Contemplative prayer is not so much the absence of thoughts as detachment from them. It is the opening of mind, body and emotions – our whole being – to God, the Ultimate Mystery, beyond words, thoughts and emotions."
Thomas Keating, “Open Mind, Open Heart”
“We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.”
Buddha
“Be a kind voice in this broken-hearted world, give grace, and be ready to receive it. Listen so well that the person you’re with can rest in your attention for a moment. Be a light. Be a light. Be a light.”
Nanea Hoffman
Dear Friend,
Happy New Year!
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!
Last month, I talked about life being a mind game and that when we incorporate the discipline of managing our minds, we make it easier to navigate life with minimal or no suffering. It is, of course, easier to speak of mentally caring for ourselves than actually doing it.
It may help to know that self-compassion isn’t a feeling; it is a daily practice of noticing what thoughts disturb our inborn tranquility and then creating new thought patterns that build and sustain that joy, peace, and contentment (JPC) that you want to inhabit. If one is unaware of that internal equanimity, then begin with teaching your mind to pay attention to its thoughts; notice which thoughts bring you joy and which disrupt your mind. Then, as you become familiar with your mind’s current patterns, take agency and decide which patterns you want to reinforce and which you want to transform.
As you can see, this really is a mind game where you learn how to manage the thoughts that your experiences have taught you and create new thought patterns that build upon the JPC you want to fill your mind as you go through your days.
As you know, knowledge about changing is frequently useless without practices that implement the changes into your daily thought patterns, so this month’s newsletter will include a few activities to help you practice self-compassion. Fortunately, many of these suggestions can be built with minimal changes to things you enjoy.
Activities For Practicing Self-Compassion
Let's begin with a practice that may seem boring to the new practitioners: stillness. A daily period of stillness and silence is an excellent way to notice all the distractions your mind experiences. Distractions pull us away from being present even though the only time we are truly alive is in the present moment. Frequently, noise distracts us and pulls us into autopilot or habitual reactions. When we are purposely silent and still, we learn to recognize the distractions and then teach our brains how to handle them.
I will eventually dedicate a full newsletter to being present because it is paramount in our journey to being self-compassionate. Until that newsletter, please spend some or all of the suggestions below in silence.
Awareness is an excellent starting point for being self-compassionate. Awareness seems like a simple skill and feels like it …until one begins to look beyond the initial thoughts their brain brings up for their actions. Once we look into the more subtle motivations of our brain for some actions, we begin to realize there is a whole world of thoughts underneath the “obvious” reasons for doing something. For example, have you ever yelled at another driver? Think about the hidden layers in this action. It releases pressure, and that release feels positive. Yet, where is the pressure coming from? That pressure feels negative, and remember, negative feelings are suffering. Yet, does the pressure release authentically help? Probably minimally, as it also aims to put that pressure on another person, so we don’t have to take responsibility for our feelings. Finally, do you feel better after yelling, or did the pressure move into anger that simmers because it hasn’t been fully released? So, in the end, the pressure release didn’t truly help; it just seemed like it helped because of the initial release. In the bigger picture of your mind, you still have to release that simmering negative feeling emotional energy.
Might it be that a more self-compassionate act is to release the initial discomfort before it grows and morphs into additional layers of negative feelings? By paying attention to the subtle thoughts in your mind, you can learn to see those “hidden” agendas and deal with them sooner when they are easier to manage.
Do you have a hobby? Yep. Your hobby can increase your self-compassion. You already enjoy it, so now watch how your mind reacts to disruptions while doing your hobby, and then practice how you want your mind to react.
First, for 20 minutes, turn off the background noise, such as the music or TV, and watch your mind. How does it react to thought disruptions? When you feel negative, that is suffering, and once you recognize it, you can practice how you want to respond next time so you suffer less.
Additionally, silence can feel scary. If twenty minutes seems like too long to hobby in silence, start with less time of silence and gently build up to twenty minutes.
Exercise is a great way to practice self-compassion. Whatever your exercise is, practice being present while you’re doing it. Being present may be difficult at first because you have thousands of hours of memories to draw from, so it is easy to do the exercise from muscle memory. A big part of self-compassion is being present to your mind and life; your exercise is an excellent place to practice being present. Being present means you are consciously doing the activity, not just your body doing it from muscle memory and autopilot.
Finally, the best exercise we can do to practice self-compassion is meditation. I can imagine your eyes just rolled up into your head. Yet, if you understand how your brain behaves during meditation, you realize that meditation is the best way to teach your brain to be more self-compassionate. As you meditate, you learn the three skills I discussed in last October, November, and December newsletters: awareness, acceptance, and letting go. Meditation is the ultimate brain workout for being self-compassionate because it repeats these three skills, making them easier to do in daily life. Meditation can be similar to silence and stillness, so I will also cover it in some future newsletters.
Here’s a warning for all these suggestions. Generally, there are no quick ways to learn self-compassion because our brain uses automatic habits for treating ourselves; self-compassion is teaching your brain new methods and habits, and that usually takes time. Rarely are there quick ways to learn to be self-compassionate. The consistency of daily disciplines—like those mentioned above—is the best teacher.
Familiarize and Cultivate
Please notice that in all the suggestions above, I recommend spending part or all of the activities in silence. Noise distracts us from ourselves and our habitual methods of treating ourselves well or poorly. Thus, one of the first skills most of us have to do is recognize our default programming.
We usually treat ourselves the way the “responsible” adults in our childhood treated us; that is our default programming. Being self-compassionate first asks us to familiarize ourselves with how we treat ourselves and then create and cultivate better ways to treat ourselves. Any exercises I list above can effectively help you recognize old programs and develop new methods that treat you better.
Please try to be patient. Generally, it’s a slow process of revealing our authentic selves.
Next Month
I mentioned being present as a primary skill. So, in the Marches newsletter, I’ll discuss being present, what it means, and how to practice it.
On a Personal Note and Shameless Commerce
I am beginning my next Creating Self-Compassion class on Monday. February 10th from 2:00 to 3 PM MST. If this newsletter is the first you’ve heard of this, I am sorry for not notifying you sooner; I hope you will still join me. Creating Self-Compassion is a six-week class where I teach the participants a model to understand how their brain processes data, and then I offer several tools one can use to create and cultivate self-compassion. You can read more about the class HYPERLINK "https://self-compassionateliving.com/creating-self-compassion.html"here.
In Conclusion
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. Above are some exercises to help you practice self-compassion. Please try them or others that you discover and learn about your mind so you can create the life that you want to live.
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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