“This is the paradox of modern life: Though the world around us is vivid and immediate, we inhabit a second, invisible world—one made entirely of thoughts. The first world is made up of what is, while the other is what we think about it. The first is reality—the sound of rain, the taste of an orange, the weight of a hand in yours. The second is a mental construct—a labyrinth of beliefs, labels, and stories we mistake for truth.”
Chris Niebauer PhD – The Abstract Mind, How Thinking Became the Source of Suffering—And How to Break Free
“Don’t spend too much time on the bad times. Their staggering number will be heavy as lead on your mind.”
Willy Nelson from “These Are Difficult Times”
“When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Dear Friend,
Thank you for subscribing to the Self-Compassionate Living Newsletter! You can create and cultivate self-compassion by learning and practicing it. A supportive community usually makes it easier. You signed up to receive this monthly newsletter as part of that effort. I will do my best 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 these newsletters, I will share some of the knowledge I’ve learned from the 50+ spiritual teachers, philosophers, and psychologists I’ve been lucky enough to work for, study with, and read. Additionally, the best teachers teach us to look at our own minds in our personal journeys, “for that is the greatest of teachers”; thus, these newsletters include a lot of my mental/spiritual self-examination. By writing it out, I learn by looking more deeply at my experiences and, hopefully, share a few pieces of knowledge you find useful in 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 said that I’d probably write about attachments and expectations this month, and I will! I have discovered some new insights on this topic, and though I’ve covered attachments before, I grew enough from these realizations that I wanted to share them to hopefully help others. That’s why I delayed this topic when I first mentioned it a month or two ago. With or without this information, I hope you learn new ways to look at your experiences and reduce unnecessary suffering in your life.
First: What is an attachment?
An attachment is anything that controls, or we allow to control, our emotional well-being. We can recognize attachments by how we feel. When we experience emotional reactions, they signal that some part of our brain is attached to a thought triggered by a sensory input or a previous thought. Understanding attachments is that simple, and that difficult. Part of the difficulty is being honest with ourselves about what we’re experiencing.
If we want to be self-compassionate, being honest with ourselves is a fantastic place to start (more on self-honesty later in the newsletter). We begin by paying attention to our mental, emotional, and physical experiences; that self-awareness gently reveals the subtle thoughts (and eventually the triggers that started them) driving our reactions. Once we recognize the thoughts generating the feelings we’re experiencing, we can use our rational mind to find a path through those thoughts (and the triggers that started them) and minimize or even eliminate much of the suffering we experience.
So, now that we have an idea about what an attachment is, where do attachments come from?
The Library of Our Life
The day we were born, we had few memories. In many ways, our early brain is like a giant room with hundreds of shelves, 99.9% empty. When we popped into the world, overwhelming sensations immediately flooded our sensory organs. Our brains went into hyperdrive and began recording the sensory data they collected, along with our reactions to that data. As soon as an experience ended, our brain indexed it, along with the survival judgments and reactions we experienced, and bound those memories and reactions into books and shelved them. Those books are our memories.
As we grew, whenever similar sensory data entered our brain, it looked to those books first. Those memories and reactions that kept us physically alive last time are the first place our brain looks to understand and handle new, similar experiences. Thus, we practice self-compassion by understanding that our brain is built to reference its memories first, rather than to study and logically process new data arriving from our sensory organs. Reality, in other words, is biologically downgraded by survival to secondary importance in our brain.
Ironically, this memory-based brain system is fantastic for species survival; unfortunately, it’s also lousy for an individual feeling meaningful or satisfied. Our brains remember survival dynamics so well that they usually shut down our logical processing to save energy. This means that in trauma situations, an inadvertent consequence of this energy saving is that our brains choose our memories and our reactions to those memories as guides instead of discerning reality as it truly is, even if the memory-based reaction emotionally harms us over the long term. Additionally, because our brain turns off logical thinking to conserve energy, it usually can’t tell the difference between the memory it’s reacting to and what’s happening in the present. To further conserve energy, our brain ignores the present moment and instead reacts to memories triggered by similar cues. In other words, our brains naturally work from the past instead of processing the present.
Anybody see problems with this arrangement?
This reaction-based system works excellently for physical situations like touching a hot stove, which usually means pain. Unfortunately, it works horribly for mental situations like interpreting facial expressions. For example, Survival says that a particular negative look on your spouse’s face means a fight is coming because it always has in the past. Because our brain usually runs on autopilot, it then reacts defensively. This defensive reaction often triggers another fight, inadvertently and unnecessarily; it’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Contrast that with a reality-based system that says, “They look angry, and that usually means they are feeling angry. However, I want to be self-compassionate and compassionate toward them, so I’ll stay present and listen calmly, because maybe they just had a difficult day and need to vent.”
If we detach from our body’s feelings and brain’s reactions and instead listen compassionately (without letting our survival reactions control us), we give our loved one the compassion they need and the self-compassion we want! We build this self-compassionate resilience by practicing detachment in our stillness discipline. In other words, in stillness we practice detaching from identifying ourselves as our body, our feelings, and our thoughts, and with that detachment, our true, authentic self can direct our actions.
Body, Emotional, and Thought Identification
For over twenty years, I recorded Fr. Thomas Keating as he talked about these ideas from a Christian spiritual perspective. In the late 90s through the mid-2000s, he frequently mentioned overidentification with an idea. He was talking about personalizing our thoughts, feelings, and bodies as ourselves; in other words, “I am my thoughts and feelings”. Overidentification with our body/brain system is a common paradigm of many spiritual and philosophical teachings.
However, mystics say we are not the individual things our life is composed of, such as our thoughts, feelings, or bodies. As strange as it may seem, none of these individual parts are us; instead, we are a gestalt of all of them. For Self-Compassionate Living, let’s call this gestalt of all aspects of ourselves our authentic, or true self.
When our physical body is physically attacked, immediately Fight, Flight, Freeze, Grab & Hold kick in to resist the attack and hopefully not die or even endure any physical pain. Survival Modes are natural and useful …in physical survival situations. However, the Survival Brain can’t discern physical reality from mental/emotional reality, so it reacts to mental/emotional threats or benefits using the same five tools: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Grab & Hold. However, mental/emotional experiences are better served by rational reasoning. We are usually more self-compassionate when we learn to navigate mental/emotional/physical triggers with discernment; part of that discernment is learning to identify with our authentic self in those situations.
Getting Back to Reality
As strange as it may seem, what we think and feel is only real in our heads; a personal reality; it isn’t real the same way to anyone around us. Those around us can only interpret our thoughts via our expression of reality, which is usually driven by our feelings. In other words, they can never know for certain what we mean. Humans interpret sensory input through a library of memories shaped by personal experiences. This means our reactions come from our personal libraries, and everyone’s library is different, even though there are similarities!
Our culture tends to have similar memories (books in our heads) because we have similar experiences; similar, but not exactly the same! Most of our books (memories) are similar, so we learn similar emotional reactions to similar triggers.
Film directors can draw upon those shared reactional norms. However, drawing on those shared norms is not authentic reality. Thus, what is the reality?
For example, imagine watching a particularly emotional scene in a movie; most experience those emotions strongly and physically feel sad, wistful, or regretful. Most would say the film made them emotional. Yet how does watching a film have that effect? The film has no physical properties that touch our bodies. All it has are photons of light flying above the audience’s head. Those photons paint images on the screen, which our eyes see and send to our brain as data that it interprets based on memories in our personal books. At the same time, the theater speaker’s push-and-pull air creating pressure changes that move the eardrums in our ears, and our brain interprets those changes as sounds that also trigger memories (the books we carry in our heads).
Thus, reality during a film is the light photons and air-pressure changes; those are the only physically real things; everything else happens in our heads. The emotions we feel so strongly during films are a great example of the first line from the Formula for My Life, which I’ve written about in previous newsletters.
My thoughts generate my feelings.
My feelings compel my actions.
My actions create my life.
Reality and Being Self-compassionate While Experiencing Feelings
For fourteen months, I suffered from depression. I suffered; I personalized the depressive feelings I was experiencing as I was depressed; the depression was not just powerful feelings in my body. I was suffering. Fortunately, during those fourteen months, Fr. Tony D’Souza, PhD, a client of mine from Mumbai, India, came to America to teach a month of classes about awareness and record a dozen meditations in my studio. Almost every day, he would listen to me moan and complain about how depressed and angry I was. He listened and, kindly and gently, simply kept repeating “You’re safe, you’re safe.”
One time, with a tone of irritation in my voice, I questioned him, “Why do you keep saying that? I want to be happy again, and you’re just telling me I’m safe!” Tony smiled and said, “Look around.” I did, and he continued, “What is attacking you? What is physically making you depressed?” I looked around my studio. I was not being attacked; nothing was physically interfering with me. Yet, I was feeling depressed.
I was so attached to my body being me that I was personalizing the depressive feelings as me: “I was depressed.” However, I kept thinking about Tony’s words: “What is attacking you? What is physically making you depressed?” Slowly, I began to notice that my feelings were generated by the thoughts happening in my brain, …and I could watch my brain think those thoughts and then generate the feelings my body was experiencing.
Then one day another client told me about another Indian teacher, Sai Baba. I found many videos of Sai Baba on YouTube, and in one of those videos Sai Baba said, ‘Face it, people, we are wearing a meat suit, so we’ll suffer less if we learn how to work with the meat suit.’
Notice the honesty in that statement.
The Meat Suit, Feelings, Energy, and Honesty
Unless there is biophysical imbalance going on inside of you (more about this below), when we’re feeling anything, and nothing is physically touching our body, the threat or benefit we feel is mentally generated by our thoughts. We are experiencing feelings in our meat suit generated by thoughts in our brain; even a lion about to attack is not physically threatening us because it is not touching us; instead, our brain is predicting an attack, and our survival mind reacts to that prediction by preparing for fight, flight, or freeze.
Like I said earlier, this brain/body survival system based on fight, flight, freeze, grab & hold is great at …surviving physical threats and benefits. It’s lousy for daily threats and benefits to our Sense of Survival: our sense of approval and affection, sense of security and safety, and our sense of power and control.
To survive daily mental threats or benefits to our Sense of Survival, we are wise to be honest with ourselves.
As odd as it may sound, our Survival Mind is especially talented at hiding our personal mental/emotional discomfort from us. Part of self-compassion is practicing awareness, and then being honest with ourselves about what we notice, like our mental/emotional discomforts. If I use the depression I experienced as an example, it was much easier for my Survival Mind to personalize the depression by saying I was depressed than it was to admit my brain/body were experiencing depression brought about by its own thoughts. My Survival Mind had me playing the victim to ease its discomfort with reality. So my Survival Mind’s thoughts attacked me, and because I was unaware of them, I felt I had nothing to do except fight, flee, or hide from the negative feelings they were generating.
After I started practicing meditation, I eventually noticed that Survival Modes (fight, flight, freeze, grab & hold) weren’t improving my life, so I decided to try being honest with myself. At that point, the depression became something I could deal with; I was no longer a victim; instead, I was experiencing something extremely unpleasant, and I could choose to expend the energy needed to take some agency in my life and try to ease the discomfort.
Being honest about the thoughts and feelings we’re experiencing is extremely self-compassionate and, usually, uncomfortable at first. Uncomfortable because we force our brain to acknowledge the feelings it is generating and explore the thoughts behind them. Then we begin unwinding the Gordian knot of thoughts to ease the discomfort and create sustainable joy, peace, and contentment for us to grow in.
Unfortunately, negative feelings are not a pleasant path, yet they often lead us to seek help. However, in some cases, stillness can dramatically redirect one’s life during or even before negative feelings take over. One key is to consistently be honest with yourself. Be aware that not all negative feelings are strictly thought-driven; our bodies can be health-wise imbalanced, which can also generate chronic negative feelings. So please speak with medical and mental health professionals if your stillness practice doesn’t begin to show at least minor improvements after a few weeks. You’re worth it, and your life is worth living fully!
Next Month
I suspect I will write about our built-in Sense of Survival and probably more self-honesty.
If you have a particular topic you’d like to see discussed, please reply and suggest it.
The Weekly Announcement for Discussion & Inspiration and Refresher Events
2 or 3 days before each Self-Compassion Discussion & Inspiration Group and before the Self-Compassionate Living Refresher Class, I send an announcement email for the upcoming event. I want to respect your privacy, so I won’t send announcements about upcoming events unless you ask to be notified. If you would like a weekly event announcement about the upcoming Self-Compassion Discussion & Inspiration Group or the Self-Compassionate Living Refresher, please go here to sign up for the next event and check the box for the weekly announcement (there is no cost to sign up and not attend). I send only one announcement per week for that week’s event.
The Self-Compassionate Living Refresher Class
The next class is on October 10th at 10 AM MST. Please come!
In each class, we’ll do a ten-minute stillness practice, and I’ll often ask you to notice your brain doing the topic of that day’s class. Then I’ll teach for an hour on one aspect of the self-compassionate living journey. During the teaching, the floor is open to discussion, questions, and responses; these are very informal.
The next two Self-Compassionate Living Refresher classes are scheduled for Saturday, October 10th, from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM MST, and Saturday, October 24th, from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM MDT. Please join us. Click this HYPERLINK "https://self-compassionateliving.com/self-compassionate-living-refresher.php"link or visit the Self-CompassionateLiving.com Refresher page to register.
These Refreshers are free! I never want money to interfere with you gaining knowledge that may help you. I ask for a $10-$15 donation because I am trying to make this vocation part of my monthly living contributors. To that end, the website will ask for donations after registering for the class, and I’ll share a link during each class so you can easily access my donation page. If you feel moved, you can also offer support HYPERLINK "https://self-compassionateliving.com/support-self-compassionate-living.html"here; thank you!
Self-Compassion Discussion & Inspiration Group
The Self-Compassionate Living Discussion & Inspiration Group has been deeply impactful for so many. Please join us for the next one on Saturday, October 17th, from 10 to 11:30 AM MST.
The next two Self-Compassionate Living Discussion & Inspiration Group meetings are scheduled for Saturday, October 17th, from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM MST, and Saturday, October 31st, from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM MDT. Please join us. Click this HYPERLINK "https://donate.stripe.com/8x2cMU60meyX4MYdUW3Nm06"link or visit the Self-CompassionateLiving.com website to register.
These discussion groups are free! I don’t want finances to keep anyone from attending!
In each meeting, after a brief introduction, we’ll observe 10 minutes of silent stillness, followed by a discussion of any self-compassionate living-related topics participants raise. 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.
On a Personal Note:
I have been actively watching my mind since the summer of 2009 when I was suffering from depression. After six months of practicing meditation, doing therapy, and walking four miles a day, I began to rise out of the depressive feelings; I noticed my mind began seeing the distorted thoughts that had been generating the depression. The important point is, just noticing these distorted thoughts did not immediately fix me; I was not instantly healed. Instead, as I continued to practice 20 minutes of stillness a day, go on an hour-long walk every day, and meet with a therapist once a week, my brain slowly and gently began to rearrange and reframe its distortions, so they faded, and my acceptance of reality increased.
Now, in October 2026, I find I’m still learning lessons, and it’s humbling and empowering. Humbling to part of my brain because I want to think I’ve got it all figured out, and empowering because I’ve learned there is a special type of grace I experience when I learn a lesson (again) that I’ve learned in countless similar situations.
My brain is represented by my library, and every book wants to think it knows all the truth; then I learn about acceptance of reality again, in a completely different yet remarkably similar situation to the previous 27 times I’ve learned the lesson. When that happens, it takes a new level of patience and self-compassion, and therein lies the grace: each time I learn the same lesson again in a totally new way, my self-compassion grows along with my humility. When I accept myself learning the same thing over and over and over, I can also encourage others to exercise that same patience and grace with themselves and their loved ones as they learn.
I feel incredibly lucky to share the message of self-compassion with you. You help me grow spiritually and improve, and I hope I offer you at least a little of the same. With this fortunate bond, we have the opportunity to improve small parts of the world for ourselves and others.
Thank you for allowing me to walk with you and learn from you. I feel extremely blessed to share this time with you.
Donations for the Newsletters.
If you find value in these newsletters, will you please make a small monthly donation to help me afford life as I write these? I spend between 15–20 hours per month writing the newsletters to explain often difficult concepts and remedies that minimize suffering and increase joy, peace, contentment—self-compassion, in other words. I will not hide these newsletters behind a paywall, because I believe everyone can benefit from being more self-compassionate. However, I do have bills to pay, and I promised my wife I wouldn't sacrifice my half of the family budget for Self-Compassionate Living. If you share this dream of being and sharing more self-compassion, will you help me share this information? If yes, please click this link to go to my donation page: HYPERLINK "https://self-compassionateliving.com/support-self-compassionate-living.html"Support Self-Compassionate Living.
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. Over the last thirty-four years, I’ve learned what I share in these newsletters from spiritual teachers, philosophers, and psychologists. I’m sharing it with you, hoping it helps you also 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.
Let’s learn and grow together!
Your encouraging, supportive, and loving notes mean a tremendous amount to me; please keep sending them. Thank you! I thank God for this community. Each of you has inspired 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!
See you next month, and may the rest of this month be peaceful.
Thank you for inviting me to walk with you.
I appreciate you!
Blair
Blair@Self-CompassionateLiving.com
Self-CompassionateLiving.com
PS: If you have any thoughts, comments, or questions, please reply to this email. Additionally, please share this email with those you care about. If you were forwarded this email and you want to receive it directly, please subscribe here: Subscribe to the Self-Compassionate Living Newsletter
Self-CompassionateLiving.com is committed to offering anyone, in any belief system, tools to help them reduce the suffering they experience and increase the Joy, Peace, and Contentment they feel. It’s about creating meaning for each moment by managing your mind, so you treat yourself with love and kindness.
All writing, videos, and photographs by Blair Ashby unless otherwise noted.
©2026 Blair Ashby. All rights reserved.
