The essence of self-esteem is compassion for yourself. When you have compassion for yourself, you understand and accept yourself. If you make a mistake, you forgive yourself. You have reasonable expectations of yourself. You set attainable goals. You tend to see yourself as basically good.
Your pathological critic cannot stand compassion. To him, compassion is like water to the Wicked Witch of the West or garlic to a vampire. When your self-talk is compassionate, your pathological critic is gagged. Compassion is one of the most potent weapons you have for keeping your pathological critic at bay.
When you learn to feel compassion for yourself, you begin exposing your sense of worth. You literally uncover the hidden jewel of your own value. Compassionate self-talk can wash away the sediment of hurt and rejection that may have covered your innate self-acceptance for years.
This chapter will define compassion, show how compassion for yourself and compassion for others are related, discuss how to achieve a sense of self-worth, and present exercises designed to increase your compassionate skills.
Most people think of compassion as an admirable character trait like honesty, loyalty, or spontaneity. If you have compassion, you show it by being kind, sympathetic, and helpful to others.
This is certainly true. However, as it relates to self-esteem, compassion is much more. First of all, it is not an unchanging character trait. Compassion is actually a skill—a skill you can acquire if you lack it or improve if you already have it. Second, compassion is not something you feel only for others. It should also inspire you to be kind, sympathetic, and helpful to yourself.
There are three basic components to the skill of compassion: understanding, accepting, and forgiving.
An attempt to understand is the first step toward a compassionate relationship to yourself and others. Understanding something important about yourself or a loved one can totally change your feelings and attitudes. Consider the case of Sean, a brick mason who finally realized why he overate in the evenings. One day he had a particularly hard job. After working until dark, he realized that he still had a full day’s work left for the next day, when he was supposed to start yet another job. He drove home with one eye on the temperature gauge because his car had been overheating and he couldn’t afford to get it fixed. He felt exhausted, anxious, and defeated. He thought about stopping at the liquor store and getting some nuts, some corn chips, and some dip to snack on before dinner. As he pictured himself ensconced in front of the TV with his snacks piled on the arms of the chair, he began to feel better. But the critic had also started kicking him for his “junk food binges.” At this point Sean did something different. He asked himself why the thought of food made him feel better. Then he had an insight: he overate in the evenings to escape his feelings of pressure and inadequacy during the day. While snacking, he felt comforted and safe.
This sudden understanding was Sean’s first step toward a more compassionate view of himself. He understood his overeating as a response to unbearable pressures, rather than an expression of gluttony or weakness.
Not all understanding comes so easy. Sometimes it comes as the result of a plodding, sustained effort to figure things out. Your decision to buy and read this book is an example of a conscious, step-by-step approach to understanding.
Understanding the nature of your problems doesn’t mean that you have to come up with solutions to them. It merely means that you have figured out how you operate—what you are likely to do in a given situation and why you probably do it. It means you have some sense of how you came to be the person you are.
Understanding others is mostly a matter of listening to them instead of listening to your own self-talk about them. Instead of saying to yourself, “What a blabbermouth! Will she ever shut up?” you listen as your mother tells you about her trip to the doctor. You ask her questions about her symptoms and the tests she had to take. You gently probe for the feelings underneath the facts. Gradually you realize that she is not just complaining about the nurse and the receptionist. She is worried about getting older, about death. You are able to empathize and offer some sympathy, instead of your usual impatience. This makes her feel better and you feel better about yourself.
Acceptance is perhaps the most difficult aspect of compassion. Acceptance is an acknowledgment of the facts, with all value judgments suspended. You neither approve nor disapprove—you accept. For example, the statement “I accept the fact that I’m out of shape” does not mean “I’m out of shape, and that’s perfectly okay with me.” It means “I’m out of shape, and I know it. I may not like it. In fact, sometimes I may feel like a barrel of flab. But right now I’m putting my feelings aside, editing out value judgments, and just facing the bare facts.”
Marty is a good example of the power of acceptance. He was an auto body worker who constantly put himself down for being a “short, fat, ugly little man.” As part of his struggle to gain self-compassion, he composed a brief description of himself to use every time his pathological critic started whispering “short…fat…ugly.” He would counter by saying, “I’m five-foot-six, and I accept that. I’m 182 pounds, and I accept that. I’m getting bald, and I accept that, too. These are all facts. These facts are to be accepted, not used to beat myself up.”
Acceptance of others involves acknowledging the facts about them without your usual judgments. For example, Laurie usually thought of a particular teacher as a cold fish, totally without feelings, who never gives a word of encouragement or extra time for assignments. However, she made a great effort to accept this man because she had to work with him on an important student-faculty committee. First, Laurie got rid of the derogatory labels in her mind. Then she mentally ran down the facts: “Doctor Sommers is quiet, reserved, and detached. He usually gives help only when formally asked. He takes deadlines very seriously. I may not like his style as a teacher, but I accept him for what he is. I can work with him and still accomplish something.” This exercise in understanding helped Laurie get some important joint resolutions passed by her committee. The whole experience boosted her self-esteem as well, because she felt that she had learned the value of being a little more detached and reserved herself.
Forgiveness flows out of understanding and acceptance. Like those two traits, it doesn’t mean approval. It means letting go of the past, reaffirming self-respect in the present, and looking toward a better future. When you forgive yourself for screaming at your child, you don’t change wrong to right or forget all about it. Your tantrum was still the wrong thing to have done, and you will remember your mistake so that you can do better in the future. But you do write “case closed” and proceed with today’s business without dwelling on the incident and feeling rotten all over again.
Alice was a young woman who had trouble accepting dates. Men would ask her out to dinner or the movies, and she would invent some excuse for why she couldn’t go. Then her pathological critic would start up: “Chicken. He’s a nice guy. Why can’t you take a chance? You’ve blown it forever with him.” Alice would suffer this attack repeatedly for days. When she began fighting back, forgiveness was one of her most powerful weapons. She would say to herself, “Okay, I made a mistake. I would have liked to go out with John, but I felt too shy and scared. That’s in the past. There’s nothing to do about it now. I forgive myself, and I can go on to the next opportunity. I refuse to atone forever for my shyness.”
True forgiveness of others means that the accounts are balanced. The person who harmed you no longer owes you anything. He or she is no longer in a one-down position to you, regarding what happened. You have given up any idea of retaliation, reparation, restitution, or revenge. You face the future with a clean slate between you.
Charlie was a landscape architect whose relationship with his dad was poisoned by a long-standing disagreement over some money they had earned when they were in the gardening business together. His self-esteem suffered whenever he compared himself to friends who had closer relationships with their fathers. Finally, he realized that the key to raising his own opinion of himself and getting back in touch with his dad was to sincerely forgive him. “I had to stop rehashing all the old arguments,” Charlie explained. “They were hanging around both our necks and keeping us apart.” When he forgave his dad and put the past behind him, Charlie’s self-esteem and his relationship with his father improved.
Understanding, acceptance, and forgiveness: these are three big words that seem almost platitudinous. No one becomes more understanding or forgiving because he or she reads somewhere that this is a good way to be. Abstract concepts, no matter how laudable, have little effect on behavior.
To develop a compassionate mind, you must make a commitment to a different way of thinking. The old way was to judge and then reject. The new way requires that you suspend judgment for a few moments. When confronted with a situation that you traditionally evaluate in a negative way (“She’s stupid… I screwed up again… He’s selfish… I’m incompetent…”), you can instead use a specific series of thoughts that make up the compassionate response.
The compassionate response begins with three questions you should always ask yourself to promote an understanding of the problematic behavior.
Next come three statements to remind yourself that you can accept a person without blame or judgment, no matter how unfortunate his or her choices have been.
Finally, two statements suggest that the slate can be wiped clean, that it is time to forgive and let go of it.
Try to memorize this sequence. Make a commitment to use it whenever you notice that you are judging yourself or others. Revise it, if you wish, so that the language and suggestions feel right for you. But be sure to maintain the basic thrust of the compassionate response: understanding, acceptance, forgiveness.
Learning compassion skills helps you to contact your own sense of self-worth. But that sense can be very elusive if you suffer from low self-esteem. At times it seems like you’re just not worth anything. It may seem that nobody is worth much.
What makes people worthwhile? Where do you look for evidence of worth? What are the criteria?
Many criteria for human worth have been devised throughout history. The ancient Greeks valued personal virtue in a human and political sense. If you conformed to ideals of harmony and moderation and contributed to society’s order, you were considered worthy and might enjoy high self-esteem. Worthy Romans were expected to display patriotism and valor. Early Christians valued love of God and mankind over allegiance to worldly kingdoms. Worthy Buddhists strive to rid themselves of all desire. Worthy Hindus contemplate ways to deepen their reverence for all living beings. Worthy Muslims respect law, tradition, and honor. Liberals value love of man and good works. Conservatives value industry and respect for tradition. The worthy merchants are the rich ones. The worthy artists are the talented ones. The worthy politicians are the powerful ones. The worthy actors are the popular ones. And so on.
In our culture, the most common solution to the problem is to equate worth with work. You are what you do, and other positions and professions are more or less worthy than your own. Doctors are better than psychologists are better than lawyers are better than accountants are better than stockbrokers are better than disk jockeys are better than hardware store cashiers and so on.
Within a given profession or social level, our culture next awards worth based on accomplishments. Getting a raise, a degree, a promotion, or winning in competition are worth a lot. Acquiring the right house, car, furnishings, boat, or college education for your kids—all these accomplishments are worth a lot too. If you get fired or laid off, lose your home, or in any other way slip down the accomplishment ladder, you are in deep trouble. You lose all your counters and become socially worthless.
Buying into these cultural concepts of worth can be deadly. For example, John was a bank examiner who equated his worth with his accomplishments at work. When he was late in meeting an important deadline, he felt worthless. When he felt worthless, he got depressed. When he got depressed, he worked slower and missed more deadlines. He felt more worthless, got more depressed, worked less diligently, and so on in a deadly downward spiral.
John wasn’t worthless. He was crippled by an irrational concept of worth. And because his irrational concept was a very common one in our society, he had no one close to him to point out the dilemma. John’s supervisor agreed that he was worthless to the company if he couldn’t meet deadlines. His wife and brother agreed that something was wrong with him. Even his therapist tended to agree that poor performance at work was certainly something to get depressed about. In subtle ways, they all reinforced John’s belief that he was worthless. He was on a self-propelled merry-go-round of depression, and they weren’t helping get him off. They were helping push.
When you’re in this sort of cultural jam, it may help a little to remind yourself that every criterion ever devised for measuring human worth is dependent on its cultural context. The Zen monk of great virtue is worthless in Wall Street. The highly respected stockbroker is worthless in the jungles of Borneo. The most powerful witch doctor is worthless in the halls of the Pentagon. John tried reminding himself of this: “What does it matter if the First Intercity audit is finished this week or next? Are stars going to fall from the sky? Is my total worth as a human being really so dependent on whether two columns of numbers balance? I wouldn’t have this problem on the beach at Pago Pago or in Shakespeare’s London.”
This self-talk gave John some distance on the situation, but it didn’t boost his self-esteem much. The fact was, he had chosen to operate and compete in the arena of bank examination, not beachcombing in Pago Pago or Renaissance playwriting. He was a member of a Western, urban culture, and he felt that he had to measure up to the prevailing standards of success, even if those standards were irrational or subjective.
A more fruitful place to turn is to your own experience and observations. The most “obvious” and “reasonable” cultural criteria for worth can often be confounded by observation. For example, if pediatricians are more worthy than the people who wash their windows, then it follows that pediatricians should have a higher sense of self-worth. All the pediatricians should be basking in the warm glow of their high self-esteem, while the window washers should all be diving off their scaffolds in despair. But it just isn’t so. Statistics show that your profession is only slightly related to your level of self-esteem or mental health. The observable fact is that there are both pediatricians and window washers who like themselves, and there are similar ratios of pediatricians and window washers who don’t like themselves.
John’s personal observations bore this out. He knew other people in financial occupations who had good self-esteem, but weren’t really any more competent or successful than himself. On the negative side, one of John’s classmates in college was a vice president of a major corporation, but John knew him to be haunted by a sense of worthlessness despite his accomplishments.
Obviously, some people have solved this problem of personal worth and some haven’t. If you want to enjoy high self-esteem, you too will have to come to terms with the concept of human worth. When you conclude that the solution must lie outside of culturally determined criteria, that leaves four ways you can approach the concept of worth and come out with your self-esteem intact.
The first way to deal with the problem of worth is to throw it out the window. Accept that human worth is an abstract concept that, upon examination, turns out to have an extremely fragile basis in reality. It’s just another global label. All the criteria turn out to be subjective, culturally variable, and damaging to your self-esteem. The idea of identifying a universal standard of worth is a tempting illusion, but you and everybody else are better off without it. True human worth is impossible to determine.
The second way to deal with the problem of worth is to realize that worth exists, but that it is equally distributed and immutable. Everyone at birth has one unit of human worth, absolutely equal to everyone else’s unit of worth. No matter what happens in your life, no matter what you do or is done to you, your human worth can’t be diminished or increased. Nobody is worth more or less than anybody else.
It’s interesting to note that these two options are functionally the same. They both free you to live without having to compare yourself to others and make constant value judgments about your relative worth.
Of course, these first two options are essentially different. The first is a kind of practical agnosticism: one person may or may not be “worth” more than another, but this judgment is a hopelessly difficult and dangerous one to make, and you refuse to make it. The second option is more in line with traditional Western religious teaching, and results in a comforting, nondenominational “feeling” that people are worth something, that they are special, that they are more akin to angels than to animals. For the purpose of fostering self-esteem, you can choose either option and succeed.
The third choice is different from the first two options without negating either of them. In this option you acknowledge your own internal experience of human worth.
Recall a time when you felt good about yourself, when human worth seemed real and you had a good piece of it. Recall the feeling that you were okay, with all your faults and failings, in spite of others’ opinions. You may have had only a glimpse of this emotion in your life. You may be, at this moment, totally out of touch with the feeling of personal worth. You may have only a dim, colorless, purely intellectual memory that once upon a time you felt good about yourself.
The point is to admit that your personal worth exists, as evidenced by your own internal experience, however brief and occasional it has been. Your worth is like the sun, always shining, even when you are in the shade and can’t feel it. You can’t keep it from shining; you can only keep yourself in the shade by letting your pathological critic throw up clouds of confusion or by crawling under the rock of depression.
John, the bank examiner, was able to contact his inner sense of worth by remembering a neighbor he had when he was twelve. She was an old woman named Mrs. Ackerson who lived next door. She would often look at John’s school projects and drawings when his mother and father didn’t have time or were not forthcoming with praise. Mrs. Ackerson always had great enthusiasm for his creations, telling him what a clever boy he was and how he would go far. John remembered the pride he felt, and his sense of confidence about the future. Sometimes it was possible for John to reach back to the memory of Mrs. Ackerson and tap into his early feelings of pride and competence.
The fourth way to deal with the problem of worth is to take a good look at yourself through the lens of compassion. Compassion exposes the essence of your humanness.
What do you understand about yourself? First, you live in a world in which you must constantly struggle to meet basic needs—or you will die. You must find food, shelter, emotional support, rest, and recreation. Almost all of your energy goes into these major need areas. You do the best you can, given your resources. But the available strategies you have for meeting your needs are limited by what you know and don’t know, your conditioning, your emotional make-up, the degree of support you receive from others, your health, your sensitivity to pain and pleasure, and so on. And all through this struggle to survive, you are aware that both your intellectual and physical abilities will inevitably deteriorate—and despite all your efforts you will die.
In the course of your struggle, you make many mistakes and are rewarded with pain. Often you feel afraid—both of very real dangers and the vaguer dreads that come from a life without guarantees, where loss and hurt can slap you down at any time. There are so many kinds of pain, and yet you carry on, seeking whatever emotional and physical sustenance is available.
The last point is key: you carry on. In the face of all the pain, past and to come, you continue to struggle. You plan, you cope, you decide. You continue to live and to feel. If you let this awareness soak in, if you let yourself really feel the struggle, you may begin to get a glimmer of your real worth. It is the force, the life energy that keeps you trying. The degree of success is irrelevant. How good you look, how psychologically or physically nourished you are, is irrelevant. The only thing that counts is the effort. And the source of your worth is the effort.
After understanding comes acceptance. Nothing one does in the quest to survive is bad. Each approach is only more or less effective, painful or not painful. Despite your mistakes, you are doing a good job—because it is the best job you can do. Your mistakes and the pain that follows teach you. It is possible to accept everything you do without judgment because every minute of your life you are engaged in the inescapable struggle.
You can forgive and let go of your failures and mistakes because you have already paid for them. It is our condition that we do not always know the best way—and even knowing the way, we may not have the resources to follow it. Your worth, then, is that you were born into this place and that you continue to live here despite the enormous difficulty of the struggle.
To be complete, compassion must be directed toward others as well as toward yourself. At present you may find it easier to understand, accept, and forgive others than to understand, accept, and forgive yourself. Or you may find that it’s relatively easy to feel compassion for yourself, but that you’re constantly irritated at the failings of others. Either kind of imbalance can lower your self-esteem.
Fortunately, this imbalance is self-correcting. Feeling increased compassion for others will eventually make it easier to feel compassion for yourself. Learning to give yourself a break will lead naturally to a more compassionate view of others. In other words, the Golden Rule operates in both forward and reverse: “Love thy neighbor as thyself” or “Love thyself as thy neighbor.”
If loving yourself seems like misplaced affection, then start with increasing your compassion for others. After you have learned to understand, accept, and forgive the foibles of others, your own shortcomings won’t seem so enormous.
A more convenient term than compassion for others is empathy. Empathy is clearly understanding the thoughts and feelings of another person. Empathy involves listening carefully, asking questions, setting aside your value judgments, and using your imagination to understand another’s point of view, opinions, feelings, motivations, and situation. The insight gained by the exercise of empathy leads naturally to the compassionate process of understanding, accepting, and forgiving.
Empathy is not feeling the same way somebody else feels. That’s sympathy, a related but different activity that is not always possible or appropriate. Empathy is also not acting in a tender, understanding manner. That’s support, another activity that’s not always possible or appropriate. Empathy is not agreement or approval either. Empathy operates outside of and prior to sympathy, support, agreement, and approval.
True empathy is the ultimate antidote to anger and resentment. Remember, anger is caused by your thoughts, not others’ actions. When you take the time to thoroughly understand another’s thoughts and motivations, your mind reading and blaming are short-circuited. You see the logic behind others’ actions. You may still not agree with the logic or like the actions, but you understand. You come to see that real evil and meanness are very rare, that the vast majority of people are seeking pleasure or avoiding pain in what seems to them to be the best way at the time. You see how little your own worth or actions enter into the equation. You are free to accept the facts of the matter, forgive the offender, and move on.
June was a social worker who frequently had run-ins with her supervisor. June felt that the clients had to come first and paperwork second, and so she was often late with her weekly and monthly statistics and reports. She felt very critical about her supervisor’s insistence that she keep up with the paperwork, feeling that he didn’t really care for her clients as much as he cared about looking good on paper.
This state of affairs improved after June had a long conversation with her supervisor at a staff picnic. She consciously made an effort to listen and understand the supervisor’s point of view. As they talked, she refrained from making her usual accusatory or sarcastic remarks. Her supervisor gradually unbent, letting some of his commitment and feelings show. He told a story of how he had once lost a lot of grant money and killed a valuable outreach program because he messed up the paperwork. This major failure had taught him that looking good on paper was a necessary precondition for doing good as a social worker. After this conversation, June was much more kindly disposed toward her supervisor. Her exercise in empathy paid off in a better working relationship.
Exercises
This chapter concludes with four exercises. The first two will train you in feeling compassion for others, and the last two combine compassion for others with compassion for yourself. Go with your strength: try the exercise that seems easiest first. Then proceed to the more challenging exercises.
Video Encounter
This is a perfectly safe, nonthreatening way to practice empathy for others. Watch a TV show you hate, one you normally wouldn’t be caught dead watching. If you normally watch game shows, pick a serious drama. If you normally watch only news, tune in some cartoons. If you prefer comedies, watch a TV preacher, or a cop show, or a soap opera.
Watch and listen carefully. Every time you feel irritated, disgusted, bored, or embarrassed, set your feelings aside and refocus your attention. Say to yourself, “I notice I’m feeling very irritated by this. That’s okay, but it’s not what I’m interested in right now. I can set the irritation aside and just observe for a while, without judging.”
Suspend your value judgments for a time and imagine why the faithful fans watch this show. What do they get out of it? Do they watch for excitement, enlightenment, diversion, escape, identification with the characters, or confirmation of their prejudices? Try to understand the attractive features of this show and what kind of person likes it.
When you arrive at an empathetic understanding, switch to another kind of show and try again. Remember, you don’t have to approve of what you see—just see it clearly and understand its attractions.
The goal of this exercise isn’t to expand or corrupt your viewing taste. The purpose is to provide a safe, nonthreatening situation in which you can practice setting aside your snap judgments and gain insight into a point of view you would ordinarily dismiss out of hand.
Active Listening
With a friend. Choose a friend who likes to try new things. Explain that you want to improve your listening skills. Ask your friend to tell you a story about something that is important in his or her life: a traumatic experience, an important childhood memory, or a hope for the future.
As your friend talks, your job is to listen carefully and ask questions about any parts that you don’t understand. Ask your friend to clarify or expand. Dig beneath the facts by asking for information on thoughts and feelings: “Why was that important to you?” “How did you feel about that?” “What did you learn from that?”
From time to time, paraphrase what your friend has said: “So in other words, you…” “Wait, let me see if I understand: you thought that…” “What I hear you saying is…” Paraphrasing is an important part of listening with empathy because it keeps you on track. It helps you remove your own false interpretations and clarify your friend’s precise meaning. Your friend gets the satisfaction of knowing that he or she has really been heard, and a chance to correct any errors you have made. You then incorporate the corrections in revised paraphrases.
With acquaintances. Now you can go on to a more difficult exercise. Choose people that you don’t know as well and practice your empathetic skills without their knowledge of what you are doing.
Whatever they are talking to you about, ask for clarification and amplification. Resist your impulse to argue or jump in with an anecdote of your own. Notice when you start judging them in your mind and set the judgments aside. Remember that you don’t have to love them, that you are just trying to understand something without your own self-talk getting in the way. Especially watch out for any comparisons with yourself that you find yourself making.
With someone you don’t know well, paraphrasing is even more important. It helps you remember an unfamiliar story, assures the speaker of your interest, and helps you separate your own mental processes from what was actually said. As your acquaintance clarifies and corrects, your understanding deepens and the conversation will often shift to a more personal, intimate level. True opinions, feelings, and areas of uncertainty or vulnerability will be gradually uncovered as the speaker learns that you are a careful, interested listener who can be trusted to hear a person out without jumping all over the conversation. Do this exercise often enough and acquaintances become friends.
With strangers. At a party or other gathering, pick someone you don’t know or someone you don’t like. Engage that person in conversation and use your listening skills to really try to comprehend what he or she has to say. Follow the instructions given for listening to friends and acquaintances, realizing that it will probably be more difficult to suspend judgment and concentrate on asking for information and paraphrasing.
When you are listening to someone you actually don’t like or with whom you have nothing in common, it is important to remind yourself of the basis of compassion: everyone is just trying to survive like you are. Ask yourself the three questions that begin the compassionate response. Ask yourself, “What need is this person meeting by saying this? How is it making this person feel more secure, more in control, less anxious, less in pain? What beliefs are influencing him or her?”
Compassion for Things Past
This is an exercise that you can do over and over to develop skills of understanding, acceptance, and forgiveness.
This moment, as you are reading, is the present. Every other event of your life is in the past. Some of these events you label bad and use to reject yourself: not visiting your father more before he died, the demanding way you dealt with your first wife, things you said as you were separating, your eating binge last week, your failed effort to stop smoking, your argument with your son, and so on. But you don’t have to go on hurting yourself with the past. These events can be reexperienced by using the compassionate response.
Here’s what you do. First, select an event from the past, one that the critic has used to make attacks. Now get into a comfortable position. Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Scan your body for tension and stretch or relax any tight areas. At this point, let yourself begin drifting into the past. Go back to that time when your selected event was unfolding. See yourself doing whatever it was you now regret. See how you were dressed, see the room or the environment, see whoever else is present. Hear any conversation that is taking place. Notice any feelings you are having in the past event—either emotional or physical. As best you can, let yourself relive the event. See the action unfolding, hear the words, notice your reactions.
Now, while still holding on to the image of yourself in the middle of the event, ask yourself this question: What need was I trying to meet?
Think about it. Were you trying to feel more secure, more in control, less anxious, less guilty? Take your time with the answer. Now ask: What was I thinking at the time?
What were your beliefs about the situation? How were you interpreting things? What did you assume to be true? Don’t rush your answer. Now ask: What kind of pain or feeling was influencing me?
Take your time and think about the emotional context of the event.
When you have some answers to these questions, when you know the needs, thoughts, and feelings that influenced you, it’s time to accept and forgive yourself for who you were at that moment in time. Stay focused on the image of yourself in the middle of the event and say this to the person you were:
Really try to feel each of these statements. Allow them to sink in. Now it is time to let go of the past. Say to yourself:
If this exercise works at all for you, use it with as many past events as you can. As you keep using it, the compassionate response will become more automatic. Forgiveness will come easier. And you will feel less caught in the painful regrets of the past.
Compassion Meditation
This exercise has three parts: visualizing and feeling compassion for someone who has hurt you, for someone you have hurt, and for yourself. You can have someone read this to you, make a recording and listen to it, or download the audio version of this exercise at http://www.newharbinger.com/33933. If you’re recording it, speak slowly, in a low, distinct, relaxed tone.
For someone who has hurt you. Sit or lie on your back with your hands and arms uncrossed and your legs stretched out side by side. Close your eyes and take several deep breaths. Continue to breathe deeply and slowly as you scan your body for tension. As you notice tight areas, relax your muscles and settle into a heavy, warm, relaxed state. Let your breathing slow even further, and suspend your judgments. Accept whatever images come to you, even if they don’t immediately make sense.
Imagine that there is a chair in front of you. Someone is sitting in the chair, someone you know who has hurt you in some way. Imagine that person who has hurt you sitting silently in the chair. Notice all the details: how big or small the person is, the clothes, the colors, the posture. The person who has hurt you is looking calmly, expectantly at you. Say to the person:
Continue looking at the person who hurt you. Gradually let the person enter your heart. Open yourself. Let anger and resentment fade out like music being turned down. Open further. If it’s difficult to empathize or let go of your anger, don’t judge yourself for how difficult it is. Take a moment more if you need to, and go at your own pace. When you are ready, say “I forgive you” one more time. Let the image of the person in the chair fade from sight.
For someone you have hurt. Imagine that the person in the chair is now someone whom you have hurt, someone from whom you want understanding, acceptance, and forgiveness. See all the details of his or her clothing and appearance. Make the vision as real as you can. The person you have hurt is looking at you calmly, expectantly. Say to the person:
As you look at the person you hurt, see that person slowly smile. Know that you are understood, you are accepted, you are forgiven. Let the image of the person fade away until the chair is empty.
For yourself. For the final part of this meditation, imagine yourself sitting in the chair. Again, see all the details: see yourself dressed as you are dressed, looking as you look now. Imagine that the image of yourself is saying:
Imagine the figure of yourself in the chair getting up, coming over to where you are, and sitting or lying down in your body, merging into one whole person.
Relax and rest. You are at peace with yourself, at peace with others. When you are ready, open your eyes and get up slowly, feeling refreshed and relaxed, with a sense of compassionate acceptance toward yourself and others.
Do this exercise at least five times over the next two weeks.