Tag: compassion

Self-Compassion It

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I was in a meeting at the Pentagon recently, seated at a table surrounded by uniformed military officers and dark-suited government officials. The meeting was tense, with the officials all insisting the Defense Department was doing the right thing and I and my colleagues from other human rights organizations pointing to our evidence that in many situations, it had not. We didn’t seem to be making any progress.

At some point I glanced down at my wrist and realized I was wearing a red rubber bracelet that said in prominent white letters: “Self-Compassion It.”  I’d been given the bracelet upon completing an eight-week training course in “Mindful Self-Compassion,” and had been wearing it as a reminder to use the tools I’d learned.

Nothing wrong with that, right? Still, in this buttoned-up professional setting, I was instantly embarrassed. I sheepishly tucked my hand under the table, slid the bracelet off and stuffed it into my handbag. The idea that I would be seen considering “self-compassion” in a meeting of senior warriors seemed absurd.

The idea of mindful self-compassion can sound silly, trivial and self-involved. But it’s actually anything but.  As Kristin Neff and Chris Germer, the psychologists who created the Mindful Self-Compassion course explain, self-compassion has been scientifically proven to be critical to well-being.

Unlike self-esteem, self-compassion isn’t based on pumping yourself up to believe you’re better than anyone else.  That keeps you in a judging mindset, so as soon as you screw up, you feel worthless again.  Self-compassion is instead having compassion for yourself — not for your accomplishments, but simply because you’re a human being, flawed like everyone else, and deserving of compassion nonetheless.  Once you acknowledge that you don’t have to be perfect to deserve compassion, you naturally start feeling compassion for the other less-than-perfect people around you. In other words, it’s helpful not only for yourself, but for everyone you encounter.

Neff’s book, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, explains this all very well.  But most convincing to me was Neff’s story of how she’s applied it in her own life.

As a small child, her son was diagnosed with autism. She felt a huge range of emotions — including disappointment, sadness, grief and fear.  She had recently learned self-compassion techniques on a week-long mindfulness retreat. She describes how flooding herself with self-compassion allowed her to feel her full range of emotions — including the shame she felt at some of her reactions.  Only by accepting those emotions with compassion rather than judgment could she fully experience them, to the point where she could accept and then acknowledge that she was strong enough to handle the situation. Not that it was easy, but it gave her a critical tool to deal with the challenges.

After that, when her son would start acting out — screaming and flailing in public,  for example, as some autistic children do —  she would comfort herself for her feelings of confusion, shame, stress and helplessness. That calmed her enough so she could respond wisely and compassionately to her son, instead of lashing out in anger or wallowing in self-pity.

Neff’s experience illustrates why self-compassion is so valuable.  It allows us to face our situation, whatever it is, with compassion instead of judgment. That allows us to look at the situation more honestly and thoughtfully, and to choose more carefully how we want to respond.

If I’ve made a mistake, for example, instead of immediately criticizing myself as “stupid”, I can forgive myself for not being perfect, acknowledge the mistake, and look more closely to see what happened and what I’d want to do differently next time. Giving myself compassion instead of criticism allows me to move forward. On the other hand, if I immediately beat myself up and feel worthless, I’m going to try to hide from or forget the situation immediately and avoid looking at what I did at all.  And I’m more likely to repeat the same mistake again.

The feeling of compassion, much like the feeling of love, has positive physical effects on our bodies, too. Scientists have shown it increases oxytocin, which has a calming effect on our nervous systems; it improves vagal tone, which helps the body reduce inflammation; it improves relationships, which has an anti-ageing effect, and, well, it just feels good.

The feeling of judgment or self-hatred, on the other hand, creates anxiety, which has a decidedly negative impact.  Chronic self-doubt and anxiety harm the heart, immune and gastrointestinal systems. Plus they just make us feel lousy.

Compassion “involves the recognition and clear seeing of suffering,” writes Neff. “It also involves feelings of kindness for people who are suffering, so that the desire to help – to ameliorate suffering – emerges. Finally, compassion involves recognizing our shared human condition, flawed and fragile as it is.”

Self-compassion thus places us in the sea of common humanity and allows us to extend the same compassion to ourselves we would instinctively offer to a good friend, a small child, or favorite pet.  It allows us to acknowledge what’s happening, including our suffering, with kindness rather than with judgment.  For those of us who’ve allowed ourselves to be ruled by self-judgment, that’s a huge relief.

“Self-compassion provides an island of calm, a refuge from the stormy seas of endless positive and negative self-judgment, so that we can finally stop asking, “Am I as good as they are? Am I good enough?” writes Neff.

It’s hard to be a human being in a difficult world. Our social and professional settings can make us feel like we constantly have to prove ourselves, to measure up, to justify our worth. As obvious as it sounds, no one’s perfect: we all make mistakes, even if we’re trying our best, usually in less-than-ideal circumstances. The simple response of kindness – both for ourselves and for others – can go a long way.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

The Demoralizing Science of Success

063b6cfOne of the most interesting subjects in the field of Positive Psychology is the science of human motivation and success. Why are some people so motivated and so successful? Why do some people not even bother to try? And how does that correlate with human happiness?

I find this all fascinating. But I also find it tends to make me crazy. The other night, for example, I listened to a lecture by psychologist Tal Ben Shahar, who explained a range of psychological studies showing that high expectations of ourselves leads to higher self-esteem and higher levels of happiness in the long run, even when we fall short of those expectations. It was somewhat counterintuitive, since I would have thought that lowering our expectations would make us feel better, because we’d be more likely to meet them.  Studies show, however, that seeing ourselves try to meet our own high expectations actually changes our view of ourselves, which raises self-esteem, even if it also means we fail more often.  Higher expectations, if grounded in reality, also tend to lead to eventual success.

All good as far as it goes. But the longer I listened to the lecture, the more I found myself in turmoil. Were my expectations high enough? I wondered. Had I settled for too little in my life? Should I be setting my goals higher, and if I did, what would they be?

Ben Shahar went on to explain the impact of our environment on achievement, and how we can create an environment that “primes” us for success, even subliminally encouraging and cheering us on. That’s good news.  Still, I found myself in a bit of a panic: is my environment encouraging enough? Should I have more photos of friends and family on my walls?  Would that feel supportive, or oppressive?  And what about inspirational quotes? Would those subconsciously help me even if I tend to find them cheesy?

By the end of the lecture I felt like crap. Now obsessing about my lack of achievement, I looked up one of my favorite positive psychologists, Ellen Langer. A researcher and professor at Harvard, Langer has published 11 books on mindfulness and is an accomplished self-taught painter. I can never be as successful as her, I despaired.

The science of success wasn’t motivating me, it was deflating me.

It’s great to want to be your best self, but knowing what or who that even is can be a lifelong work-in-progress. I think the key to making that process “successful” is to learn to enjoy the ride along the way. Comparing yourself to your role model of the day, on the other hand, is a recipe for despair, depression, and demoralization.

The Beat Generation writer Seymour Krim has a wonderful essay called “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business” that encapsulates what I’m talking about.

“At 51,” he writes, “believe it or not, or believe it and pity me if you are young and swift, I still don’t know truly ‘what I want to be.’ I’ve published several serious books. I rate an inch in Who’s Who in America. I teach at a so-called respected university. But in that profuse upstairs delicatessen of mine I’m as open to every wild possibility as I was at 13, although even I know that the chances of acting them out diminish with each heartbeat. One life was never quite enough for what I had in mind. “

“That’s because I come from America,” Krim continues, “which has to be the classic, ultimate, then-they-broke-the mold incubator of not knowing who you are until you find out. I have never really found out and I expect what remains of my life to be one long search party for the final me. . . . and I don’t really think that the great day will ever come when I hold a finished me in my fist and say here you are, congratulations.”

Positive Psychology seems to arise out of that American tendency to take advantage of every possibility available to us. Which is a lot of pressure. With all this psychological understanding, now, it’s not enough merely to be successful by conventional measures, but we have to realize our truest deepest visions, too. It’s a nice goal, but trying to meet it can be exhausting.

This is where I think we can learn a thing or two from Buddhism. Unlike positive psychologists who speak of unmasking your true, best self and then succeeding wildly, Buddhism speaks of the self as a constantly evolving and changing, ephemeral concept. There is no fixed self to unmask, no core we need to improve. Sure, we have tendencies and inclinations and strengths and weaknesses based on causes and conditions in our past – whether our genes, family, society, education, or whatever. And those may or may not be helpful to us now. But the goal is not to try to remove all those to reveal some true self that you then have to shine and polish. It’s to see them all as clearly as we can and to work with them. Acknowledge their influence, and then, with the wisdom we have today, choose what we want to develop, let go of or build upon.

The purpose of mindfulness practices like meditation are to learn to see and discern the various thoughts and influences that have led you to this place, so you can make clearer and wiser choices from here. That may include choosing more helpful influences in your future.

If you approach your own efforts with heartfelt compassion for the self you have become, you’ll be much more able to take advantage of the wealth of scientific studies on happiness and success. Because only by seeing and accepting who we are now can we begin to truly consider who we want to be and where we want to go.

Success, then, means simply continuing to move in our chosen direction.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

The Neuroscience of Change: More Cause for Compassion

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If you’ve ever wondered why it’s so hard to make lasting change, you may find comfort in knowing that one reason is human biology. Neurobiology, in particular. That’s not cause for despair: because with sustained effort and support, our brains are actually something we can change.

Ever since participating in a retreat on the neurobiology of yoga and Buddhism back in May, I’ve been fascinated by how our brains have developed over millennia to help us survive, but in many ways, particularly in the modern world, also cause us to suffer. And I’ve found it strangely soothing to know that we’re all in the same boat here: another reason to extend compassion to ourselves, as well as to others, even when we – or they – do things we really don’t like. It’s also a good reason to seek support for changes you want to make – whether from a coach, friend, teacher or mentor – because it’s really hard to make lasting change on your own.

The brain is a complicated organ, of course, and there’s lots to be learned about it. Interested readers may want to check out Rick Hanson’s excellent book, Buddha’s Brain: the Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom, which provides a great explanation and lots of brain-changing exercises. I’m also relying here on what I learned from Jim Hopper about this at his recent Kripalu retreat, and in his chapter in the book Mindfulness-Oriented Interventions for Trauma: Integrating Contemplative Practices (The Guilford Press).

The Cliffs Notes version of this material goes something like this: we’re hard-wired to flee from danger and pain and to seek pleasure and safety. So when the part of the human brain called the amygdala — often called the “reptilian brain,” because it’s the oldest part of the human brain, in an evolutionary sense — senses a threat, it creates a response of fear or aversion – what we commonly call a “fight or flight” response. Whereas in the wild “fight” might have meant trying to kill a predator or competitor, in modern life, we “fight” often by getting angry or judgmental – a way of trying to regain control. The flight response, meanwhile, kicks in our seeking circuitry: now we’re seeking an escape from the fear or other unpleasant feeling. That may lead us to suppress the feeling, or to mask it by indulging in some immediately pleasurable activity to escape it – for example, eating, drinking, or sex.

Although we tend to lament these “bad habits,” these instincts were actually useful when we lived in the wild as hunter gatherers, where we had to escape predators and be on the constant prowl for food (and sex) for the species to survive. But these now-ingrained habits unfortunately don’t work so well in modern life, where we’re largely cushioned from life-threatening predators, and food and other basic pleasures are, for many of us, often too easily obtainable. That leads to indulgence, feelings of guilt or other kinds of pain, and more suffering.

On top of that, again with the aim of species survival, we’re hard-wired to pay far more attention to things that frighten us or cause us pain than to things that feel good. This is the brain’s “negativity bias.” As Hanson explains in his book, that helped us survive ages ago, when one encounter with a predator would mean the end of us, so we had to be hyper-alert to threats and lived in frequent fear. In comparison, there were multiple opportunities to find food and mates, so if we paid less attention to those simple pleasures when we encountered them and just sought them out when we really needed them, we could still survive just fine.

But you can see how this all becomes a recipe for suffering today. For one thing, it means we tend to exaggerate our fears. Since change usually involves some fear of the unknown, it means we have a built-in bias against change, even if that change would be good for us. We also have a tendency to overlook or underestimate the opportunities for lasting, more meaningful pleasures – things like love, peace, playfulness and joy (what Hopper calls “true goods”) — because we’re distracted by fear. Plus, because we’re raised among similarly hard-wired humans, we’ve incorporated the fears of everyone around us, too, who likewise have an exaggerated sense of fear when it comes to change, and a tendency to underestimate deeper satisfaction. (Not surprisingly, marketers have learned to take full advantage of this — hence the relentless advertising of junk food, luxury goods, pharmaceuticals and fabulous vacation “escapes”.)

The result of these ancient and culturally reinforced tendencies is that it often feels easier to stay stuck – to avoid the fear of making a change, and respond to current dissatisfaction by seeking short-term easily-available immediate pleasures (which often lead to more suffering), rather than seeking longer-lasting deeper satisfaction, which may involve more effort and taking risks.

This all sounds pretty depressing. But take heart: neuroscientists have found we can actually alter how this circuitry functions. It just takes awareness, practice, and support.

That means paying attention to how our brain functions on autopilot (and how it affects the body) and trying to create more space between the thoughts and the impulsive (and often destructive) behavior that tends to follow them. It means practicing different ways of thinking, through contemplative practices like meditation, which can actually strengthen the prefrontal cortex – the part of our brain that allows us to reason and regulate fear and other responses — or visioning exercises that can help counteract the paralyzing impact of fear by motivating a desired change. (Hanson includes in his book a series of guided meditations designed to enhance certain parts of the brain, such as those responsible for positive emotions like love and empathy, and for skills like mindfulness and concentration.) And it means finding support from like-minded people who can help keep us on track – a trusted friend; a local meditation, yoga or support group; a skilled coach; or ideally, some combination of these.

Changing your brain — and changing your life — is possible.  But it’s very hard to do alone.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

Skip the New Year’s Resolution

karma ethics.tree buddhist-network comNew Year’s resolutions seem to me like a recipe for disaster. Another commitment you make to yourself that you inevitably end up breaking. I’m going to exercise every day, or lose weight, or cut out alcohol, or always be nice to my family, or whatever. Then you slip up, and bam – you feel like shit again. The resolution goes out the window.

But I like the idea of living deliberately – in fact, I think it’s crucial to a happy and fulfilled and meaningful life. Being conscious of our actions and making deliberate choices seem like basic building-blocks for that. So how to reconcile?

To me, setting an “intention” rather than making a “resolution” seems a bit more promising. An intention is something you want, plan and hope to do, but when you slip, as you inevitably will, you just dust yourself off and get back on the path you’ve chosen. I know, they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but that seems to me more using the term “intention” as a cheap band-aid covering up a deep and massive delusion that you’re not dealing with. A true intention is something you set for yourself, because it’s something you truly and deeply want, and you use it as a compass to move forward. Sometimes you get lost and veer from the path, perhaps caught up by some shiny delusive object you encounter in the woods along the way. But the compass helps you eventually find your way back and steer your course again.

I think one key to living by “intention” without getting discouraged when we screw up is just acknowledging that we’re human, and change is difficult. I’ve been reading a terrific book by Stephen Cope, a yoga teacher and psychotherapist who writes about the intersection of Western psychology and the Eastern philosophy of yoga. (I also participated in a weekend workshop with him at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in the Berkshires after Christmas.) In The Wisdom of Yoga: A Seeker’s Guide to Extraordinary Living, Cope explains this phenomenon as being part of what yogis call karma.

This isn’t the sort of oversimplified notion of karma we tend to hear about as determining your life because of something you did in your prior life as a dog or the idea that people are suffering through a vicious war or in some horrible refugee camp as just desert for something bad they did in their past lives. This is a much more subtle and, to me, convincing notion of karma that’s also backed up by Western psychology and contemporary neuroscience. It’s simply the idea that our actions and reactions to circumstances create patterns in our minds, and the longer those patterns continue, the more deeply they become embedded in our unconscious and the harder they are to change.

A child might react to abuse by withdrawing, for example, and withdrawal from other people at the first sight of conflict might become her unconscious pattern. For someone else addiction results – alcohol, drugs, food, whatever. We all do things to avoid pain, and those things become part of the patterns that shape our lives. So when as adults on New Year’s Eve we decide we’re all of a sudden going to stop doing that thing, good luck – karma or brain patterning or whatever you want to call it is going to make it very difficult.

The yogic approach to changing this, according to Cope – which is very much like the Buddhist approach, which grew out of yoga philosophy – is simply to begin to focus our attention on the chain of events that leads to the unwanted action. Without judging or condemning it, simply notice when the craving or withdrawing or whatever problematic action arises. What is happening at that moment? What is the underlying feeling you’re fleeing?

Continue to watch it. What happens next? Do you reach for a drink, a cookie, or walk out the door? Do you get angry and yell at someone, or pick up your phone and get absorbed in your Twitter or Facebook feed? Whatever it is, just start by observing it. We tend to be so judgmental of ourselves that we refuse even to witness this chain of events, because it causes us so much shame. But as Cope explains, “[w]hen we pare away judgment, something remarkable happens. We’re free, for the first time, to observe how the pattern really works.”

So the key is to approach this all with compassion. Recognize it’s not “you” that’s doing this, in the sense of some fixed sense of yourself as a bad person. It’s just a part of your patterning, and we all have patterns that make us suffer. Only by letting go of the judgment and being willing to look at those patterns can we truly see them, and then take steps to interrupt them.

I’m not saying this is easy. Last night I was feeling sick, and tired, recovering from some sort of a bug I’d caught after not getting enough sleep on New Year’s eve, which I was still angry at myself about.   When I feel shitty, my impulse is usually toward sugar. Preferably chocolate. While I usually try not to keep that stuff around, lots of it ended up in our house over the holidays, and it was calling to me. Fortunately, I was reading Cope’s book, and after a couple of chocolate kisses I reminded myself to slow down and just feel what I was feeling. Tired. Pain in my stomach. Feelings of regret and disappointment at having let myself get to this state, after having set all sorts of intentions to live more deliberately and be healthier. I let those feelings wash over me, and reminded myself to be compassionate about it all. I felt the urge to run away from them slowly dissipate. The need for chocolate melted away. I realized that what I really needed was to sleep. I went to bed soon after.

Obviously some habits are more difficult than this one, but the process is basically the same. (For a highly simplified and overdramatized but compelling version of how exposing unconscious habits helps them unravel, watch Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Marnie, which I watched for the first time the other night.) Whether it’s Western psychology or yoga or Buddhism or any other contemplative tradition, the idea is the same: become aware of the internal chain of events that leads to the action you’re taking that you want to stop. Observe it without judgment.

Eventually, let yourself have the feelings that are arising, without reacting to them. Maybe at first you can ward off the reaction for just a few minutes. Over time, as you continue to make conscious and interrupt the chain of events, they have less power over you. The urge to act begins to dissipate. And you’re able to interrupt the chain earlier and earlier in the process.   The practices of yoga and meditation (and probably some Western practices of prayer as well) are designed to get us to slow down and focus enough that we can become aware of what’s happening internally, so we can make deliberate choices about how we want to act.

All of this helps explain why I don’t like the idea of New Year’s “resolutions.” A “resolution” is “a firm decision to do or not do something” and “the action of solving a problem,” and as we’ve seen, such deeply ingrained problems can rarely be “solved” simply by deciding to take any one action.

An “intention,” on the other hand, is “an aim or a plan,” or “a design.” It’s more like setting a path toward reaching an eventual destination. An intention allows you to be human – to stray from the path on occasion, as you’re inevitably lured by shiny objects that catch your eye along the way. But if it’s a true intention that’s important to you, and perhaps you create reminders for yourself of that, at least some outline or markings of the path remain. You’re still laying that path along the way, but the intention acts as a compass that aims you toward your ultimate goal.

I like that.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

Start Where You Are

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The view from my roof at sunset.

I’ve been trying to get outside more.  I love the outdoors, but the noise and congestion of New York City can make being out on the street pretty unpleasant, so lately I’ve been escaping to the roof.  I’m lucky to have access to a rooftop, and I’ve discovered that sunset yoga up there can be pretty amazing — and free.

The problem is that getting to the roof requires climbing up a ladder that’s in a really disgusting old utility closet.  The closet was disgusting when I moved into this place 17 years ago, filled with corroding old paint and stain cans, various kinds of cements and glues and solvents and other toxic substances that inevitably leak and spill and are really hard to safely (and legally) dispose of.  So somehow, I’ve never cleaned it out.  But now that I’m climbing that ladder to get to the roof more often, the nastiness of the space has really struck me.

I’ve also been reading Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze’s book, Walk Out, Walk On, which I’ve written about here.  One of the most striking stories in the book is of a group of people in Brazil who took an abandoned apple warehouse filled with sludge — “layers of dirt, asbestos, syringes and excrement” — and turned it into a thriving community center. Organized by a group of Brazilians who started the “School of Warriors without Weapons,” the community of Paqueta, realizing that no one else was going to come clean up that old warehouse for them, decided to take on the task themselves.  Working just 15 minutes a day each, volunteers who’d created a vision for what they wanted the place to be cleaned out the 11,195-square-foot warehouse and transformed it into something their community really needed:  a healthy public space.

It’s an amazing story that inspires me in all sorts of ways, especially as I think about how coaching skills could help advocacy and community organizations. But what it inspired me to do the other morning was to clean out my closet.

After descending the ladder, I was about to just close the door once again on the dirt and muck and leave that project for another day. Maybe I was influenced by that post-yoga feeling of well-being, but it suddenly struck me that no one else was going to come and clean that closet up for me.  And that actually, doing just a little at a time wouldn’t be all that difficult.  Sure it’s kind of gross, but I can wear rubber gloves.  It’s really not that big a deal.

So I pulled out the gloves and some sponges and paint scrapers and I cleaned the damn thing up.  And you know what?  It wasn’t that hard.  I haven’t gotten rid of all the old containers in there yet, but it only took me about an hour to clean up the layers of grime that had built up on the shelves and the molding, and the chunks of debris scattered on the closet floor.  And man, did I feel better afterwards.

We’ve all had that experience:  some task looms before you that you don’t want to tackle because it seems really impossible and unpleasant and like it will take forever.  But imagine how nice it will be when it’s done;  then just start where you are.  Eventually, you’ll get there.

“Start Where You Are” is also the name of a Pema Chodron book I like that makes a really helpful point.  You can’t get to the good stuff without going through some bad stuff too.  Pema puts it more eloquently:

Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that’s all that’s happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness–life’s painful aspect–softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody’s eyes because you feel you haven’t got anything to lose–you’re just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We’d be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn’t have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.

I’m not equating cleaning out my closet with life’s most painful moments.  But the point applies even to the simply unpleasant and annoying tasks we try to avoid:  if everything were easy and good and clean and beautiful all the time, we wouldn’t really see and appreciate it. Nor would we appreciate how difficult life can be for others, whose lives may be dominated by many more annoying, difficult or even truly wretched circumstances. Even in taking on grubby little chores, we can find compassion for others, and greater possibilities for ourselves.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting