At this point, many people are suffering more than usual. They are worried, exhausted and overwhelmed by the terrible things happening in the world. They are often glued to the news and soaked in commentary on social media, with the amygdala in overdrive and the endocrine system hanging with adrenaline.
I recently shared three slogans that help me stay balanced. They: feet on the ground. Heart wide open. Keep looking up. These are phrases we all suggest to keep in mind.
I now want to explain how they relate to the practice of self-compassion.
What is self-compassion?
Self-compassion is a major part of my spiritual practice. It’s useful when times are difficult. (I wrote a book about it called “This Difficult Things to Be Human.”)
Self-compassion treats ourselves as if our suffering was important. It is where we are our own supporters. When times are rough, we provide ourselves with emotional support. When you realize you’ve been ruined, it can involve cutting yourself off. After all, who doesn’t ruin it? It means realizing that suffering is normal and not a sign of failure. Again, everyone is suffering. It is part of the human condition. It means providing emotional support and security to yourself. We all need them. It can include self-care. This means recognizing needs such as rest, nutrition, friendship, and recreation, and meeting those needs as much as possible.
Let’s take a look at how this works under the three slogan headings I suggested.
1. “Foots on the ground”
We need to learn to emotionally keep our feet on the ground.
Reactive emotions such as worry, anger, and despair hijack the mind and create pain. In response to our feelings, our minds produce the thoughts of catastrophe that make us even worse. These reactive emotions seem to imply that they will help. The implicit assumption seems to be something like, “If I keep worrying enough about this, I will be safer, thinking about everything that may be wrong.” But instead, we suffer even more intensely, making ourselves even more difficult to do anything that could actually help.
Recognize that you are suffering
The first step in self-compassion is to recognize that we are suffering. Without realizing how it is, you will not be able to meet your suffering with compassion. So instead of getting caught up in stories about how terrible things are, we need to realize that these stories are part of our suffering. We need to recognize that worry, anger and despair are forms of suffering.
Drop the story
Recognizing that worry, anger, and despair are patterns of thought that intensifies our suffering, we must then gently let them go.
You can recognize that “this way of thinking is useless for me” and refuse to put any more energy into it. You drop the story.
But we don’t just drop the story and find ourselves in the spiritual void. Instead, what we do is head towards our body so that our consciousness is filled with sensations rather than thought.
Please head towards a painful feeling
We do this by realizing and accepting our suffering as we appear in our bodies.
When the mind causes worry, anger, and despair, what it is responding to is a painful emotion in the body. Emotions are reactions to emotions.
Whenever you are in a reactive state, pay attention to what is happening around the chest, around the diaphragm, and around the abdomen. You will notice that there is an unpleasant feeling there. There may be tension, tingling, flapping, weight, pressure, etc. None of them feel good.
These are “emotions” and are not the same as the reactive emotional patterns described above. Emotions are mere sensations. Emotions are what we do. They are our attempts to deal with those feelings.
Emotions can be uncomfortable, but they are never “bad”. So we can accept them. They are just feelings. They are signals that occur within the body as communication from ancient parts of the brain that say, “Look, I think there is a threat to pay attention to.”
Please accept the difficult thing
Rather than responding emotionally to our emotions, we can accept them and allow them to exist.
If necessary, you say, “It’s okay to feel this. It’s just a feeling. Let’s go through this. Let’s forgive it. There’s nothing to fear here.
This kind of self-talk helps us support us, attracting attention again and again on our feelings.
You can notice the quality of your emotions, pressure, tingling, and more. You can notice how it changes.
The mind is less able to respond to them than they get caught up in observing their emotions as if they were other sensations. And observing our emotions helps us to reduce our tendency to be reactive and to calm us down.
2. Heart Wide Open
But no matter how important it is, there is far more to self-compassion than to accept painful feelings. Compassion is when we meet kindness and suffering. So we need to invoke kindness.
One of the easiest ways to awaken our innate ability to kindness is to practice “kind eyes.” We remember what it’s like to see simply with kindness, and we notice the quality of warmth, kindness, and softness that arises within and around our eyes. Then, as we focused on painful emotions, we realized that those qualities continued, permeating the inner gaze of intezaméptious awareness. In this way, we kindly meet the pain.
You can also talk about pain. In reality, this is a compassionate part of communicating with us and providing support and peace of mind to our hurt and frightened parts. “I know this is difficult for you, but we’ll get through this. I’m here for you. I love you and I want you to be happy.”
Often, when we did all this, we realised that we were suffering, dropped the story, accepted towards painful emotions, and provided ourselves with support – we lose our reactivity and benefit others. As the Buddha said, “I will take care of myself, I will take care of others.”
It’ll be outside
Our reactivity continued to run our attention in circles, as if we were dogs, as if we were certain that our tail was the enemy to be pursued. Now, your mind can stop running in circles and have a wider field of vision. For example, we can see that others suffer just as much and often more than us. And we have already caused empathy and compassion, so we meet their pain with equal compassion.
Having self-compassion frees us to be considerate of others.
We feel caring for others who are struggling – whether they are in war zones, retracting civil liberties, or scared about the future, it’s a good start, but ideally we set us up to take action to help where we can. The actions may include asking someone how they are doing and listening with an open mind as they say to us. We should be wary of jumping in to give advice, but at least we can let others know that they have been heard and understood.
Being compassion for others helps us as well as them. It helps us meet our deeper needs of connection with others. And it reminds us that we are not alone in suffering. Suffering is a universal feature of the human condition. As compassion helps both parties, the Buddha said, “I will take care of others, I will take care of myself.”
3. Keep watching upwards
Even when it is replaced by maliciousness and chaos, we need to remember what is good and what is normal. This is difficult as our expectations tend to slide. One of the tragic elements of the first Trump administration was the repeated enthusiasm of journalists declaring Trump as “president.” Because he was able to read the script from the teleprompter without being derailed by words and nuisance, without throwing childish provocations or unkind nicknames at him.
These journalists made the mistake of sliding the standard. Being a president no longer means having the personal qualities of politeness, leadership, wisdom and emotional maturity. Now it simply meant “you can read the prepared script.”
Remember “Normal”
In so many ways, we need to remind ourselves of what “normality” once was. That way you can return to normal if possible. Masha Gessen’s “surviving dictatorship” is “normal”, highly recommended to remind us of how we departed, and how the media normalized those departures. But Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” is a better guide to how governments can stay sane when they slip into dictatorship.
Keep hope alive
We need to live our hopes. As Howard Zinn said, “hoping in a bad time is not only stupidly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is not just cruelty, but a history of compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness.”
Hope helps us psychologically. As Thich Nhat Hanh said, “Because hope is important, and hope is important.
You can change things. Probably not that much. But we can change things a little. And one of the people who change things can inspire others, which leads to more meaningful changes.
There is strength in numbers
Don’t forget there are more decent people than cruel people. We are the majority.
And a democratic moment didn’t fail when 3.5% of the population protested over the duration of the democracy, according to a study by Erica Chenoweth at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and Maria Stephen at the American Institute of Peace.
It’s difficult to maintain hope. But for our own emotional well-being, it is essential for us to maintain others and for the world.
So these are some of the ways in which self-compassion becomes apparent as we keep our feet on the ground, live our open hearts, and keep hope alive.
