Community for Deepening Practice

Befriend Yourself

Week 7: Meditation – An Offering to the Spirit

The quintessential self-compassion question is this: “What do I need?” And what better way to discover those answers than to sit in your own good company and embrace whatever may arise?

These brilliant minds of ours are tricksters at times, and despite our earnest wishes and effort to hold our experience with kindness and warm attention, obstacles will show up during our sacred meditation time. Doubt. Grasping. Aversion. Restlessness. Weariness. Sometimes we’ll want to give up. To doubt the practice. To doubt ourselves. To run away and never come back.

Ah! This is a sure sign that this it is time to soften. Perhaps to surrender some striving to do it “right” or to feel a certain way. At times like this — and with each and every practice, exercise, and experience — it’s also helpful to remember the zones of optimal learning in which we open and close so that we remain in the most self-compassionate state of engagement and out of the “overwhelm” zone.

So an invitation for the week ahead as you practice and move through your days: Notice your obstacles as a curious scientist might, and hold your challenges as a dear friend might. With time, this gentle self-embrace will find its way more and more into your daily life. And we soon find that practice and living are one and the same.

Warmest wishes for the coming rest week,

Housekeeping

Reminder that there will be no class this Tuesday, May 29. Rest week!

Home Practice

Formal Practice: Please add Affectionate Breathing to your practice this week, practicing 15-20 minutes for four days. If you choose to have a go at the Practice Makes Imperfect journal pages, try if you can to record at least one short comment each day, even if you have not practiced formally. This will help increase awareness about you are relating with yourself on a day-to-day basis.

Optional Creative Invitation: Create Your Own Joyful Meditation Space [instructions]. This is an elaboration of the conversation we started in class about ways to support our formal practice by refining intention, inviting in ease, and surrendering struggle.

 

Resources
    • Week 7 Video: Password 1Meditate2
    • Practice Makes Imperfect Journal: A printable worksheet with invites you to check in daily with yourself; a good way to support awareness and identify trends unfolding in your deepening self-compassion practice.
    • Obstacles to Meditation and how to work with them (Chris Germer)
      • Specific to our self-compassion practice, Chris offers a summary of how we can kindly work with our obstacles as they arise. Here are the pages in case you’ve misplaced your copy (pages 207 – 211 in Mindful Path to Self-Compassion).
      • For some, it may be helpful to learn more about obstacles, beyond the scope of what was offered in class. If this would be useful for you, feel free to visit this in-depth exposition as offered by the Insight Meditation Center. Remembering that this is not a blueprint for perfection or a way to get trapped in thinking/comparing; rather, it is a way to help illuminate and hold in tender awareness your own frequent obstacles so that you are able to work more skillfully with them when they arise.
    • If you are a person who is still fairly new to meditation and you would like specific guidance for how to begin a practice, you may wish to check into any of the following resources by Tara Brach. As this is offered from a Buddhist perspective, please translate any language that doesn’t resonate with you personally to language that does. 🙂
    • If you are a person who would like to learn more about contraindications and best practices in regards to meditation, you might appreciate the Meditation Safety Toolbox by Willoughby Britton, et al. The toolbox contains documents, protocols and best practice guidelines from the UMASS Center for Mindfulness, Bangor and Oxford Mindfulness Centers, and other mindfulness researchers.
    • Bill Morgan’s collection of short guided meditations (scroll down to the bottom of the page) to bring joy and richness to meditation.
    • Insight Timer: A popular app that allows you to meditate in virtual community with others. Free to use, the app has every type of guided meditation conceivable, all available to you 24 x 7. If structure is helpful to you, it also allows you to track your own progress. Finally, it has a simple meditation timer if you’d prefer to sit without guidance.
“Don’t meditate to fix yourself, to heal yourself, to improve yourself, to redeem yourself; rather, do it as an act of love, of deep warm friendship to yourself. In this way there is no longer any need for the subtle aggression of self-improvement, for the endless guilt of not doing enough. It offers the possibility of an end to the ceaseless round of trying so hard that wraps so many people’s lives in a knot. Instead there is now meditation as an act of love. How endlessly delightful and encouraging.”

– Bob Sharples, from Meditation: Calming the Mind

I Go Among Trees

by Wendell Berry

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

~ Wendell Berry from Sabbaths

Week 6: The “Ka-bloom” of Backdraft

“Backdraft is the visceral somatic awareness of the contrast between how we have been treated – by ourselves and others – and how we need to be treated to thrive and flourish. Backdraft is grief and anger over a personal history of consistently unmet needs, all the while having some sense that we deserved something better, and finally, suddenly discovering experientially that we were right all along.”

-Kristy Arbon, MSC Teacher

As we continue through MSC Session 2, we re-discovered backdraft, which sometimes occurs when offering ourselves compassion feels bad (evokes sadness, shame, anger, numbness, etc.). This reaction can happen in a range of domains — mental (thoughts), physical (body sensations), and emotional (feelings) — and can vary in intensity from a passing moment of soreness/tenderness to a more intense “ka-bloom” of strong emotion (as we saw in the Good Will Hunting video clip). Once we begin to recognize our moments of backdraft, we can then meet ourselves with understanding, kindness, and care in that moment. This may be in contrast to the ways we may been met in the past during moments of suffering and in this way is an opportunity to transform these old relational wounds.

“Walk slowly, go farther.”

A gentle reminder from Alayna. 🙂

So yes! While backdraft can hurt, it is part of the healing journey. It is our resistance to backdraft that increases suffering. Backdraft is an opportunity to offer yourself the gift of loving connected presence, and to treat yourself with kindness and respect. As best you can, returning to your zone of safety if you are experiencing strong backdraft. (Also remembering that what may feel safe and manageable one day may not feel the same way on another day, and allowing yourself the flexibility to simply take what you need in this moment, without judgement.)

We watched a short video clip from the movie Good Will Hunting that illustrates how easy it can be to dismiss our own feelings (or to be guarded against them), and then demonstrates the possibility for relief that comes with compassionate presence.

Working with backdraft:

In class, we talked about how the act of closing can sometimes be the best way to meet our needs during backdraft. We also talked about the nourishing power of sharing with certain trusted people (or pets!) during moments (or even seasons in our lives) of backdraft. And that our confidantes — whether therapists, friends, or family members — must be chosen with care.

Other ways we can work with backdraft:

Regulating our attention

  • Labeling the experience. “Ah! Backdraft!”
  • Naming the emotion beneath the backdraft. “Oh, sadness is here. Ah … that’s grief.”
  • Exploring where the emotion resides in the body (Tension in the stomach? Tightness in the throat?) and then perhaps offering ourselves some soothing touch and kind words.
  • Or … during strong backdraft, it can be helpful to direct our attention to someplace more neutral in the body (breath) near the boundary of the body (soles of the feet) or outside ourselves entirely (an external object or sounds).

Caring for ourselves through mindfulness and self-compassion in daily life

Sometimes it makes most sense to turn our attention away from mind-training practices and focus on the things we naturally enjoy in daily life. Practicing behavioral self-compassion or as a conscious, kind response to suffering. Take time if you want to do consider the Self-Compassion in Daily Life exercise, knowing that for some people, it can be challenging to think of concrete ways in which to offer ourselves kindness. And so we start small. 🙂

Home Practice
  • Optional: Cultivate greater awareness of backdraft in daily life as well as exploring how to respond using the Backdraft Awareness Sheet as a support.
Click to access full-sized, downloadable worksheet.
  • Self-Compassion in Daily Life. A way to explore in earnest concrete ways in which you can care for yourself in various domains: physically, mentally, emotionally, relationally, spiritually.
  • Creative Invitation: Make your very own Here and Now Box, filled with items that might support you in cultivating mindful presence and also in soothing and grounding you during moments of strong emotion. This CI is a wellspring of ideas and ah-hah!s. 🙂 Especially useful exercise for those who have a tough time identifying ways to treat themselves with kindness.
Housekeeping
  • David will be out June 12 (Neurodharma retreat). Aimee will be out June 19 (rafting adventure in Utah). Class will meet as usual.
  • Reminder that there will be no class on Tuesday, May 29. Rest week!
Resources

Week 5: Mindfulness and Resistance

As we explored mindfulness last week, we revisited some of its core components as well as our own understanding of the role of mindfulness in the MSC journey.

Specifically in MSC, mindfulness is critical to supporting us in these ways:

  • Mindfulness helps us identify when we’re suffering so that we know to offer ourselves kindness.
  • It helps us to anchor/stabilize when we’re feeling overwhelmed emotionally. When we’re feeling activated, we can ground our awareness in the body to help us keep from getting swept away in the current of strong emotion.
  • Balancing compassion with equanimity. We need a stable, clear-seeing mind to choose appropriate compassionate action. Mindfulness supports this.

Because our innate human negativity bias is a counter-force that keeps us consistently seeking and ruminating about perceived danger, it is very helpful for us to continue to cultivate mindfulness so that we can put some space between the thing that scares us and a more measured response.

We also looked at what happens when resistance arises. How readily can we notice our resistance, identify what we need in that moment of pain, and then soften into a tender tone and stance with ourselves? Remembering that resistance, too, is a state of suffering. With practice, time, and patience, the two wings of the bird — mindfulness and compassion — can begin to work in synchrony for our deepest benefit. We watched a poignant example of mindfulness and compassion in flight in Frank Ostaseski’s video, “Find a place of rest.” Next week, with a refreshed perspective on mindfulness we’ll begin to work with the idea of backdraft and how to resource ourselves for the times in our lives when compassion feels painful.

Home Practice
    • Mindfulness in Daily Life exercise. Please try three times this week, and we’ll discuss in class next week … or you can share about your experience on this dedicated discussion board item.
        • Pick an ordinary activity (don’t be too ambitious! Full sink of dishes = tall order!)
        • Choose some sensory experience during the activity
        • Immerse yourself, bringing your mind back when it wanders.
        • Bring gentle, friendly awareness till you’re done.
    • Creative Invitation: Exploring Mindfulness Through Blind Mark-Making (30 minute exercise)

Remember that part of our freedom in the CDP is that we get to use novel ways of accessing MSC ideas/concepts. Moving beyond the thinking-mind into the felt experience of “What is true?” Indeed, this is mindfulness! While this week’s CI involves drawing materials, this is a mindfulness exercise focusing on sensory experience, not an attempt to create a specific quality of drawing. As with anything we do in class, please pay special attention to your internal tone of voice as you proceed through the exercise. Notice what thoughts and emotions arise. What happens when resistance crops up? How are you with yourself? Can you tenderly companion with yourself, or perhaps even find some hint of levity as you proceed? Go easy on yourself, know there is no “right” way, and share as you wish. Here’s the invitation.

Housekeeping
      • As mentioned in class, there are several opportunities available for those of you who wish to deepen your practice through in-person, self-compassion-focused retreats. Here are a few options that may be of interest:
      • Reminder that there will be no class on Tuesday, May 29. Rest week!
      • David will be out June 12 (Neurodharma retreat). Aimee will be out June 19 (rafting adventure in Utah). Class will meet as usual.
Resources

Optional Readings

      • Article: Tara Brach, “Unfolding the Wings of Acceptance.” A lovely read describing how the two parts of genuine acceptance, clear seeing and holding our experience with compassion, are as interdependent as the two wings of a bird. “Together, they enable us to fly and be free.”
      • Video: “Moments,” by RadioLab, illustrates the richness available to us in daily life as we maintain presence with what is.