In meditation, you have no agenda besides being in the fluidity, no agenda to transform your wounded heart... be aware and try not to alter and judge.
Tsoknyi Rinpoche III
The pain one brings upon oneself by living outside of evident reality is a greater and longer-lasting pain than the brief pain of facing it head-on.
Richard Rohr
Go within every day and find the inner strength so that the world will not blow your candle out.
Katherine Dunham
Dear Friend,
Thank you for subscribing to the Self-Compassionate Living Newsletter! You want to grow your self-compassion by learning, practicing, and having a community to aid you. You signed up to receive this monthly newsletter as part of that effort. I will endeavor to inform and inspire you, and together, we will explore ways to treat ourselves better. Thank you for inviting me to join you on your journey!
In the inaugural October newsletter, I mentioned three skills or tools to help you be more self-compassionate; I also briefly wrote about the first skill: Awareness. If you’d like to read that letter, you can read it here. I discussed Acceptance in the November newsletter; you can read that letter here. In this last newsletter of 2024, I’ll talk about a third helpful skill: Letting Go. May you find some valuable knowledge in it.
Leaves and Letting Go
I looked like I was going into a dystopian war. I was wearing multiple layers of work clothing, eye protection, a breathing mask, and jet airplane ear protection. My wife said I looked like some character from the movie Mad Max. I also had a substantial empty trash bin on the front drive.
I was ready.
I plugged in the leaf vacuum and prepared to battle the hordes.
Five hours later, and one full of ground-up leaves trash bin later, I unplugged the screeching banshee leaf vacuum. I was covered with dust, had muscles shrieking as loudly as the banshee, and felt totally exhausted. I also felt satisfied with a job well done as I gazed serenely around our one-evergreen treed yard.
Yep, we don’t have any leafy trees on our property. That 50+ pounds (23+ kg for my readers outside the US) of ground-up leaves were all from neighbor's trees.
The reactive parts of my brain thought about yelling, hollering, and screaming at the unfairness of cleaning up “other people’s” leaves! My self-compassionate part thought about treating myself well and letting go.
Letting Go of the Pressures from Thoughts We Can’t Immediately Control
Earlier that day, when I looked at the leaves in the yard, my brain’s immediate reaction was negative thoughts and feelings. Thoughts like “These are my neighbor’s leaves! They should come over here and clean them up!” raced through my brain. I was rested and mentally grounded, though, so I noticed them and watched them fly through my mind. I acknowledged that my mind was experiencing those thoughts. I also felt considerable pressure to express or act out those thoughts. You’ve experienced these feelings, too. This situation is where letting go is self-compassionate. If I let the pressures control my mind and body, I’d only be adding to the mental and physical discomfort my body was already feeling. Why make a bad situation worse? Alternatively, if I release the pressures to react, I ease the discomfort my brain and body are experiencing; I treat my brain and body the way I want to treat myself.
Letting go isn’t usually a simple task to incorporate; however, it is critical to living self-compassionately.
Unfortunately, many of the things you experience in life are beyond your control (actually, most things in life are beyond our control; that’s a newsletter for another month, though); thus, when situations—and more importantly, your brain’s automatic thought reactions about those situations—are uncontrollable, the best way to be self-compassionate and ease your suffering is to release the desire to control the uncontrollable. The reality is that the desire or pressure to change the unchangeable is causing your suffering!
Control or a Sense of Control?
On February 12th, 2017, at 11:07 PM, my wife and I were 11 miles outside of Taos, New Mexico, and we were enjoying a wonderful conversation about our plans for the Valentine’s weekend. All of a sudden, I saw two giant elk standing in the middle of our highway lane; I swerved and fortunately missed them. Unfortunately, the tires on the passenger’s side of the car dropped off the pavement. Automatically, I turned the wheels to get back on the pavement and, of course, overcorrected. The vehicle went into a tailspin. We spun 360 degrees while careening across the opposite lane, slid into the opposite side ditch, flipped upside down, flew through the air for ten feet (three meters), landed, and watched weeds and dirt race up the windshield while the car slid to a rest with my wife and I hanging upside down in the seatbelts (no physical damage to either of us besides very sore the next day).
This whole episode took maybe five seconds to unfold. When I examined the truth of the situation, I realized I never had real control of the car prior to the elk; at most, I felt like I had control because nothing was going wrong; I had a sense of control.
For much of our lives, at best, we have a sense of control over people and situations. We unwisely choose not to accept reality as it is because it feels uncomfortable to be powerless; instead, automatically, we cause ourselves tremendous suffering, trying to keep or augment our sense of control while never acknowledging the lack of real control.
Treating ourselves self-compassionately asks us to release the desires that are the problem, the desire for a sense of control. Yes, people or situations seem to make you angry in much of life. Yet, if you look closely at your mind, you will discover that your thoughts about the people or situations are the actual disruption in your mind. The people or situations are only triggers that start your brain thinking in the way it is. Thus, releasing the pressures to react will minimize the power the reactive thoughts have over you, and consequently, you will be able to get back to your baseline emotional state more quickly.
How Do I Practice Letting Go?
In these last three months of 2024, I’ve asked you to practice three skills: awareness, acceptance, and letting go. In October, I recommend you start with small, logically unimportant experiences, like the feelings of irritation you experience when the TV station shows a commercial in the middle of an engaging scene. Using that example, try to notice the layers of thoughts and emotions your brain is thinking and your body is feeling; that is awareness in action. In November, I asked you to watch the thoughts/feelings that float around your brain/body (awareness) and recognize the pressure they exert on you to take action, like scowling or throwing the couch at the TV; then, gently ask your mind to sit back and accept the mental activity that is happening, exactly like you acknowledge the wind blowing leaves on a breezy day; this is acceptance.
This month, I’m asking you to go one step further. Once you notice and accept the thoughts/feelings you’re experiencing, try to let the pressure they are exerting go. Letting them go means releasing the pressure you feel to act out the thoughts/feelings. This is usually easier said than done, and that’s the reason I recommend you begin with some logically unimportant trigger, like commercials during a fantastic TV show. As you learn and practice letting go of logically unimportant thoughts/feelings, it’ll be easier to release more powerful and seemingly important thoughts/feelings in daily life. You practice it in your mind so you can do it in daily life.
Releasing the pressure to react gives your brain time to see beyond the instant answers that arise. Then, in that added time, you can take in more information and give yourself more possibilities for navigating through the experience with the least amount of suffering for you and, hopefully, for all the others involved. Letting go of the pressures gives you time to be self-compassionate.
Therefore, practice letting go of things that don’t matter so you can release the pressures generated by things that seem to matter; then, you can live more self-compassionately.
Our Brains are Like a Muscle
What we practice, we improve. One goes to the gym to exercise and improve their physical well-being. Our brains handle our mental being; self-compassion is exercising and improving your mental well-being. That is the reason I ask you to learn and practice these skills mentally; by learning and practicing awareness, acceptance, and letting go, you are exercising and improving your mental well-being; you are being self-compassionate.
Self-compassion is a discipline of mind management, a daily practice of training your mind to create your life to be filled with more joy, peace, and contentment. In the first Self-Compassionate Living newsletter of 2025, I’ll write about managing your mind, which seems very important for starting a new year self-compassionately.
On a Personal Note
Last month, I announced that www.Self-CompassionateLiving.com is live. I have been slowly adding to and improving it; the previous newsletters and this newsletter will all be there. Thank you for your suggestions for the website; please keep them coming.
Next month, I will begin teaching my six-week Creating Self-Compassion class starting on Jan 23rd from 10:30 AM to noon MST; this class will be called Creating Self-Compassion Through Centering Prayer (Contemplative Outreach of Colorado, which is focused on Centering Prayer, hosts this class). The class is centered on Centering Prayer as a tool to create self-compassion; please visit HYPERLINK "https://www.centeringprayer.net/CreatingSelfCompassion"CenteringPrayer.net to register. I’m also trying to put together a second Creating Self-Compassion class that will begin on January 20th at 2:30. If I get everything put together, I will send out an email specifically for it, so please watch for that email.
In Conclusion
In the October newsletter, you read about awareness: paying attention to the thoughts and emotions floating through your brain/body. Notice the thoughts affecting how you feel and what triggers those thoughts. In the November newsletter, you read about accepting those thoughts and your brain/body’s reactions to them as simple actions or data in your brain. This December newsletter has been about letting go of the pressures those thoughts generate to react because when you release the pressure, you open your mind to create new possibilities for treating yourself well.
By this point, you’ve probably realized that self-compassionate living is about building a new relationship with your brain. Self-compassion starts with mind management so you can live with more Joy, Peace, & Contentment (JPC) and experience fewer negative feelings. We’ll keep exploring this discipline together.
See you next month, and may the rest of this month be peaceful.
Thank you for inviting me to walk with you.
I believe in you!
Blair
Blair@Self-CompassionateLiving.com
Self-CompassionateLiving.com
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