
Open your awareness to the sounds in your environment. Come into the present moment by simply listening to whatever presents itself to your ears.
Form an image of yourself sitting in the chair. Note your posture as if you were seeing yourself from the outside.
Next, bring your awareness inside your body. Note the world of sensation occurring there in this very moment.
Now feel your breathing wherever it’s most obvious to you. Pay special attention to every out-breath. (Use a different anchor for you attention if you feel more comfortable doing so.)
Replace your out-breath with the loving-kindness phrases. For the next few minutes, slowly repeat the phrases, returning now and again to an image of yourself sitting in the chair.
Gently open your eyes.
The following example illustrates how we can work in meditation with mindfulness and self-compassion to establish a new relationship with ourselves and the world in which we live.
Natasha is a single 32-year-old family physician who began practicing mindfulness meditation to help herself relax. She is the daughter of hardworking parents who desperately wanted her to become a successful doctor. Natasha learned to value achievement just as much as they did, which also meant she hardly found the time to socialize or unwind. It didn’t really matter to Natasha until recently, when she discovered her friends were getting married and having children. Natasha just seemed to be getting tired.
Mindfulness meditation worked very nicely for Natasha at first, especially the calming effect of focusing on her breath for half an hour each morning and taking conscious breaths throughout the day. After a few months, however, Natasha noticed that focusing on her breath was making her anxious. She worried that breath meditation had stopped working for her, or worse. Sometimes Natasha found herself taking deep breaths—gasping for air—during her meditation.
Natasha consulted with her meditation teacher, who suggested that she was focusing too hard on her breath and she should open her awareness to other sensations that were occurring in the body. This helped, and Natasha discovered that her breath became a refuge again whenever she returned to it. She took the lesson to heart and broadened her informal practice to include the feeling of her feet on the floor. She especially liked this mindfulness exercise when appointments piled up near the end of the day and she was running from one examining room to another.
Natasha decided to go on a silent, weeklong retreat to deepen her practice. She chose a combination mindfulness/metta retreat. Natasha woke up at 5:15 A.M. and diligently attended every 40-minute meditation session for the first 3 days. Then she heard that teacher interviews were scheduled to begin on the fourth day. To her surprise, Natasha found herself stricken with fear about the interviews: “Will the teacher think I’m a good meditator? Will she like me?” Natasha meditated, hoping the fear would subside, but the more diligently she meditated, the worse it became.
Feeling broken and exhausted from fighting her fear, Natasha dragged herself to the meditation hall on the fourth morning. The morning meditation instructions were on loving-kindness meditation, especially metta for oneself. When Natasha sat down to practice metta meditation, it struck her like a revelation: “I don’t have to concentrate, I don’t have to be mindful, I don’t need to apply more effort, I don’t even need to calm down … all I need to do is love myself because I’m in such a miserable state!” Natasha stopped using her breath as the anchor of her meditation and switched to the metta phrases. As she began ruminating about the upcoming interviews, she said to herself, “May I be safe. May I be free from fear. May I live my life with ease.” Her body relaxed, and she found a tear trickling down her face. It no longer mattered what the teachers thought of her, or even what she thought of herself—she was okay just being who she was.
During the lunch break the same day, Natasha wondered to herself why she was so afraid of the interview. After all, the purpose of a meditation interview is to be supportive and helpful, not to judge. Natasha concluded that she was a perfectionist—self-critical and never good enough. She was the daughter of parents who desperately wanted her to be successful and financially secure. No matter how many A’s she got on her report cards, her parents could never let up. Natasha internalized the message that she needed to strive relentlessly in order to prevent catastrophe.
Natasha decided it was time to live her life in a new way. She could hardly recall the last time she had taken a vacation. The dreaded interview eventually arrived, and Natasha shared with her teacher all that had occurred over the previous day. The teacher advised Natasha to cultivate a “preference for the present moment.” The present moment is always a mini-vacation from striving—there are fewer worries because there’s no future in the present. Natasha took this message to heart and started skipping sitting meditation sessions to walk in the woods, listen to the birds, and smell the earth. As she walked, she said to herself, “May I be safe. May I be happy. This moment, this beautiful moment.”
When Natasha returned to her sitting meditation, she blended loving-kindness into her mindfulness practice. She used her breath to quiet her restless mind, she opened up to body sensations when she felt her breath shortening, and she used metta phrases when she felt disturbed or overwhelmed. Natasha learned to inhabit her body in a new, more loving, way.
During the remainder of the retreat, Natasha remained particularly vigilant to the hindrances of “clinging” (to calmness) and “aversion” (to fear). She recognized when she slipped into the “workhorse” or “perfectionist” mode. She labeled “striving” as it arose. Natasha also uncovered deeper feelings when she stopped striving— feelings of loneliness, fear, and emptiness—and she brought kindly awareness to these as well. Natasha had learned on her retreat to allow each moment to be just as it was—to simply sit.
Back at work, Natasha was surprised to notice how happy she was to see her patients and how carefully she listened to them. She had dropped an invisible layer of struggle—the struggle for approval—and she felt more at ease with others. Natasha also discovered she had more sympathy and understanding for her parents and the struggles they had gone through as she was being raised. She had found them in herself and knew the pain they unwittingly passed on to her. Natasha resolved not to transmit the same struggle for achievement to her own children, should she ever have the privilege of having kids.
Natasha’s personal transformation might have eventually occurred in daily life, but retreats can generate deep changes in a relatively short period of time due to the absence of ordinary distractions. In Natasha’s case, she saw how her intolerance of feeling fear magnified anxiety into an intense situation. The only approach that helped Natasha was self-compassion. It opened her to further insights, such as underlying feelings of inadequacy and her fear of being left alone without anyone to rely upon if she faltered or failed. As Natasha validated herself with loving-kindness, her need for approval from other people began to subside. Natasha experienced a wholly unexpected sense of connection with others, including her patients and her parents. What had begun as an exercise in stress reduction evolved into a new, more compassionate way of life.
You now have the essential concepts and tools to cultivate self-compassion. The challenge, of course, is to practice them. There are so many pressing concerns and responsibilities in daily life that self-compassion is easy to forget. What does it take to maintain a practice over time? The next and final chapter will show you how.