Blog Post #113: Self Compassion and Loving Kindness
On our podcast, we recently talked to Sharon Salzberg, a New York Times best-selling author and renowned meditation teacher. She shared wonderful insight on cultivating loving kindness and self compassion for Type C’ers. Here’s a summary of our conversation (see podcast version here):
Sharon’s study of Asian philosophy completely changed her life, especially study of the Buddha and the awareness that there is suffering in life. Buddhism has an unashamed, unafraid acknowledgement of suffering - which helped her make sense of her traumatic, difficult childhood. It also gave her a sense of belonging, that suffering is a part of everyone’s life. She created an independent study for herself in India and set out to learn meditation.
In Sharon’s experience, Type C traits are a prevalent way of living, and an antidote is moving more toward authenticity. It's hard to claim the right to your feelings, whatever they are, and to be able to express them, to have a sense of boundaries. But doing so is liberating and oddly enough, doesn’t make us more distant from people. It’s a genuine sense of connection, which doesn't happen through artifice and trying to pretend everything's okay when it's not really okay.
Caring about others and caring about ourselves creates balance. This doesn’t mean making everything okay for them, but being realistic.
A friend of Sharon’s exhibited Type C traits - she would never say no, she would take on all sorts of tasks. She was exhausted and not happy. In her meditation practice, she started purposely bringing up that kind of scenario in her mind to study what was happening in her body. And she’d feel this kind of panic in her stomach that was usually quicker than the thought, “oh, maybe they won’t like me if I don't say yes.” This became her feedback system. When this stomach feeling came up, that was her signal to say, “I'll have to get back to you on that.” And once she had some space, she could say, “sorry, I can't do it.”
It’s great to learn these reactions in our bodies and meditation can help. In the moment, we create space for ourselves, we can respect ourselves.
Science is showing us that being too hard on ourselves, being too punitive just doesn’t work. That kind of harsh environment may spike our performance briefly but then we will crash. To make a sustained effort to learn something new, we need self compassion, which is often mistaken for laziness or not having standards of excellence.
A common tendency in meditation is to berate ourselves when our minds wander, believing we are bad meditators and everyone else does it well. When we emerge from that period of intense self-doubt and judgment, we are exhausted and demoralized. It’s not helpful. We have to engage our self compassion to give ourselves a break and start over, and that’s the whole point.
A lot of people turn to meditation because they have a kind of deep curiosity about life; they want to live on a deeper level. You have to find the method that’s right for you - you don’t want to feel forced into a certain approach. It’s perfectly fine to keep your eyes open or do walking meditation instead of sitting. We don’t need to stay with a painful experience, whether it’s physical or emotional pain. We can take breaks. When Sharon was in the hospital, a physical therapist said to her, 'It's not a race, you know. You'll get further if you take a few breaks now and then, and give yourself a break and then get a little rest and then you can go on.” This sums it up nicely.
In Buddhist philosophy, there's an underlying belief that no matter who we are, no matter what we've done, no matter what's been done to us, we have a capacity - it's like a seed inside of us - a potential for love, for wisdom, for growth, for change. It's usually covered over and it may be hidden from view and it's hard to find. It's certainly hard to trust - but it's there.
Sharon once attended a conference with the Dalai Lama in India and asked him - “Your Holiness, what do you think about self-hatred? And he said, 'What's that?” He didn’t understand, he thought it was some sort of nervous disorder. He finally said, “But you have Buddha nature!” - which is that potential inside everyone.
If you're doing a meditation or yoga exercise where you're resting your awareness on something like the feeling of the breath or the repetition of a sound, and your mind wanders, learning how to speak to yourself differently will be a tremendous boost in thinking of ourselves differently.
In loving kindness meditation, we can offer gifts to ourselves and to others with phrases like “may you be safe”, “may you be happy”, “may you be peaceful”. We offer these to ourselves first.
Most of us come to the end of the day and evaluate ourselves, like “how did I do today?” We are often in the habit of thinking of the mistakes we made and the problems we had - and focusing on what we didn't do or say right. But what if we switch channels? It's not being conflict avoidant or pretending there are no problems - instead we broaden our perspective a bit and stop narrowly focusing on what we did or didn’t do. We give ourselves gifts instead.
For more on Sharon’s work, please visit her at www.sharonsalzberg.com.