"Compassion isn't some kind of self-improvement project or ideal that we're trying to live up to. Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all those imperfections that we don't even want to look at."
Pema Chodron
“If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.”
Jack Kornfield
Sharon Salzberg, weekly blogger for OnBeing.org, shares an experience she had as a guest on the Katie Couric show. It is well worth reading and watching the conversations with an inner city, grass roots organization and how they are using mindfulness meditation and helping to transform the inner experiences of children toward responsiveness instead of reaction.
http://www.onbeing.org/blog/everything-we-do-matters/7602
Dr. Kristin Neff at The University of Texas at Austin makes an interesting distinction between self-esteem and self-compassion. She notes that self-esteem, held in high regard in our culture, is based on comparison and judgement and separation while self-compassion “involves recognizing our shared human condition, flawed and fragile as it is.”
Focus for your personal reflections this month
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” -- Albert Einstein
In thinking about the centrality of "suffering" and the "end of suffering" in the Four Noble Truths there is an understanding that that is also the entry point or gateway to understanding and developing compassion in our lives. What might it look like to use COMPASSION as the focus of your personal reflections over the next few weeks?
Here are some questions to spark your interest, an online compassion exercise and the link to a private online Facebook discussion group I created for sharing your insights, questions and challenges.
1. Questions for your own reflection:
2. Shifting Toward Compassion: An online exercise from the NY Center for Nonviolent Communication.
3. Compassion in Regular Life Facebook Discussion Group.
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us the "universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
-- Albert Einstein
I have decided to focus my own practice this month on compassion and how it can be cultivated in our regular lives. If that interests you too, here are some things to get you started.
1. Questions for your own reflection:
What is compassion? What does compassion mean to you?
What does it take to have compassion in your daily life?
What acts of compassion or kindness did you witness in the last day? How were you involved?
2. Shifting Toward Compassion: An online exercise
www.theexercise.org I think this is a powerful tool by Thom Bond from the NY Center for Nonviolent Communication, that can be used in many situations. The purpose is to experience a "shift" in what you are thinking about and a shift in how you feel along a "connection continuum." Even though it is online, you'll want to find some uninterrupted time (20-30 minutes) and a couple sheets of paper and something to write with.
As we recognize there is suffering, dissatisfaction and unreliability in life, we can begin to accept that it is our attachment to and craving after impermanent things that causes our suffering. We see that the things we hope will bring us stability and happiness just don’t live up to their promise. Ultimately, we understand that the end of suffering will depend on changing our own states of mind and our views about our experience, not on relying on the impermanent things we desire. So, how do we begin the work of changing our relationship to the suffering we find in life?
A common analogy used as a model for the Four Noble Truths is that of a physician treating illness. We recognize the illness is present by the symptoms we experience, we see the cause of the illness and we understand the cure for the illness. Finally we lay out a path of treatment. That path, the Fourth Noble Truth, is called the Noble Eightfold Path.
The path, despite it’s name, is not a linear path of increased achievement, but really an interconnected collection of steps the we cultivate in the areas of conduct, mental development and wisdom. We’ll briefly look at each of the steps: Right Speech, Right Action and Right Livelihood (Good Conduct); Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration (Mental Development); Right Attitude and Right View (Wisdom).
“If you let go a little, you’ll have a little happiness. If you let go a lot, you’ll have a lot of happiness. If you let go completely . . . you’ll be completely happy.” - Achaan Chah
The Third Noble Truth, the end of suffering, is a very positive message in Buddhism and tells us that suffering can be overcome and happiness can be found for anyone.
The First Noble Truth reminded us that because everything is impermanent and always changing there is suffering, dissatisfaction and unreliability in life; there just is. Accepting that truth we looked to the Second Noble Truth that told us that craving causes suffering; we get attached to and crave all kinds of impermanent things hoping they will stabilize our experience in the world and make us happy. But, pretty soon, we realize things don’t live up to their promise, they can't, they don't last. So, we begin to put it together that suffering and the causes of suffering depend on our own states of mind and on our own views about what’s going on, not on the things we desire.
The good news, the reassuring news from Third Noble Truth is the fact anyone can change their mind states and their views and know happiness and contentment now. We do this by seeing through and letting go of the misperceptions and delusions we've constructed to support how we want things to be in favor of a natural alignment with how things actually are. The extent to which we let go of our craving is the extent to which suffering will drop away.
In our discussion of the First Noble Truth we saw clearly that suffering is part of life. It arises in relationship to actual pain or injury and in response to unfathomable natural and man-made events that affect hundreds of millions of people. Suffering experienced as unsatisfactoriness also arises when we feel things in life are unreliable because they are constantly changing. Finally, we can also experience suffering as a kind of existential anxiety when we encounter the big “why” questions in life.
The Second Noble Truth tells us that before we can find freedom from suffering, we also need a deep understanding of what causes it. The Buddha found through his own experience that craving and not being able to see the world as it really is were two primary causes of suffering. We crave pleasures of the senses but become unsatisfied and disappointed when they don’t last and we can’t control them. We also suffer when we attach our fears, hopes, facts and behaviors on the world view we’ve built ourselves that is based on insufficient information and incomplete understanding.
Over the next four weeks we'll take a look at the Buddhist Four Noble Truths. These four topics are foundational teachings in Buddhism and offer insights into the suffering and dissatisfaction we all experience in life. The good news from these teachings is the promise that freedom from suffering is possible and available to everyone.
The Four Noble Truths help us (1) realize that suffering is a real part of life, (2) what causes suffering, (3) how we can lessen or remove suffering, and finally provide us with (4) an eight step training program for finding freedom from suffering (The Noble Eightfold Path).
“The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last—that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security.” - Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
All things and experiences are impermanent. They come and go depending on constantly changing conditions. The issue for us is that we really don't want this to be the case and it causes us a lot of suffering. The suffering can take many forms across a wide spectrum of experience from extreme physical and mental pain to the many subtle inner struggles and conflicts that arise in this human life. The Buddha spoke of "the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering. . ." Through meditation and direct experience we can become increasingly aware of our own relationship with suffering and begin to better understand the role we play in its arising and find freedom from it.
Restlessness is often talked about in Buddhism as “monkey mind.” Living in a culture that can’t sit still and has a tweet-centered response time, it’s not surprising that our minds are frequently restless and on the move. When we are dissatisfied with the current conditions, we urgently and relentlessly looking for something better somewhere in the future. Or, we are attempting to keep one step ahead of the results of our past experiences that we feel or believe didn’t go so well. Restlessness, and its close relative worry, are outcomes stemming from how we perceive or view our experience in the world. The clearer we can be about our views and their accuracy and relevance in the present moment, the more we are able to adjust and fine-tune our restless minds and feel more at home now.