Compassion For Yourself

Only you know what you have suffered and overcome: the times when you have felt broken and unable to take another step, the times you acted out of ignorance or anger, which resulted in trouble or suffering for someone else, the times' others have caused trouble for you and you had to find a way to either forgive or quietly move on. Compassion for oneself is not a selfish act; it allows more compassion for others as well.

Transcript

Welcome to In the Deep.

I'm your host,

Katherine Ingram.

The following was excerpted from a Zoom session of Dharma Dialogues,

Which was broadcast from Australia on June 21st,

2020.

It's called Compassion for Yourself.

Our history,

Which only goes back a couple,

Well,

I don't know when recorded history started,

But it's not very long.

But what we know of recorded history is that it has been careening between war and peace.

And really,

There are probably not that many times of full world peace on the planet all at once.

There's always skirmishes here and there.

And in a way,

We know this in our own case,

We actually feel war and peace in our own lives.

There's a way,

Isn't it?

You're going along and things are okay for a while.

And then there's a little skirmish happens with,

It doesn't mean a kind of fight with someone,

Just a skirmish in life that some bump happens,

Some difficulty,

Some loss,

Some straining situation.

And then maybe you get some peace,

Catch your breath.

But in these ways,

You're always at the effect of circumstances,

Right?

You're hoping for the peace phase,

So you can relax.

And then you've got to brace yourself and get through the war phase,

Whatever that might be,

Whatever that might mean in your own life.

Is it possible to simply choose peace more?

Can you actually find peace without your circumstances being entirely peaceful or even not peaceful at all?

I know that's harder,

Way harder.

Some people's circumstances are just so hard.

Every day is a grind.

And yet there are joys to be had.

And there are ways to reflect and use the attention to choose peace.

And this can be a moment by moment thing.

Literally a moment by moment thing.

You're in the middle of something that's stressful.

It's agitating.

It's producing,

It's provoking fear or irritation.

Even just having the phrase choose peace might cut through or at least hammer at the chain of it.

But this takes a kind of it takes a focus of attention as needed.

You don't have to do it all the time.

You don't have to walk around saying choose peace,

Choose peace.

You just need it at the moments when peace is not there,

When peace is has been obscured by the stress or the irritation,

Or any number of things that are gnarly parts of existence.

We don't have to ask either for continual ease of being.

I think that's a bridge too far,

A demand that we should not put on ourselves.

I think that for those who subscribe to ideas such as enlightenment,

I see those as just burdensome concepts with no evidence in reality.

People think they're going to hit some kind of steady state and be ever more peaceful if only they could just get the clue.

You know,

Crack the code,

Get some sort of insider vision or whatever.

We've all had a million of those,

By the way.

We all have oodles and oodles of aha moments and insights and now I get it and so on.

But the conditioning is so strong.

The primordial conditioning,

The reptilian conditioning,

The limbic system conditioning,

These are parts of our brain that are quite ancient and over which we have very little control.

So yes,

Those things are operating.

It's a gigantic operating system in each of us and we shouldn't demand that we're going to transcend that operating system entirely.

However,

We can adjust our attention as to where we're putting our attention.

So you don't want to just have your attention constantly locked into the reptilian brain,

Which is just moving only on primitive impulses.

Instead,

You use your attention wisely.

You understand,

You give yourself a pass that sometimes you just lose it.

Sometimes things are so hard.

Now I spoke last night a lot about the fact that when you're in a stressful phase,

Such as the one we're in,

Right,

We're collectively in a historically stressful phase.

Depending on how your system is processing that,

There might be a lot of background anxiety that's just really like it's a kind of layer inside of yourself that's just anxious.

So that every small anxiety or small difficulty that piles in on top of it gets an extra trigger much bigger than it would even deserve in normal times.

Because there's already a lot of tension,

A heightened anxiety.

And this is actually very,

Very unhealthy.

Having this constant state of anxiety is super unhealthy for us.

It's bad for our bodies.

It's bad for our minds.

People are slipping into depression and very extreme stress.

So this is something we have to keep a check on.

And we can,

You can do this,

You can keep a check on it,

You can redirect your attention.

And it's all the things I always talk about and we together many of us have talked about over years.

Having to do with simple joys and gratitude,

Gratitude.

Now I'm going to add in one more,

Those are those those two things,

Simple joys,

Presence,

Living in your senses,

And gratitude.

I talk about all of those a lot.

I'm going to I'm going to add in another.

And that is compassion.

And we're going to start with ourselves feeling compassionate for your own dear self,

That now part of your lifetime is getting taken up with this,

This stressful phase that doesn't look promising in terms of how it's rolling out.

Compassion for each of us,

And some of us are of an age.

I was talking to my mother this morning,

She's about to turn 90.

And she said something which she's never said to me before she said she was depressed.

And she said that it wasn't only the isolation that she's experiencing,

But that there was nothing much for her now to look forward to,

Given her age,

And given the circumstances.

So in other words,

She's saying,

I'll be probably spending out my portion of life that's left in this circumstance.

That's very hard.

These things are in many people's minds now,

Everywhere.

And you know,

It's in young people's minds,

It's in older people's minds,

It's in people who were in the kind of the gallop of their lives in the middle of life,

Maybe they were creating something or building something,

And it got interrupted.

So compassion is an order for all of us.

And start with you.

Right?

Start with you,

You only you know,

All the moments of the day,

That are hard for you,

Or little worries that arise.

Some people are in circumstances where they're economically stressed,

They don't know how they're going to make it economically.

That's a very unsettling thing to live with.

So these are just some reflections about our time,

How,

Given it,

It's due as to how hard it is,

It is hard.

It's not,

It's not very different than lots of other hard,

Horrible times of history.

And people did go on,

And they did find love,

And they did celebrate and they did,

You know,

Of their families and their friends and their spouses and so on.

Their partners,

They people life carries on,

Right?

It carries on through thick and thin.

So how do you carry on how gracefully can you make this these steps?

How can how graceful can they be?

And incidentally,

When you are able to feel compassion for yourself,

To choose peace a lot,

Not all the time,

You don't have to do it all the time.

But choosing peace,

Being grateful,

Being compassionate,

Experiencing your senses,

The privilege of living in your senses,

Then you become a steady,

I like to say a shade tree for others,

You become a sanctuary.

And people can rest in your presence.

And I also like to say they can take you off their list of worries.

On their list of words,

Your name doesn't pop up.

Isn't that nice?

Isn't it nice to think about people you know,

Who somehow or other,

They maintain a buoyancy,

Not a kind of Polly anish,

Overly,

Silly,

Happy,

Happy thing,

Which can get annoying.

But they maintain a,

A general buoyancy,

A kind of clarity of being.

Even if sometimes they,

I wrote about Leonard Cohen,

But it's a it's a line I like.

I said of him,

He had a tear in one eye and a twinkle in the other.

That kind of understanding where it's it's that you you're with someone who gets it who gets how hard it is is not in denial and covering over and looking the other way and dancing as fast as they can to not notice how sad things can get and are for people.

A tear in one eye and a twinkle in the other because they also get the joy and the beauty and the the tragic comedy of the whole thing.

That's a really nice place to rest with someone.

That's really great.

Because then you can pretty much talk about anything.

You can admire things you can appreciate you can celebrate.

And you can also say,

Damn,

This is hard.

Thank you for giving me the to speak.

I really appreciated what you said.

I really like what you ended with in terms of a tear in one eye and a twinkle in the other,

Especially because you related it to Leonard Cohen that makes it always makes it a bit more special.

But I just felt sort of an ache and a relief in my heart at the same time when you said that.

And I like I really like when you said compassion and I feel that from your offerings that you teach me to be compassionate to myself when you offer that very generously.

And I was wanting to say something last night that I didn't get to say in the end that came to me.

Just I wanted to say that I mean,

It's been for quite a long time,

But especially now during this time of isolation.

You're accompanying me.

And I've really what's really remained with me is the different times over the years that I've spent little bursts of time with you.

And you share things,

Small things about your own life and what you do,

Especially like domestically.

So I think most days when I think the way I spend time in my life is I spend quite a bit of time eating and preparing my food.

And particularly I don't know why but at lunch times,

I think my head tells me I'm not enough and I should this and I should that and I'm bad.

It's got lots of stories and I try to manage my mind as you've taught me.

And I find that quite hard work,

But I feel a bit sorry for myself that it's such hard work to contain all the darkness.

But,

You know,

Gratitude floods me most of the time.

And it's just a very interesting juxtaposition between it's almost like the gratitude makes me feel guilty that this is so strong.

I've gone off on a couple of different places.

I was wanting to say something in particular about your being with me.

And like when I'm making my food,

I think this is what Catherine's telling me.

I really appreciated what you said about your mum in terms of the age,

The time that we're in and what stage I'm in.

And I sort of feel,

Oh,

Maybe there'll still be more open time for me.

But I'm very aware that this might be close to the end and this might be what it is.

And just,

You know,

The trees are still just as beautiful as ever.

And I just wanted to say,

When you said about being buoyant and having grace,

I just feel that is really desperate.

I feel desperate about the demand of that language.

So when you went from,

You know,

Living with being graceful about our lives and the way we're living them.

So to say there's a tear in one eye and a twinkle in the other,

It like counterbalances that we're craving to live with grace.

It was beautiful,

As always,

And always so authentic.

It's just so lovely to hear you speak so from the heart and bravely.

So I want to touch a couple of points.

But the idea about the darkness,

There's another frame on it.

And really,

It's about how much you've endured and suffered.

I think part of the darkness for many,

Many people is that they think somehow that they caused it,

That they caused the darkness,

But in fact,

You didn't really choose whatever you're referring to as the darkness,

Why would you have,

You know,

So people feel like damaged or somehow broken or have this shadow that lives in them and all that.

And there's another way to see it very impersonally.

And then the real response to it is compassion for yourself.

You know,

I have this feeling when my old,

You know,

Neurotic stuff arises when my shadow and dark spaces arise.

One of the thoughts that comes quickly along is,

I have to suffer this one again,

Right?

It's basically about a suffering.

Here we go again,

I have to suffer this mind state or this view or this self-recrimination or this self-diminishment.

You know,

It's like,

You know,

Poor thing yet again,

You know.

And that's basically the relationship to it.

It's like watching another creature suffer.

Or like watching,

You know,

You've probably heard me use this example,

When you come to know that an animal has been mistreated.

And then that animal has certain conditioned responses,

Even if sometimes it's bad behavior.

Yet there's a kind of compassion for the innocence of the creature that got harmed and now has these traits.

And that's how I see my own,

A lot of my own shadow material that really through no choosing of my own,

It's very impersonal.

But there it is.

And I do have to suffer it sometimes.

And that's why the mind management suggestion is so helpful.

I don't have to bother with the guilt or the blame.

That part is an extra burden of suffering that's not needed.

You just go for the pure experience.

Here comes some judging thoughts or whatever,

You don't really see it as they're not true exactly,

But they arise.

So yeah,

And to your other point about buoyancy and grace and all of that.

Yeah,

Certainly not like I tried to make clear not in any kind of Pollyanna ish way of like,

False happiness,

Or,

You know,

Just having to constantly be cheerful or anything like that.

But just that you wear your problems well,

You know,

That you,

You know,

And you turn yours into art,

Right?

It's an incredibly graceful way,

You know,

And shares.

And I think one of the beauties of the kind of art that you and many people do,

Is that it gives everybody else permission to feel something very deeply,

That maybe they thought that they were alone in,

You know.

So that's what I meant by grace and,

And actually buoyancy as well,

Because part of the buoyancy is just keeping on keeping on,

You know.

That's a helpful refrain of experiencing,

My experiencing the shadow,

That's a helpful refrain.

It's just my ego is so attached to experiencing that is who I am.

It's hard to get another perspective in there when it's happening.

But yes,

Yes,

Well,

It doesn't even because I need to reflect deeply on what you've said,

Somehow,

These things sometimes they hold,

And it becomes,

It enters my deeper,

The deeper place where I experience these things.

So maybe I'm just going to bring the same issue to you.

And you'll have to tell me the same story.

I'm happy to do that.

I always love to talk with you.

You started responding to me by saying about being compassionate to myself and what came to me,

Which is so obvious.

I constantly need to tell somebody how difficult it is for me so that someone else will tell me to be compassionate to myself.

It's like I need that from the outside still,

Like a child.

But thank you for giving me that nourishment.

Yes,

Well,

It's always a pleasure to speak.

And I think I'm probably not only speaking to you on this subject,

I think it's a very common thing for people.

Due to the enormity of what we're dealing with,

And I think people I knew have defined it really well,

Just all aspects of our life and nothing that we've ever dealt with before,

That's so,

It's just so every part of our life,

You know,

We've all had difficult times and then that everyone else is dealing with the same difficult things at the same time,

The collective,

As you mentioned.

And so my question is very brief.

I just would like more practical day to day,

How do we keep our head above water?

How do we be so that,

Like you said,

Buoyant for others,

And just keep our own sanity?

Just to speak more about that.

Yes,

I mean,

It's the usual things that you've heard me say.

The go to for me,

The first line of when my mind starts going into crazy stuff and fear and future projection is gratitude.

I go into gratitude for this what I have now.

Like when Rosie said,

The trees are still beautiful,

Right?

I like to keep my gratitude practice,

If you could call it that,

Very basic and very immediate.

So in other words,

This cup of tea,

And having this conversation,

Right,

So there's a part of my awareness that's tracking that I'm very appreciative to be doing this and having this cup of tea and having this conversation.

I'm appreciative that I am sitting in a relatively comfortable temperature.

All my senses are working fairly well,

Given my advanced years.

You know,

All my senses are working.

I get to I can walk,

I can do things,

I can make myself a meal,

All of these small things.

I let myself notice and feel gratitude for.

So that's my first point.

I also,

Sometimes I'll sort of grab my attention and force it into my senses in a sense like,

You know,

Really just pay attention to the breath,

Notice that I'm hearing like,

Really start listening,

Maybe try to hear the birds as ways of interrupting negative thinking and scary thoughts just to interrupt them so that they don't take hold and make a big gigantic story and write a novel of scary,

Spooky stories.

So I interrupt the process whenever it comes up,

Whenever I need to.

Sometimes I'll realize,

I need to move my body.

I need to shake out something.

I have to go outside and breathe deep.

In my case,

I live near an ocean,

I go walk on the beach,

That kind of clears the cobwebs.

In your case,

You know,

You have a partner and even just just having a chat about anything,

Right?

Of course,

You have each other to turn to in moments of real need,

And to really process what's going on in your heart and when you're in a dark moment.

But otherwise,

Even just to have a chat,

Just to have a chat about anything,

You know.

And we can,

For those of us who are not living with partners,

Find that in this case,

With us being locked down,

It's mostly phone chats,

Isn't it?

We can't really convene the way we have in terms of being in someone's company.

But you actually have that built in.

So all those little ways of reflection and to leaving room for the mystery,

Basically saying whatever scary picture you're entertaining,

You don't know for sure that's how it's going to play out.

Right?

You don't know for sure.

So you don't want to invest too much in a big assumption,

When in fact,

It may not go that way.

It may go some other way,

It may go worse than you're imagining,

You just don't really know.

So rather than build up a whole case in your mind,

You stay with what's here.

Sometimes it's possible,

Often actually,

To because of the very nature of destruction that we all face,

Each of us individually face that,

Because of that,

It's so heightens the beauty and the feelings of love and connection,

Because they are so temporary.

And so it's like the Buddha said,

Like a star at dawn,

It's just this temporary beauty.

And then you don't see it.

And so it's to understand all of those kinds of things and to have some vigilance as to what your attention is doing,

What your awareness is up to.

You know,

You don't just let it wander around in bad neighborhoods,

You know,

You basically,

You know,

Have to kind of be as needed.

You don't want to be sitting on it like a cat on a mouse.

But if you find yourself feeling tense,

Feeling anxious,

Feeling erotic,

Making bad decisions based on your stress,

That's time to take yourself in hand,

And counter it however you can,

Whatever your ways are,

Counter it with understanding that your joy factor and your calming factor is out of balance,

You need to revisit that and address it.

Just very practical,

Keep it practical.

Nothing esoteric.

Just very all about how you're using your attention.

One of the things that I've been really has been with me lately,

Is about stress and distress.

And I prayed and meditated on it.

And I came to a point of forgiveness,

And self forgiveness.

It came via grace.

It's not something I know how to do.

But I was so touched in how it unraveled some very tight knots that I thought were there for good.

I know Leonard's got stuff to say about stuff like that.

So my kind of question,

Comment to you is about forgiveness and self forgiveness and how to go back to that point.

I delighted in the joy that came from it,

The other side of it.

It felt stale,

Getting out,

Like,

Oh,

Yeah,

As you know.

Maybe that experience has created a kind of pattern.

But since you don't know how you got there in the first place,

You probably can't figure out another methodology to get you to have that again.

But just that it's created a certain pathway in your being that might make it more easy to visit spontaneously.

And that's how I've usually found things to be that,

You know,

That suddenly there's an opening.

And even though there may be a clouding again,

Because that opening was there,

It's easier to experience it again.

So I would just say,

Relax.

That's always the answer.

Just relax and have a welcoming,

You know,

Have a welcoming for that.

Yeah.

Forgiveness,

Self compassion,

As we've been talking about all of those things are all related.

Yes.

Right.

And that thing that you talked about last night about the let go.

The let go muscle.

Just because I realised a lot of these are long hard battles that I've battled to keep these stresses in my life.

Yeah.

And to undo them like they're wrong,

They've done wrong,

You know,

All that stuff.

No,

I'm going,

Oh,

Really do I still have that?

It's more like,

You know,

It's more like the shedding of a snake skin,

You know,

You can't rip it off,

It sheds off on its own good time.

And,

But what can happen is,

As something is falling away,

Whatever it is,

Whether it's a personal thing,

Or whether it's something bigger,

That we're all experiencing,

We're all expecting last night,

When I spoke about it was in specific relation to how we're having to let go of all kinds of things,

For instance,

Our travel plans.

Lots of our plans are poof,

Poof,

They're gone.

You know,

But even in personal ways as well,

When you see something is gone,

Even the phrase let go is extraneous,

It's already gone.

So you're not even in control of the letting go.

But what's interesting to note is your impulse to want to grab at it,

Despite the fact that it's gone.

And that's just a very painful motion.

That's just constant retriggering of disappointment.

So I've noticed in my own life,

This is a really basic example.

But when I break something,

I don't break a lot of things,

But occasionally I break a glass or something,

You know,

I don't have any,

There's no resistance at all.

It's like nothing,

Or something's lost or lose,

You know,

An earring,

I'm out and I lose an earring.

When that's at that level,

It's just,

It doesn't even get an extra thought.

And I like to apply that to lots of other things that are harder,

That are bigger than just an earring or a glass.

But just as an example,

That when something's gone,

It's gone.

Right?

Like in Tibetan Buddhism,

They say,

Gatte,

Gatte,

Paragatte,

Parasamgatte,

Bodhisvaha,

It means gone,

Gone,

Gone beyond,

Gone beyond the beyond.

Hail the goer.

I was thinking about the beginning of the lockdown.

At the beginning,

You were talking about fear quite a lot.

And I was born two years before the start of the Second World War.

So my boyhood was very,

Very much colored by bombing.

Did you go into bomb shelters and things?

Yes.

In the night,

You would hear an air raid and you'd go into the shelters.

Yes.

So the few times I went out after lockdown started and before I was told to shield,

The atmosphere took me quite a while to recognize what this feeling was outside.

And eventually I put my finger on it.

And I felt like this as a child.

This was what the war was like.

And what I chose to see was that it's the uncertainty,

The way people behave in uncertainty creates an amazing amount of fear.

People need security.

I heard somebody talking about what's going on and they said,

We are grieving for the certainty that we had for the kind of comfortable,

Rolling process of existence.

That's brilliant.

So around all of that,

In the weeks since then,

What I've recognized in myself is that a whole lot of behaviors that I took for granted in a way that I wasn't happy about,

But I thought I was stuck with,

Like controlling behaviors,

Very,

Very defensive behaviors,

Very judgmental behaviors.

All of those behaviors came out of my early learnings in the war and everybody had to behave the same.

The thing that's different from war is that in the war there was a clear enemy.

The enemy was throwing bombs at you.

There were clear sides.

But what we're in the middle of now is that the enemy is invisible.

I thought at one point,

It's like everybody's a double agent.

I think I'm all right,

But I'm not quite sure.

And I'm certainly not sure whether you're all right or not.

It is like so much fear.

But I think there's so much to learn from fear.

Because what I've thought for a long time is that we need an ego.

We need an ego that can be frightened to survive.

Otherwise,

You're just not going to last very long.

You need to be a certain sort of awareness.

Well,

I've often spoken about how our ancestors were tough.

They were fighters.

They were probably very anxious because you don't just rest on your laurels if you've got to go out and.

.

.

Yes.

And it's hardwired,

Isn't it?

But it's become displaced.

The things that are just completely cerebral,

Like status.

Yes.

And other kinds of safety and things like that.

And we're particularly bombarded with this information,

Right?

Yes.

I mean,

If we were just dealing with COVID and have all the other threats we're looking at and hearing about and all different dramas going on at once,

Flooding into our screens every day,

It would be a different experience.

It would be much more,

Not that it would be calm,

But it would be calmer.

So,

Because we feel barraged by so much information,

It's scary and portending ill.

It's a whole other level of the stress on the system that we have to be watchful of.

And I think it's fair to unplug a lot of the time.

You don't need to know it.

You need to know how to keep yourself safe in this COVID situation,

Right?

But a lot of the other stuff you don't need to know.

You can do nothing about.

You can't affect it.

It's not going to necessarily affect you exactly.

And yet,

We fret over the endless things that people are screaming about.

It's a great time to sit.

It's a great time for the Dharma.

It's really a good time for the Dharma.

Really return to the basics.

Yeah.

And that's very interesting what you said.

I've heard the analogy about this feeling like 1939,

Not only because of COVID,

But other reasons as well.

And yet,

You've really put a kind of visceral quality to it that you actually had the deja vu of this is what it's reminded me of.

Yes.

Yeah.

Where there's a collective fear,

Whether it's invisible or it's Nazis,

There's a collective shared experience of unrest.

And yes,

Very interesting.

And,

You know,

It's kind of like,

It always ends up,

No matter what the conversation,

It always ends up,

We're back to the same ways of reflecting and of stepping forward and what it helps us,

You know,

Get through in the night.

And how do we calm ourselves down?

How do we offer the best we can to others and to ourselves?

So good to see you.