“Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: the flag is moving. The other said: the wind is moving. The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by. He told them not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.”
Zen Flesh Zen Bones compiled by Paul Rep
He glanced at Elisabeth’s habitually sour expression and thought that bitterness only perpetuated misery. She tried to spread it around, but her bad attitude blighted her own life more than anyone else’s. Negativity was instant karma.
Jourdan, Carolyn; Bracht, Ludger Dominic.
Breakdown on Blowhard Mountain: A Travel Mystery: A Comical Chase Through the Western National Parks
(p. 267). Athenaeus Media. Kindle Edition.
“Leaves are busy, the roots are still.”
Rumi
“When we are in touch with our blessedness, we can then bless other people.”
Henri Nouwen
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 we will explore ways to treat ourselves better together. Thank you for inviting me to join you on your journey!
Last month, in the inaugural newsletter, I mentioned three skills or tools that help us 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. In this second newsletter, I’ll talk about Acceptance.
Acceptance: The Second Skill
Yesterday, I woke up feeling disjointed, almost separate from myself, and consequently, a little lost and mentally disorganized. I planned on spending the day with my Dad, and as I was driving and caught up in my thoughts, I noticed I wasn’t present. I noticed that instead of being present, I was personalizing my thoughts and feelings; in other words, I had allowed my thoughts and feelings to define who I was. At that moment, I realized I had a choice; I could consciously personalize those feelings and allow them to define and control my life: “I’m feeling lost. Therefore, I am lost, and my life is directionless,” or I could accept the reality of how I was feeling as it is at that moment, “This disjointed feeling is just the interpretation my brain is putting on feelings and thoughts I’m experiencing in my body. I’m Blair. What simple-to-enact thought can I focus on to realign my brain patterns and direct myself while feeling directionless?”
Part of self-compassion is learning to accept that we’re going to have different feelings all the time, and it’s okay, even if it feels uncomfortable. In the journey to being self-compassionate, one of our skills is learning to accept how we’re feeling as it is. Acceptance can also mean simply acknowledging that we are feeling something, positive or negative, like it or dislike it; we are feeling something. Acceptance is allowing ourselves to feel whatever we feel and just recognizing it as a feeling we’re experiencing in our bodies; it doesn’t mean the meanings our brain puts on the feelings are true or false; it means we are simply feeling something.
Accepting feelings as simple body sensations gives us freedom from personalizing every positive and negative emotion that happens to our bodies. Self-compassionately and logically, we stay free even though our bodies may feel wrapped in a sensation that feels good or bad. The feeling is simply a feeling; it’s not you; you are watching your body suit and experiencing a feeling. This skill can be challenging to absorb and learn, and you can learn it!
Feelings Are Not Real Outside Your Body
Huh?! They certainly seem real. Yet, if you ask the person next to you what they feel, they’ll probably answer something different from your experience. While driving to see my Dad, it seemed like traffic was behaving weirdly. However, unless every driver was sharing an experience, like a storm, traffic is just traffic; I’m the one who feels weird. On a psychological level, my brain is blaming traffic for being weird, so it doesn’t have to admit experiencing a negative feeling it dislikes.
Accepting that I am feeling weird is remarkably self-compassionate because once I do it, I give myself possibilities; my mind has choices about handling the feelings. I can punish myself by yelling and feeling irritated at others. I could punish myself by bemoaning how weird I feel today. Or I can accept that I feel weird and allow myself to watch my brain/body feeling weird, knowing the feeling will pass eventually. Notice that two choices punish me, and one allows me to experience the sensations as non-interferingly as possible. Yes, I still experience the discomfort of feeling weird; I also stop adding to that discomfort by fighting the biomechanical feelings. One choice adds to the negative feelings with more negative feelings, and the other acknowledges some negative feelings without increasing them; that’s being self-compassionate!
“Yeah, but negative feelings are unpleasant! How do I get rid of them?”
Immediately, you probably don’t, and most people tend to dislike this answer. Yet, you are also not powerless against the negative feelings. Instead, Self-Compassionate Living asks you to change your relationship with the negative feelings by letting go of the pressures they exert. Next month, I’ll explore this next skill: letting go or releasing the pressures to react instinctively.
How Do I Practice Acceptance?
We frequently want to practice these tools, yet we don’t know how. This is where the discipline of self-compassion becomes invaluable.
Three skills are frequently involved in your journey of teaching yourself to be self-compassionate: awareness, acceptance, and letting go. This month, we will use the first two.
Last month’s newsletter introduced the idea of awareness, and specifically, seeing your mind processing data or thinking. To practice acceptance, one first must recognize areas of mental activation and use the question, “What am I thinking?” as a starting point. If you can’t recognize any thoughts, look at how you’re feeling and then internally look at the thoughts driving those feelings. Notice any emotions you are experiencing; positive or negative isn’t essential right now, noticing you’re feeling emotions is. Once you’ve discovered thoughts or emotions you’re experiencing, you’re ready for acceptance.
First, try to allow the thoughts and feelings to exist in your body. Acceptance asks us to recognize that there are parts of our mind that want to resist or hold on to the activation. Try to consciously experience the thoughts and feelings passively. If the feeling is negative, it may feel uncomfortable, and if the feeling is positive, it may seem wrong not to feed the feeling with more thought. Thus, I recommend you start with some small, logically unimportant experiences, like the feelings of irritation you experience when the network shows a commercial in the middle of an engaging scene.
Using that example, notice the layers of thoughts and emotions you’re feeling. Watch them float around your brain/body; see them pressure you to take some type of action like a scowl or throwing the couch at the TV. Then, gently ask your mind to sit back and watch as if you were watching the wind blow the leaves on a breezy day.
This exercise of passively watching your mind wrestle with its myriad thoughts and feelings may seem challenging. If it is, gently calm its activities and try to simply accept that your mind is thinking.
Using minor, unimportant things, compassionately train your mind to watch and acknowledge without personalizing the emotional activations it’ll experience; this is awareness and acceptance in action! With practice, you’ll improve this skill so that, eventually, even the most sensational situations elicit only a minimum of emotion in your mind. At that point, most of the thoughts and emotions your brain/body experiences will be under your control.
You can learn this skill! I believe in you.
On a Personal Note
www.Self-CompassionateLiving.com is live! Albeit in a pretty limited form. I'll expand it in the next few weeks and months and add pages for upcoming classes, discussion groups, and community interaction. Please visit it and suggest anything you’d like to see added by replying to this email.
Several of you have told me the holidays are challenging. I am holding a self-compassion series called Creating Self-Compassion During the Holiday Season to offer you some community. We’re meeting six times biweekly from November 4th until January 13, 2025. The series is priced at $10 per session, and you can join anytime. Please click here to join us: Creating Self-Compassion During the Holiday Season.
Additionally, I found out today (Saturday) that I had made an error in setting up the Self-Compassionate Living newsletter sign-up confirmation letter. I think some of you received a Follow-up letter for a Cultivating Self-Compassion group and may have felt confused. If you did, I am sorry for that. I have fixed the mistake (I think), so if you do not want to subscribe to this newsletter, please simply unsubscribe. I don’t want to add to the SPAM in your inbox. Thank you!
I look forward to sharing more time with you next month.
In Conclusion
In last month’s 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. This month, you’ve read about accepting those thoughts and your brain/body’s reactions to them as simple actions in your brain. Next month, you’ll read about letting go of the pressures to react immediately in your usual ways so you can form new, non-suffering-inducing paths through the mental storm.
By this point, you’ve probably realized that self-compassionate living is about building a new relationship with your brain. It’s mind management so you can live with more Joy, Peace, & Contentment and experience fewer negative feelings. We’ll keep exploring this practice 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
Self-CompassionateLiving.com
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