“True wisdom begins with recognizing one’s own ignorance.”
Socrates
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
Rumi
"Uncle David's hypnotic eyes hold mine: “Every morning, we are born again; what we do today is what matters most."(Gautam Buddha). “It's a Buddhist quote, and I use it to help me forgive my mistakes and move on from them. Maybe it will help you as well."
Suzanne Redfern "Call of the Camino" a novel.
Dear Friend,
Thank you for subscribing to the Self-Compassionate Living Newsletter! You can create and cultivate self-compassion by learning and practicing it. Engaging with a supportive community usually makes it easier. You signed up to receive this monthly newsletter as part of that effort. I will endeavor to inform and inspire you based on what I’ve learned from my personal experience. Please take the parts that aid your journey so that, hopefully, we can live happier, easier lives and explore together ways to treat ourselves better. Thank you for inviting me to join you on your journey! *
I have a glossary of many of the words and concepts related to self-compassion that I discuss in this newsletter, in my classes, and in my one-to-one coaching. You can find that glossary here: https://blairashby.com/glossary.html
Last month, I wrote, “The topic of awareness has numerous threads that weave together into a tapestry called self-compassion.” In every newsletter, I’ll keep trying to cultivate more insight about each thread for both of us to learn from. In the Rumi quote above, he mentions wisdom and changing oneself. I have discovered (and you may have as well) that this “wise” act of changing oneself can be extremely challenging. In my own life, the challenge arises in direct correlation to knowing myself. The better I can see the distortions my brain’s programming introduces, the more I can work to see beyond them so I can be the human I want to be, not just the human my upbringing and experiences trained me to be.
In an effort to overcome survival programming, all the mystics and philosophers that I’ve worked with, studied with, or read recommend paying attention (awareness). They suggest working on becoming more aware each day.
More aware of what, though? What does this “awareness” mean?
I’ll try to address that question based on what I’ve learned and observed. After I discuss that, I’ll also offer some insights into a few ways to practice awareness. (I said some, not all, because as I mentioned earlier, there are many, many threads in the tapestry of awareness.)
First: What Is Awareness?
Awareness is the conscious recognition of the thoughts, feelings, and actions you experience daily, as well as the additional layers of thoughts and feelings that you experience about your initial recognition. Conscious recognition implies being aware of all the thoughts floating around in our heads (these are the many threads). However, all is impossible and would destroy us, as our brains are not made to process that much data at once. Thus, maybe a good guide is becoming aware of your brain’s processing habits and patterns and using that knowledge to learn to discern which thoughts influence your present moment (this concept opens up whole new threads to explore in future newsletters).
Defining awareness is difficult because the definition depends on who defines it. Therefore, I’ll focus on the areas I’ve found to have the greatest effect on self-compassion: feelings and the thoughts that generate them, especially the virtually unnoticed ones (the subtle little buggers). These subtle little buggers are shrewd drivers who use feelings to compel us to act so effortlessly that we often don’t realize we’ve acted until after the actions are complete and we're dealing with the consequences.
Please note in the definition above that Awareness always returns to our thoughts. Remember this formula from last month:
My thoughts genery feelings.
My feelings compel my actions.
My actions create my life.
Almost everything starts with a thought. I say "almost" because most genuine physical threats, such as bears, cobras, crocodiles, or rabid hippopotamuses, rarely happen in our neighborhoods. Nowadays, physical threats usually stem from human craziness, like automobiles careening towards us, and fortunately, even those don’t happen very often. Still, when a genuine physical threat presents itself, our brain receives sensory data, assesses the threat, and quickly triggers fight, flight, or freeze reactions, even before our frontal cortex processes the information. Survival reactions are hardwired into us and cannot be changed (although practiced meditators can learn to detach from them).
Instead, the reactions we normally deal with in our daily lives and neighborhoods are thought-generated threats to our sense of survival, such as feeling powerless, unsure, or disliked (by others or, more importantly, by ourselves). I’ll talk about a sense of self-approval in a future newsletter.
In daily life, most negative feelings we experience are thought-driven and usually autopilot, automatic, or habitual thought-reactions we learned. (Once again, unless they're chronic or brought on by absorbed or ingested chemicals)
Thus, effortless action is a subtle cue to look for, and it’s an excellent starting point for introducing autopilot.
Autopilot: Moving Through Life with Your Memories in the Captain's Chair
Autopilot is an idiom for the automatic thoughts, emotions, and actions (our learned default behaviors) that occur in reaction to sensory or cognitive triggers we routinely encounter in our daily lives. We see something, and instantly thoughts about what we saw arise; the same goes for all our sensory organs, our ears, nose, tongue, and skin. In daily life, our sensory organs are stimulated, and the data they generate goes to our brain, where it’s interpreted based on what we’ve learned. Then (here’s the critical part) we react to the interpretation; our brain deduces reality from the data; we do not react to actual reality itself. In other words, everything (let me repeat that), Everything (one more time), EVERYTHING (except chemically induced feelings), starts with a thought. That is why awareness of our thoughts is so critical to having more control over how we show up in the world.
Remember the last line of the formula above: My actions create my life. Our actions define who we are to everyone we meet and to the myriad we don’t, who are influenced, directly or indirectly, by the decisions we make. (Every action has dozens or more unseen ripple effects on everything the action is even remotely connected to; no human is an island; we are extremely interdependent, even when we feel like we are alone in the world. Ironically, therein lies a key reason for awareness; when we live authentically, we grant the world the results of the gifts that God or the universe implanted in us.)
Thus, seeing our thoughts is essential for awareness. However, we often don’t even realize we are reacting until we wake up to the consequences of our autopilot actions (usually when they become too uncomfortable to ignore). Consciously responding, rather than unconsciously reacting, is a prime reason for being aware!
Sucked Into the Stream of Our Thoughts
Have you ever been caught up in the stream of your thoughts? A good example is driving across town and not remembering the drive. You get to your destination, and you wonder how you did it. Your autopilot was driving! Autopilot is a great tool for saving calories and is based entirely on memories, habits, and routine. In other words, you didn’t drive the vehicle; your memories and driving habits did.
Now, autopilot isn’t bad; it’s great for saving calories because your brain turns off logical and rational thinking and just repeats movements it has done hundreds of times. No active thinking is necessary; the only skill required is memory retrieval, which takes far less energy than consciously navigating the road or the situation.
Unfortunately, autopilot works great… until it doesn’t. Google reports that “cognitive inattention in the 3 seconds before an accident plays a role in 80% of crashes”. Autopilot works great as long as usual patterns are followed. As soon as anything non-normal or out of pattern happens, the brain immediately tries to bring the conscious mind online. However, it usually takes too long to process all the short-term memory data, and during that time, accidents or unintended events can occur.
Additionally, autopilot takes over when the conscious brain gets bored with repetition. To escape the boredom, it gets sucked into thinking about more exciting things, like what you’re going to do when you arrive, what you did last night, what so-and-so will act like, etc. Our conscious awareness gets sucked into the stream of our thoughts, and we consciously go to sleep while the autopilot in our survival mind takes control of our body and behaviors.
A quick break from writing…
An hour ago, I typed the sentence above and then went for my afternoon walk. I have a regular path I take that goes around three ponds and is about 2.5 miles (6 km) long. As I was entering the main path from my neighborhood, I consciously disappeared. My body was there, and walking. Conscious Blair was caught up thinking about the small town my wife and I visited over the previous weekend. Blair’s brain and body were on autopilot; I was walking by habit; Blair was back in Salida, CO. About a minute after walking onto the main path, a “Hello” came from behind me. That “Hello” was outside the “normal” walking pattern, so autopilot woke Blair up, or I came back online. My neighborhood friend Mark was 30 feet (9 meters) behind me, and I didn’t see him when I walked onto the path. Mark said he saw me and recognized “no one was home”. I was on autopilot! I felt embarrassed because I’d just written a thousand words about being aware and autopilot, and then I did exactly what I warned you about here in the newsletter.
It is so easy to get caught up in our thoughts and turn the world off. After this experience, I was reminded that I’ll continue to work on staying more aware.
Feeding the Emotional Monster
After my experience above, I could have easily continued being on a form of autopilot by going on and on about how “stupid” I’d been for not looking or how “embarrassed” I felt walking right in front of Mark. I could have punished myself by continuously talking about my “mistake” in a distorted way. I call this phenomenon Feeding the Emotional Monster.
Feeding the Emotional Monster is expressing an experience and inadvertently (or intentionally) re-triggering the situational emotions, as if the thoughts/experience are happening to you again; it’s personalizing an emotional experience so that mentally/emotionally parts of your brain live it again. It seems so natural to repeatedly talk about a trauma in an effort to burn off the emotional energy. However, it isn’t self-compassionate to remove the negative thoughts and feelings.
To minimize Feeding the Emotional Monster while still talking about and processing an experience, one benefits from discussing reality as it is. During a conversation in June of 2009, my main mentor, Fr. Tony D’Souza, told me to start talking about reality accurately. He was instructing me to intentionally avoid creating an emotionally charged story from a mundane fact of life. (One time, my mom called this idea turning a molehill into a mountain.) Tony said, “You are not the emotion, Blair. You are not angry. You are feeling anger. Anger is happening in your body. Change your language so that you speak accurately and detach from the anger as you personally. Instead, recognize the anger as something you are experiencing. Say, ‘I feel angry.’”
Wow! That simple instruction changed everything for me!
In my daily life, this exercise worked remarkably well. After incorporating it, I was no longer angry or depressed. Instead, I was feeling anger and depression. As soon as I started speaking this way, I soon recognized that this simple word change was a superpower!
If I am experiencing emotions, especially negative ones, I can change what is causing me emotional harm by reframing the statement “I am…” into a manageable experience: “I feel…”.
Additionally, after watching my brain and the way it was processing data, I learned that personalizing and overidentifying with the anger and depression was unintentionally causing me more anger and depression. I was ‘Feeding the Emotional Monster’, and it was growing! Once I started to detach from the anger and depression I was experiencing by saying “I feel…: instead of “I am…”, it became easier to shift my focus onto that which fed my true self, my authenticity.
Instead of feeding the emotional monster more emotion through the words you use, begin feeding your true self by speaking about reality as it is, accurately.
The last point of awareness I’ll discuss this month is paying attention to your survival brain’s subtle agendas or motivations when speaking.
Using Survival Modes as a Resistance to Reality.
I’ve noticed in many of my coaching clients a drive to feed an emotional monster. However, their survival brain frequently obscures the feeding activity because it causes additional discomfort in their lives. In the beginning, I suspect the resistance feels powerful and seems positive. Yet that pleasant feeling of “power” or “good” their brains are grasping at is often an emotional monster in disguise, sucking the life out of them by hiding the true cost of denying reality.
The reality is that very few of us like feeling powerless, so our brains expend vast amounts of energy to resist the feeling. Realistically, though, we humans are usually powerless. So, ironically, the sooner we acknowledge the powerlessness and feelings around it, the sooner we become grounded in truth, and truth sets us free. We liberate ourselves from expending energy fighting to hold something we never had to begin with, real power.
Here is an example. My dad had a debilitating stroke in April 2014. Until six months ago, he fought like a madman to retain a feeling of power over his mind and body. Unfortunately, the reality is that the stroke stole almost most of those features away. About six months ago, after over a decade of fighting reality, my dad stopped fighting the acknowledgment of it. Dad annoyed his brain and body were broken. It appears he decided to live in the present moment and enjoy his life as best he could. Within days, he began to feel a sense of pleasantness toward daily life. His life became easier emotionally. His body didn’t regain the skills he’d lost, nor did his brain recover its lost logic and capabilities. However, he began to feel happier and more at ease with reality as it is. He stopped complaining that he was trapped in the skilled nursing home and accepted that he was probably going to end his days there. My mom said it seemed like he had stopped fighting reality. Ironically, once he did, it appears he started living again.
That is an indirect positive result of being self-compassionate. Life becomes easier, especially mentally and emotionally.
A final inspiration… I hope.
As you go through your days, relentlessly ask yourself, ‘Where is this present-moment behavior coming from?’ By present-moment behavior, I mean your thoughts, feelings, and actions in the present moment or as you are doing them. By asking yourself this question for everything you do, you will nurture your self-awareness, and I suspect, begin to notice behaviors you want to alter. You’ll foster growing into the person you really, Really, REALLY want to be. You’ll become more authentic.
Next Month
In next month’s newsletter, I’ll continue to discuss awareness and its sub-threads. Here is a list of threads I’ve noted for this topic; please feel free to write me with more:
-Opposition or opportunity
-Unconditional acceptance of oneself
-Honesty with oneself, especially with the negative stuff
-Seems Like, Feels like, Is
-Recognize when tiredness is the root of your thinking
-Mind takes a few minutes to settle down
-Wisdom notices problems before discomfort makes them obvious.
If you have a particular topic you’d like to see discussed, please reply and suggest it to me.
On a Personal Note:
2026 has been a year of tremendous growth and insight for me. Mentally, I am still exploring self-compassion and energy expenditure, as well as the fact that some suffering is inherent in the human condition. I’ve also been thinking about the video series that I promised you 21 months ago. I have the month of June off from the trade school where I teach, so I am going to work on all eight episodes, building on the foundation of what I’ve learned this past year.
A feeling of discomfort has arisen in me over the original title I proposed for the series: An Introduction to Practice Self-Compassion. I am beginning to feel I need to correlate self-compassion with suffering more directly. This discomfort has left my brain in a fog, and I’m waiting for it to clear. My current brain state reminds me of the end of chapter 15 in the Tao: “Can I wait long enough for the muddy water to settle and the right action to make itself known?” or Psalm 27:13-14: “I believe I will see the bounty of the Lord in my life. Wait on the Lord with courage. Be strong and wait.” Thank you for patiently waiting with me. Eventually, my brain will discover its path, and I’ll progress more quickly toward completion of the series.
Your replies of encouragement, support, and love mean a tremendous amount to me; thank you! I thank God for this community. Each of you has been an inspiration to me. Thank you! As Ram Dass said, "We are all just walking each other home.” We are stronger when we help each other. Thank you for being so helpful!
Self-Compassion Discussion & Inspiration Group
2 or 3 days before each discussion group, I send a notification for the upcoming meeting. I want to respect your privacy, so I will not send you notifications about upcoming discussion group meetings unless you ask to be notified. If you would like to be reminded about the biweekly Self-Compassion Discussion & Inspiration Group meetings, please write to me here and ask me to add your name to the notification list. This reminder notification list does not sign you up to attend; it only notifies you of the next biweekly meeting.
The Self-Compassion Discussion & Inspiration Group has been deeply impactful for so many. Please join us for the next one on Saturday, June 13th,, from 10 to 11:30 AM MST.
The next two Self-Compassion Discussion & Inspiration Group meetings are scheduled for Saturday, June 13th, from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM MST, and Saturday, June 27th, from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM MDT. Please join us.
Click this HYPERLINK "https://donate.stripe.com/8x2cMU60meyX4MYdUW3Nm06"link to visit the Self-CompassionateLiving.com webpage to learn more and to register.
In each meeting, after a brief introduction, we observe 10 minutes of silent stillness, followed by a discussion of any self-compassion-related topics raised by participants. I may also spend about 10-15 minutes unpacking the themes that emerge in the discussion.
I humbly ask for a $10- $15 donation per session; however, all are welcome. No one will be turned away for financial reasons.
In Conclusion
By this point, you've probably realized that self-compassionate living is about building a new relationship with your brain, specifically by managing your mind to create your life rather than just reacting to it. Self-compassion begins with mind management, allowing you to live with greater joy, peace, and contentment (JPC) and experience fewer negative emotions. I have learned the information I share in these newsletters from spiritual teachers, philosophers, and psychologists during the last thirty-four years. I'm sharing it with you in the hope it helps you practice self-compassion. Please utilize the material that resonates with you and explore and learn about your mind. 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!
Happy Holidays!
Blair
Blair@Self-CompassionateLiving.com
Self-CompassionateLiving.com
*I have made a glossary for many of the words I use in these newsletters, my classes, and coaching. You can find the glossary here: https://blairashby.com/glossary.html
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