Features Of Care -2: Self Compassion

Our perception has a great deal to do with our ability to love ourselves without condition. Our perception, the stories and concepts we live by have so much weight in how we live our life.

So we have to investigate and get below our perception and our stories. We learn to listen for the way we talk to ourselves. When things get challenging or out of our control, what is the happen inside? What are we telling ourselves?
Is our self perception inferior or superior, right or wrong? Are we resisting, are we blaming?

Transcript

So over the past month we've kind of been marinating in self-compassion practice,

The features,

The features of caring for ourselves,

Even loving ourselves.

And our perception,

Our self-perception,

Has a great deal to do with our ability to love ourselves without condition.

In psychology,

Self-perception is defined as the process of observing and interpreting our behaviors,

Our thoughts,

Our feelings,

And using those interpretations,

These observations,

To define who we are.

And you may have noticed,

As you have been in this inquiry with me,

That our self-perception is pretty old.

Many of us defined who we were or had a definition placed upon us when we were very young.

And so that is kind of like the the root,

And then it changes throughout our life.

I have a,

It's called an Unalom.

An Unalom is a spiritual timeline,

And it's in the Buddhist tradition,

These Unaloms.

And I have it tattooed on my forearm,

And on it are dates where there was a significant change in my life,

In my self-definition,

My self-perception,

Who I am,

You know,

Now that I don't drink alcohol.

So there's the date of my sobriety,

Who am I now?

The date of my wedding,

Who am I now?

Who am I now that I'm married?

The date of my child's birth,

Who am I now that I have a child?

Now,

Who am I now that I am a mother?

And then the date of my mother's suicide,

Who am I now that I have no mother?

So our self-definition changes,

Our self-perception changes,

Who we are is always becoming.

We're,

As I guess in the relative reality,

We're always becoming.

In the ultimate reality,

We stop becoming.

And that's a slightly different conversation.

And all of this can be bundled up into what we've talked about,

Which is this idea of selfing.

We're building up a self all the time in our relative reality.

We have all these ideas and concepts and attachments that we have labeled as me and myself and mine.

And what's so important to remember in the teachings of the Buddha is that the idea of self,

Any kind of idea of self,

Is seen as a self-concept.

It's a concept.

And there's nothing wrong with having a self-concept.

The word for that is sannyā,

Sannyā.

And it's usually translated in English as perception.

Our work as practitioners is to begin to see and understand these concepts,

These activities of the mind,

These perceptions of the mind,

The things that we identify ourselves around.

And what I have been offering over these past months is what some of the features look like.

Our ability to care about these aspects that we have identified and constructed over our lifetime,

To love and care for this constructed self,

This relative reality,

This ego that we have built,

And are really in the process of transcending.

It's an important part of our practice to have and cultivate and maintain a healthy egoic self.

That's the way that we let go of it.

This operating system that is our self-perception,

It's not hardwired.

Many of us didn't even install it,

This operating system.

It was installed by previous generations.

But it's important to see the construction,

The becoming of it.

Some of that construction as you begin looking is jumbled and messy.

But as we go into meditation practice,

As the mind gets quieter and quieter,

We're no longer actively constructing the projections or operating through them.

They're like an unalarm.

They're just dates where you become and you become and you become and they make up your life.

And it's helpful to see them.

We're seeing them.

And the teaching is to see things as they are.

To see things as this is not me.

This is not personal.

And it becomes more and more clear.

And more of an aspect of meditation practice as we get quieter.

That is how this seeing of the ego and transcending the ego is a way of accessing the teachings of not self.

It's been the way that I've accessed the teachings of not self.

As we connect with our being without overlaying judgment,

We begin to really live differently.

So I want to close this session and before we begin our dialogue in this with two things.

One is that in the chat,

You will notice that there is a link to Christian nefs.

It's a self compassion sort of test.

I encourage you to take the link and to see where you are with self compassion.

Just check it out for yourself.

And the other thing I'd like to offer is a little bit of a story.

There's an author who used to be a member of the Spirit Rock community and lived in the town that I lived in,

Fairfax,

California.

Her name is Annie Lamont.

And Annie wrote this beautiful piece about her birthday.

And today is my birthday.

Today is my 56th birthday.

And so I was looking at this piece.

And so the invitation as I read this piece to you is to insert your birthday,

Your age into this format that I'll be sharing.

She writes,

I'm going to be 68 in six days.

If I live that long,

I'm optimistic,

Mostly.

God,

What a world.

What a heartbreaking,

Terrifying freak show.

It's completely ruining my birthday plans.

I was going to celebrate how age and the grace of my of myopia has given me the perspective that almost everything sorts itself out in the end.

That goodwill and decency and charity and love always eventually conspire to bring light into dark corners.

That the crucifixion looked like a big win for the Romans.

But turning 68,

Or whatever your age is,

Means you weren't born yesterday.

Turning 68 means you've seen what you've seen.

Ukraine,

Sandy Hook,

The permafrost.

By 68,

You have seen dear friends literally ravaged by cancer.

Lost children,

Unspeakable losses.

The midterms are coming.

My mind is slipping.

My dog died.

Really,

To use the theology terms,

It is too friggin much.

And regrettably,

By 68,

One is both seriously uninterested in a vigorous debate on the existence of evil,

Or even worse,

A pep talk.

So what does that leave?

Glad that you asked.

The answer is simple.

A few very best friends with whom you can share your truth.

That's the main thing.

By 68,

You know that the whole system of our lives works because we are not all nuts at the same time.

You call someone,

And you tell them that you hate everyone and all of life,

And they will be glad that you called.

They felt the same way three days ago,

And you helped them pull out of it by making them laugh or offering a cup of tea.

You took them for a walk or to Target.

And besides our friends,

Getting outside and looking up and around changes us.

Remember,

You can trap bees on the bottom of a mason jar with a bit of honey and without a lid because they don't look up.

They just walk around bitterly bumping into the glass walls.

That is so me.

All they have to do is look up and fly away.

So we look up.

In 68 years,

I have never seen a boring sky.

I've never felt bias about the moon or birdsong.

It is crazy,

Drunken,

Clown college outside our windows.

Almost too much beauty and renewal to take it in.

And the world is warming.

Well,

How does us appreciating spring help the people in Ukraine?

If we believe in chaos theory and the butterfly effect and the flapping of the monarch's wings near my home can lead to weather changes in Tokyo,

Then maybe noticing beauty,

Flapping our wings with amazement,

Changing things in ways we cannot imagine.

It means goodness is quantum.

Even to help the small world helps.

Every prayer which seems to be doing nothing,

Everything is connected.

But quantum is perhaps a little esoteric in our current condition.

I think infinitely less esoteric stuff at 68.

Probably best to have both feet on the ground.

Oogle at the daffodils.

Take a sack of canned goods over to the food pantry and pick up trash.

This helps our insides enormously.

So Sunday,

I will celebrate the absolutely astonishing miracle that I have specifically that I was even born.

As Frederick Buckner wrote,

The grace of God means something like here is your life.

You might never have been,

But you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.

I will celebrate that.

I will celebrate that I have shelter and friends and warm socks and feet to put them in and that God or practice or whatever found a way of turning the madness and shame of my addiction into grace.

I will shake my head with wonder,

Which I do more and more as I age at all the beauty that is left and all that still works after so much has been taken away.

So celebrate with me.

Step outside and let your mouth drop open.

Feed the poor with me locally or if you want to buy something for me,

Make a donation.

My party will not be the same without you.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Thank you.