Compassion Practice is Integral to Mindfulness Practice

“Be full of kindness toward yourself. Accept yourself just as you are. Make peace with your shortcomings. Embrace even your weaknesses. Be gentle and forgiving with yourself as you are at this very moment. If thoughts arise as to how you should be such and such a way, let them go. Establish fully the depth of these feelings of goodwill and kindness. Let the power of loving friendliness saturate your entire body and mind. Relax in its warmth and radiance. Expand this feeling to your loved ones, to people you don’t know or feel neutrally about – and even to your adversaries!”

- Bhante G., Mindfulness in Plain English

 

In the West, many teachers and proponents of mindfulness work with the belief that all mindfulness practice inherently includes a compassion component, therefore compassion does not have to be taught. I maintain, however, that compassion practice should be taught directly during any mindfulness training, particularly in the West, and especially with beginners. Without direct instruction in compassion and in particular self-compassion, mindfulness loses one of its most valuable ethical anchors, and vulnerable students can get lost in self-doubt, feelings of unworthiness, or failure. Without kindness, mindfulness could even become dangerous.

In an effort to make mindfulness easier to mainstream, in an effort to get more people onto cushions and into the present moment, some of the ethical and moral guidelines of the practice have been left behind. Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness many ways, but often with these basic phrases: “moment-to-moment, non-reactive, non-judgmental attending …” (p. 286). I feel that this focus on a non-judgmental attitude is incorrect – that mindfulness is not non-judgmental. Rather, there is a filter of gentleness, of kindness, of reverence that must be present for mindfulness to arise. Mindfulness practice separated from befriending, from gentleness, loses some of its potential to affect positive change in the practitioner’s life and in the world at large. I agree with Ed Halliwell, who recently wrote that “Mindfulness just isn’t mindfulness without kindfulness … Mindfulness is just not neutral noticing. There are a clear set of attitudes which underpin the practice, and compassion may be the most important.”

Compassion and lovingkindness are two of the four heavenly abodes taught by the Buddha along with sympathetic joy, and equanimity. “Heavenly abodes” is the most common translation from Pali, but, according to Nyanaponika Thera, another translation is “sublime states of mind.” They are called abodes because the mind should, with practice, come to reside in them more often than not. It is recommended in the teachings that practitioners use these sublime mindstates as “… principles of conduct and objects of reflection but also as subjects of methodical meditation.” (Thera). In other words, these desired states of mind require practice in order to manifest.

The modern mindfulness movement in the West largely owes its existence to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s groundbreaking work in bringing mindfulness to the masses through his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. In designing that program for use in the medical community, Kabat-Zinn sought to remove any potentially-limiting religious undertones from the traditional vipassana, or insight, meditation practice. There are some that feel that this streamlining of mindfulness has led to “McMindfulness” – a repackaging and repurposing of the rich practices steeped in Buddhism and centuries of moral and ethical study for the more fast-paced, impatient, grasping West. Jon Kabat-Zinn discusses his decision not to include lovingkindness as an explicit practice in his MBSR programs. He feels that “…all meditation practices are fundamentally acts of lovingkindness, and when taught and practiced that way, obviate the need for a single practice claiming that orientation.” (Kabat-Zinn, p. 285).

As a beginning meditator, and, in fact, for several years of practice and of studying Kabat-Zinn’s books and methods, I personally did not understand that the awareness that was being cultivated was to be of a gentle or loving nature, and because of this, I found that it was difficult to sustain practice both in length of an individual sitting and in trying to maintain a daily practice over weeks or months or years. With my default mode naturally turning toward self-criticism, the practice of mindfulness was just another place where I practiced critical mind states: I did not feel good enough, or I felt like there was something lacking in my practice that made it not worth the effort to maintain. Simply put, over time, I felt like I was not meditating correctly, and perhaps I was not cut out for the practice. With time and with a better understanding of lovingkindness, practices, however, my practice has flourished.

In reviewing some of the prominent texts on mindfulness, I have found that different teachers choose to approach the subject of teaching mindfulness in different ways. Jon Kabat-Zinn, as we have seen, feels that the practice of mindfulness itself contains lovingkindness, and so the focus, especially with beginners, can be placed firmly and exclusively on the mindfulness practice. He states: “… my biggest reservation in regard to teaching formal lovingkindness practice was that it might be confusing for people who were in the early stages of being introduced for the first time to the attitude and practice of non-doing and non-striving that underlie all the meditation practices … The reason for my hesitation was that in the instructions for lovingkindness meditation, there is an inevitable sense that you are being invited to engage in doing something, namely invoking particular feelings and thoughts and generating desirable states of mind and heart.” (p. 285-286)

In the newest edition of his influential book Mindfulness in Plain English, Bhante Gunaratana (known as Bhante G by his students) has added an afterward that explains metta practice. Bhante G explains how he translates the word metta: “The word metta comes from another Pali word, mitra, which means ‘friend.’ That is why I prefer to use the phrase ‘loving friendliness’ as a translation of metta, rather than ‘loving kindness.’ The Sanskrit word mitra also refers to the sun … Just as the sun’s rays provide energy for all living things, the warmth and radiance of metta flows in the heart of all living beings.” (Gunaratana, p. 181)

Bhante G splits off a bit from Kabat-Zinn in describing the focus of learning mindfulness. Here Bhante G seems to be describing learning the two practices – mindfulness and loving friendliness - in unison and practicing them together: “Without loving friendliness, our practice of mindfulness will never successfully break through our craving and rigid sense of self. Mindfulness, in turn, is a necessary basis for developing loving friendliness. The two are always developed together …” (p. 177)

Christopher Germer, a clinical psychologist who uses mindfulness and compassion-based psychotherapy in his work, describes three levels of mindfulness practice. One starts with focused awareness, usually on the breath, then moves on to choiceless awareness or open monitoring, where attention is granted to whatever sensations or thoughts arise in the moment. From there, the practitioner moves on to lovingkindness and compassion practices. (Germer, p. 16-22) Each of these aspects of practice can be a point of meditative focus and study in its own right. As Germer describes it, focused awareness is how most mindfulness practices begin, bringing attention to the breath or other bodily sensations over and over again for a duration of time. By contrast, in open monitoring, “… conscious attention moves naturally among the changing elements of experience … open monitoring cultivates equanimity in the midst of random and unexpected life events. Technically, mindfulness refers to the skill of open monitoring.” (Germer, p. 18)

Germer describes loving-kindness practice as “the quality of mindful awareness – the attitude or emotion – rather than the direction of the awareness.” (p. 19) Lovingkindness brings “… tenderness, soothing, comfort, ease, care, and connection. These qualities are particularly important when we’re dealing with difficult emotions that constrict our awareness and activate our defenses.” (p. 19)

My practice has only gotten deeper with greater attention to lovingkindness and less focus on sustaining focused attention on sensory details. In my practice and in my students’ practices, we have found that using the breath or sensory input as the only anchors can be limiting. Some of us have a natural tendency to be too tuned in to sensory input already. For instance, some of my students with asthma and other respiratory ailments find that focusing on the breath evokes anxiety. For some, physical pain is constant and debilitating, and so practices that are relaxing for others, such as guided relaxation or body scans, only serve to turn up the volume on their pain perception. For some with Asperger’s, the work is in turning down sensory input rather than turning it up. In my work in yoga therapy, I have found that difficulties with being still particularly plague those who are experiencing anxiety, panic, hyperactivity and even more run-of-the-mill daily stress.

With anxiety and stress, the mind and nervous system can feel as if they have been hijacked by the fight, flight, freeze response. In this state, being present to bodily sensations or to whatever arises in the field of awareness is challenging to say the least. There are other mind states that do not lend themselves to mindfulness practice, as well, at least in the beginning of learning how to sit. Kristin Neff is a leading contemporary scholar of self-compassion who currently is working to understand the efficacy of self-compassion in wellness and to spread the practice of self-compassion in a way that mirrors Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work with mindfulness. She states: “Intuitively, it would seem optimal to learn mindfulness before self-compassion given that mindfulness is needed for compassion. However, for people suffering from severe shame or self-criticism, they might need to first cultivate self-compassion in order to have the sense of emotional safety needed to fully turn toward their pain with mindfulness.” (Neff, in press, p. 26-28) Contradicting himself a bit, Jon Kabat-Zinn seems to agree that explicit instruction in self-compassion is sometimes necessary for individual practitioners dealing with particular mindstates: “…these practices can sometimes serve as a necessary and skillful antidote to mind states such as ferocious anger, which may at the time of their arising be simply too strong to attend to via direct observation unless one’s practice is very developed. At such times, formal lovingkindness practice can function to soften one’s relationship to such overwhelmingly afflictive mind states, so that we can avoid succumbing completely to their energies. It also makes such mind states more approachable and less intractable.” (p. 287)

Interestingly, metta as a practice originally was offered by the Buddha as a way to deal with anxiety and fear. The Buddha sent monks to meditate in a forest occupied by tree spirits. The spirits tried to expel the monks, and, indeed, the monks were afraid and ran back to the Buddha, begging to be sent somewhere else to practice. The Buddha sent the monks back to the same enchanted forest but with the protection of the metta practices. “This was the first teaching of metta meditation … it is said that the monks went back and practiced metta, so that the tree spirits became quite moved by the beauty of the loving energy filling the forest, and resolved to care for and serve the monks in all ways.” (Salzberg, p. 25)

            In my teaching, I have found that children delight in this story of the forest monks, and they tend to love the idea of having a meditation practice that can help them to dispel fear. The book Buddha at Bedtime by Dharmachari Nagaraja has a beautiful metta meditation for children that is a favorite of the youngest yogis with whom I practice. The metta phrases suggested there are “May I be happy – may I be really happy from my head right down to my toes. I love myself dearly” with the focus first on the self, then on friends, teachers, and neighbors, then on all beings (Nagaraja, p. 137).

Salzberg (p. 39-40) describes the beginning steps of the metta practice for adults, where one gently repeats phrases of goodwill for ourselves and then for others. First, practitioners sit comfortably and reflect on good things about themselves or on their wishes for happiness. Then practitioners choose phrases that express what they most deeply wish for themselves and they repeat these phrases, coordinating this repetition with the breath or just resting on the phrases themselves in turn. As I have been taught, these phrases are some variation of: “May I be safe, may I be happy, may I live with ease.”

As a word of warning, Salzberg notes: “There are times when feelings of unworthiness come up strongly, and you clearly see the conditions that limit your love for yourself. Breathe gently, accept that these feelings have arisen, remember the beauty of your wish to be happy, and return to the metta phrases.” (Salzberg, p. 40) In a formal metta practice, these phrases are then turned outward to focus on a dear teacher, a difficult person, adversary, or enemy, and then the universe at large or all sentient beings, each in turn. Interestingly, another guiding teacher, Narayan Liebenson, suggests that the difficult person, or enemy, might be oneself.

As we can see from all of these teachings, these practices of befriending begin with a focus on the self, making self-compassion the very basic seed of the formal practice of lovingkindness. Typically, one begins the practice by wishing love and good things for the self. Neff’s definition of self-compassion has been incredibly useful in my own practice and teaching. She describes three interacting components of the self-compassion practice: “…self-kindness versus self-judgment, a sense of common humanity versus isolation, and mindfulness versus over-identification when confronting painful self-relevant thoughts and emotions.” (Neff & Germer, p. 28) It is useful to look at each of these three components of self-compassion - self-kindness, a sense of common humanity, and mindfulness - separately.

In the West, we put great value on being kind to others, but, either directly or through messages from the omnipresent media, we are often taught to be harshly critical of ourselves. Imagine, for a moment, if you were to direct your own harsh self-talk toward a loved one and actually gave that self-talk voice. We can be cruel to ourselves in ways that we would never tolerate if we directed that cruelty outward. Neff (in press, p. 5) explains self-kindness as working to be “… supportive and understanding toward ourselves. Our inner dialogues are gentle and encouraging rather than harsh and belittling. This means that instead of continually punishing ourselves for not being good enough, we kindly acknowledge that we’re doing the best we can … instead of immediately trying to control or fix the problem, a self-compassionate response might entail pausing first to offer oneself soothing and comfort.” (Neff & Germer, p. 28)

Common humanity, the second basic tenet of self-compassion, involves recognizing that, as human beings, we suffer. This is one of the primary philosophical building blocks of Buddhism. For some, when difficulty arises, there is a sense of isolation, a sense of “Why me?”, or a general feeling that everyone else is somehow better off, somehow immune to suffering. Instead of seeing suffering as a basic human trait, it is easy to find oneself feeling singled out. “Self-compassion connects one’s own flawed condition to the shared human condition, so that features of the self are considered from a broad, inclusive perspective … When failures and disappointments are experienced as an aberration not shared by the rest of humankind, people may feel isolated from others who are presumably leading ‘normal’ happy lives.” (Neff & Germer, p. 29)

The idea of commonality of suffering is another founding principle of the Buddha’s teachings. The Buddha stated this fact as part of his Four Noble Truths: “The first Noble Truth of the Buddha’s teachings is the centrality, universality, and unavoidability of dukkha, this innate suffering of dis-ease that invariably, in subtle or not-subtle-at-all ways, colors and conditions the deep structure of our very lives. All Buddhist meditative practices revolve around the recognition of dukkha, the identification of its root causes, and the description, development, and deployment of pathways whereby we might each become free from its oppressive, blinding, and imprisoning influences.” (Kabat-Zinn, p. 127-128)

In contrast, in the dominant U.S. culture, we tend to avoid suffering at all costs. After all, one of our nation’s founding truths is the right to the pursuit of happiness! We stay busy to avoid looking at suffering, we run from it, push it down, medicate it away, cover it up with gloss and glitter, and distract ourselves from it with our various entertainments. Further, it is a common part of our identification as fiercely individualistic that we act alone, and when we suffer, we often are taught to suffer alone and privately, putting on masks of positivity for the outside world. In our culture, asking for help – or even acknowledging to oneself that one might need help - can be seen as weakness. Common humanity asks us to see that we are all connected, that we all suffer, and that we all need compassion and help (even from ourselves) during times of suffering. “With self-compassion … we take the stance of a compassionate ‘other’ toward ourselves, allowing us to take a broader perspective on our selves and our lives. By remembering the shared human experience, we feel less isolated when we are in pain … Self-compassion recognizes that we all suffer, and therefore fosters a connected mindset that is inclusive of others.” (Neff, in press, p. 5)

In the West, another limit is often placed on self-compassion by prevailing cultural thought. Here, we share the idea that we are flawed from the beginning. Steeped in our traditions of original sin, we are taught that we are flawed from birth (or maybe even conception). Because of the sins of our forbearers, we need to be fixed, and our traditions teach that this fixing can only come from some other – a priest or preacher, from God, from outside of ourselves. In contrast, in the Buddhist traditions, it is taught that basic human nature is pure and that answers come from within:

Traditionally, Buddhists are reluctant to talk about the ultimate nature of human beings. But those who are willing to make descriptive statements at all usually say that our ultimate essence or buddha nature is pure, holy, and inherently good. The only reason that human beings appear otherwise is that their experience of that ultimate essence has been hindered; it has been blocked like water behind a dam. The hindrances are the bricks of which that dam is built. As mindfulness dissolves the bricks, holes are punched in the dam, and compassion and sympathetic joy come flooding forward. As meditative mindfulness develops, your whole experience of life changes. Your experience of being alive, the very sensation of being conscious becomes lucid and precise, no longer just an unnoticed background for your preoccupations. It becomes a thing consistently perceived. (Gunaratana, p. 170).

The Buddhist teachings tell us that we all have Buddha Nature, or the embryo of the Buddha, tathagata-garbha, within us. We are all born whole and pure, embodiments of the Buddha nature, and we all have the capacity within us to reach enlightenment. In some Buddhist traditions, we can do this immediately, in this lifetime, and in others, it is the effort of many lifetimes. This Buddha Nature at our center can give us something very beautiful and innate to tap into when looking for ways to learn to practice self-compassion, ways to learn to love ourselves once more.

Further, many of us feel that we only can love ourselves if we are worthy of love. This is the difference between self-esteem and self-compassion. Self-esteem has conditions attached to it, for example, “I will love myself if I get that big bonus during my review at work tomorrow,” or, “If only I could lose ten pounds, then I would be able to love myself.” Self-compassion is loving yourself simply because you are. To overcome potentially a lifetime of learning that we only are worthy of love under certain conditions, practicing self-compassion must be just that – a practice.

There are moment-by-moment ways to practice self-compassion in everyday life as difficulties inevitably arise: self-soothing and giving oneself comfort, recognizing the commonality of suffering throughout the human experience. There are more formal ways to practice as well. Neff has aspired to boil down the broader practices of metta to just self-compassion and to simplify and systematize these practices so that they can be experienced by a broad group of people in the general public and in clinical populations. Neff also aspires to have her work be quantifiable so that the outcomes and effects of the practice on the various populations can be observed and reported on. To that end, she has developed a program called Mindful Self-Compassion, or MSC. In Neff & Germer (p. 30-31) she describes the particulars of this program as follows:

The structure of MSC is modeled on MBSR, with participants meeting for 2 or 2 ½ hours once a week over the course of 8 weeks and also meeting for a half-day meditation retreat … MSC teaches both formal (sitting meditation) and informal (during daily life) self-compassion practices. There are experiential exercises and discussion periods in each MSC session in addition to homework assignments to help participants learn how to be kinder to themselves. The goal is to provide participants with a variety of tools to increase self-compassion, which they can integrate into their lives ... The program also teaches general skills of loving-kindness, which is a type of friendly benevolence given to oneself in everyday situations (compassion is mainly relevant for situations involving emotional distress) … The program makes it clear how judging oneself when things go wrong tends to exacerbate emotional pain, while self-compassion helps to alleviate that pain …

In place of the traditional metta phrases, in Mindful Self-Compassion, practitioners are taught these phrases: “May I feel safe, may I feel peaceful, may I be kind to myself, may I accept myself as I am.” The final phrase, “may I accept myself as I am” may prove to be the crux of the self-compassion practice, and, indeed, the crux of mindfulness as well.

Kristin Neff has shown that Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) “… is effective at increasing self-compassion, mindfulness, compassion for others, and other aspects of wellbeing. Moreover, the benefits of MSC appear to be enduring, lasting at least 1 year after completion of the program.” (Neff & Germer, p. 40) This study measured participants’ perception of increases in the following aspects of well-being: mindfulness, compassion for others, and life satisfaction while also measuring participants’ perception of decreases in depression, anxiety, stress, and emotional avoidance. Further, Neff found: “…the more MSC participants practiced formal meditation, the more they increased their self-compassion levels. Similarly, the degree that participants practiced informal self-compassion techniques (e.g., putting a hand over one’s heart in times of stress) in daily life also predicted gains in self-compassion. This implies that self-compassion is a teachable skill that is ‘dose dependent.’ The more you practice it the more you learn it.” (Neff & Germer, p. 40)

It appears that healthy early childhood experiences and relationships may lay the groundwork for the development of self-compassion. “Research supports the notion that self-compassion is related to the care-giving system and early childhood interactions. People who lack self-compassion are more likely to have critical mothers, for instance, come from families in which there was a lot of conflict, and display insecure attachment patterns, while the opposite is true for those with higher levels of self-compassion.” (Neff & McGeehee, 2010) Even though early childhood experiences play a part in developing healthy levels of self-compassion in an individual, self-compassion skills can be taught, as Neff shows in her work with MSC.

One limitation of Neff’s work so far is that most of her study participants had prior mindfulness experience, but she (in press, p. 18-19) addresses this, “… it might be that practices taught in the program are only effective for those who already know how to meditate. On the other hand, the fact that MSC participants increased in wellbeing even though most had prior meditation experience suggests that MSC offers tangible benefits over and above mindfulness meditation alone.”

Neff continues to research MSC practices in settings comparable to those that Kabat-Zinn has used to quantify the effects of MSBR. Neff is showing that: “Overall, research findings so far suggest that self-compassion may be a stronger predictor of depression, happiness, life satisfaction and psychological wellbeing than mindfulness alone.” (in press, p. 23) She describes situations where one can be mindful without being accepting, and any meditator who has practiced for any length of time will be familiar with this scenario:

Feelings of self-kindness and common humanity may often accompany mindfulness of painful experiences, of course, so that self-compassion may automatically co-arise with mindfulness itself. The two do not always co-arise, however. It is possible to be mindfully aware of painful thoughts and feelings without actively soothing and comforting oneself, or remembering that these feelings are part of the shared human experience. Sometimes it takes an extra intentional effort to be compassionate toward our own suffering, especially when our painful thoughts and emotions involve self-judgments and feelings of inadequacy. (Neff, in press, p. 20)

Metta or lovingkindness or loving friendliness is a powerful practice that deserves to be experienced fully on its own with dedicated practice. It is my belief that it should be taught alongside mindfulness both as a way for practitioners to support themselves in the practice of meditation and as a way for practitioners to bolster themselves in the face of difficulties that may arise on the mat or cushion. This is particularly important for beginner meditators, for child meditators, and for meditators raised on the prevailing cultural belief in the West that the individual is inherently flawed. Lovingkindness, particularly its seed practice of self-compassion, can be a powerful antidote to difficult mindstates for those whose experiences on the cushion include anxiety, stress, self-doubt, fear, and other big emotions or nervous system activation. “Ironically, we yearn for an intrinsic happiness that has been our birthright all along. It has proven so elusive and so ephemeral because we have been so lost in our own minds’ desires, by virtue of having, to one degree or another, lost our minds and forgotten our hearts.” (Kabat-Zinn, p. 597). Lovingkindness and self-compassion are the map back to our hearts, to a deep, lasting, and loving connection with ourselves and to a deep, lasting, and loving connection with all beings.

 

References

Bhante, Henepola Gunaratana. (2002). Mindfulness in Plain English. Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications.

Germer, Christopher K., Ronald D. Siegel, Paul R. Fulton, eds. (2005). Mindfulness and Psychotherapy. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Halliwell, Ed. (2014). “The Power of Kindness (and One Surefire Way to Know If You ‘Get’ Mindfulness).” Retrieved from http://www.mindful.org/mindful-voices/the-examined-life/.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (2005). Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness. New York, NY: Hyperion.

Nagaraja, Dharmachari. (2008). Buddha at Bedtime: Tales of Love and Wisdom for You to Read with your Child to Enchant, Enlighten, and Inspire. London: Watkins Publishing.

Neff, K. D., & Dahm, K. A. (in press). “Self-Compassion: What it is, what it does, and how it relates to mindfulness”. To appear in in M. Robinson, B. Meier & B. Ostafin (Eds.) Mindfulness and Self-Regulation. New York: Springer. Retrieved from www.self-compassion.org.

Neff, K. D., & Germer, C. K. (2013). A Pilot Study and Randomized Controlled Trial of the Mindful Self-Compassion Program. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 69(1), 28-44. doi:10.1002/jclp.21923

Neff, K. D. & McGeehee, P. (2010). Self-compassion and psychological resilience among adolescents and young adults. Self and Identity, 9, 225-240. Retrieved from www.self-compassion.org.

Salzberg, S. (2004). Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Thera, Nyanaponika (1994). “The Four Sublime States: Contemplations in Love, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy and Equanimity.” Retrieved from http://accesstoinsight.org/lib/nyanaponika/wheel006.html

Mindfulness in Children: An Overview

“Your children have important lessons to learn, but even more important ones to teach. What can they teach? How to pay complete attention. How to play all day without tiring. How to let one thing go, and move on to another with no backward glances.”

-       Shakta Kaur Khalsa

 

The wooden lotus flower glows with cinnamon warmth in a sunbeam spotlight descending through the skylight. My eye traces the contours, petal after petal, breath after breath, and around again, for minutes, for hours as I sit at Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. There is a memory here, too, and my mind traces around its edges as I witness. Sitting in a church distant in time and miles from where I am now: were they the same eyes that traced the contours of the crucified wooden Jesus, bloodied brow, open wound at the ribs, emaciated, hungry, face a frozen grimace forever and always? Around and around his outline, every Sunday for years and years.

Today, my adult self realizes that, as a child in that church, I was meditating. I did not understand much of the ritual going on around me, but I knew that I was expected to pay attention, or at least look as if I were paying attention, and so I fixed my eyes on Jesus and breathed. I did not understand the words of the scriptures or the chants. But I knew that this stillness felt good, peaceful, and that I could lose myself in the finest details of Jesus on the cross while the adults attended to adult things all around me.

            I had a similar focus somewhere near the teacher during years of elementary school. The lessons were boring and monotonous, but if I focused my thoughts on a spot on the chalkboard, I could find the same peaceful stillness that I found in church. And on the ball fields during gym class, where we were expected to run and run and run, in my chunky little body that was not in any way built for speed, I could find the same stillness, even in movement, if I paid very close attention to my breath. This in breath, this out breath, and now this in breath, this out breath.

            And now, as an adult who teaches yoga and mindfulness to children, I have found that many children hold a surprising amount of insight into and interest in sitting and being here in the present moment. Somehow I had forgotten how close to the present moment I was as a child, how effortlessly I could fall into awareness then. I began formally teaching mindfulness to children with the assumption that I would be bringing all of my years of practice and wisdom to the children with whom I work. Instead, I have found the roles reversed more often than not: I am the student, and the children are the gurus.

            I began teaching mindfulness to children on my birthday in 2013. My children, then aged 8, 8, and 6, decided to begin sitting with me daily as my birthday gift. They asked my spouse to join us. We began sitting together nightly as a family, at first only five minutes a night, due to the age of my youngest child, but soon the children were begging me to let them sit for longer and longer periods of time. We built up to fifteen minutes per meditation session, always in the evening before bedtime. This practice was easily built into the bedtime routine, which at our house has always been very set, bathing, brushing teeth, and my partner and I taking turns tucking in each child.  

            I found that the practice of meditating as a family was deeply quieting and settling and comforting for all of us after what were often very hectic school and work days spent largely apart. Sometimes the sitting itself was not easy for us individually or as a group, but always, when it was over, there was a greater sense of calm and ease in each of us individually and collectively. We tried a variety of different styles of meditating, from seated, traditional sitting to chanting to guided relaxation to mindfulness in restorative yoga postures. The children wanted to guide the meditations, so each child began taking a night to lead. They were learning meditation at school, and sometimes their guidance sounded familiar - their take on words I recognized as my own. Sometimes their guidance was completely new, either borrowed from a teacher at school or something completely new and original.

            I once paraphrased Jon Kabat-Zinn’s (p. 260-261) metaphor of being up in a tall building looking down at the traffic on the street below, the thoughts being the cars flowing past. My youngest son, C*,  added, “Your mind will start on the car, the thought, in front of the traffic, and then it will travel from car to car until it gets to the biggest or newest fear or worry or sadness or joy or excitement, whatever is pulling on it most. And then your mind will fall into that car and get driven away by it until you catch your mind again.”

            C once guided meditation by saying that the breath is an anchor, and the anchor drops down to keep the boat of your thoughts from drifting away. He added that the waves are also your thoughts, because your mind is like the ocean, and sometimes the waves of thoughts keep pulling at the boat even though the anchor of the breath is dropping down and rooting you to the stable ocean floor. C practiced “listening meditation” at school one day and was so excited to share that experience with us that he could hardly wait until practice time. He pointed out that you can hear so many things during listening meditation when everything is silent. C says meditation “focuses my body on my thoughts. It focuses my body on my emotions. It gets me really calm.”

After we practiced C's “listening meditation” together, A shared that he heard a buzzing sound in his ears. I asked him what he thought that was. He said, “It’s my body working. It is the electricity that runs my brain and my muscles, just like how you can hear the electricity in the big power cables above the street.” A says meditation is “sitting still for a long time and not letting your thoughts run away. I like just sitting still.”

            Sometimes it is hard for one of the children, B, to sit still. This is something that he works on at school and at home as well, and sitting in meditation does not make it miraculously disappear. It is as if his body is constantly moving - big, bold body movements. Sitting on a chair, he might be curling up into a ball and twisting around and around, spinning on his bottom. Standing, he might be twirling and twirling or flopping as if his bones and joints suddenly cannot support his weight. Even sleeping, he prefers to be weighted down with the sand bags and other props I use when I teach restorative yoga. So for him, approaching seated meditation in the supported postures of restorative yoga is useful. He lies on the floor with his legs up on the seat of a chair, and I place a bolster on his belly to weight it, a sandbag on each shoulder, and an eye pillow on his brow. Sometimes, B prefers that I wrap him up tightly in a blanket, a “burrito”, so that he feels arms and legs pulled in and still. The stillness is difficult for him to accomplish on his own, but so supported, he finds the stillness comforting and quieting. He does best at meditations with open eyes where we focus on a candle flame, so sometimes we practice those in addition to mindfulness meditation. B says that meditation is “the relaxation of the body through mental focus – the focusing of the mind on a single thought at a time, not letting your thoughts stray all over the place.”

            For B, a perfectionist who can be terribly hard on himself, self-compassion work has become important. Sometimes we repeat the mantras of lovingkindness as described by many of my teachers: “May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live with ease. May I accept myself as I am.” Sometimes we simply say, "I love myself dearly." This can be done silently or aloud and can be done for the entire course of the practice time or for only a part of it. We all find this useful at times, in addition to the quietness and the stillness.

            I also teach meditation moments to children in my children’s yoga classes four times a week and longer mindfulness meditation sessions with my adult classes twice a week. I believe that many children have a more direct route to the present moment than most adults. Perhaps this is because children, having less memory, experience, and learning to draw from, spend more of their time in direct experience and less of their time in storytelling mode. With roots placed firmly in direct experience, children are not unlike Hansel and Gretel in the forest; they have breadcrumbs marking the path through the underbrush of storytelling into the direct experience of the present moment. Adults have lost the trail in years of meaning-making. Jon Kabat-Zinn (p. 78) says, “That knowing of things as they are is called wisdom. It comes from trusting your original mind, which is nothing other than a stable, infinite, open awareness. It is a field of knowing that apprehends instantly when something appears or disappears within its vastness. Like the field of the sun’s radiance, it is always present, but it is often obscured by cloud cover, in this case, the self-generated cloudiness of the mind’s habits of distraction, its endless proliferating of images, thoughts, stories, and feelings, many of them not quite accurate.”

Since my first moments teaching formal sitting practice to children, I have been working on understanding the very apparent differences in how children and adults approach the present moment. I addressed this idea in a journal entry on September 11, 2014:

Have you ever walked on a familiar trail or path with a young child? You have walked this path a thousand times before, and maybe you saw this path, felt this path, experienced this path the first time or the first few times you walked it, but I bet you have never fully known this path until you walked it again with a young child. With a young child, you stop to explore every crack in the sidewalk, every rock on the trail, every bug that flits by or gently spreads its wings out in the dappled sunlight. When the sun comes through the leaves overhead just so, illuminating the forest with a dramatic shaft of light, the child will let a gasp of wonder escape her lips and will point and run gleefully towards the light until she, too, is illuminated. We adults feel that we have so much to teach children, but how much can we learn from them about being fully present? … Lying in bed with one of my sons just three nights ago, I was remembering to him how much fun we had during the day and thinking at him what we had to do to get ready in the morning, and he interrupted me and said, “Yes, but mom? Let’s just think about what we are doing right now. Isn’t that better?” and he snuggled in closer and pressed his face into the crook of my neck, warm and soft, and squeezed me tightly.

Jon Kabat-Zinn (p. 119) also speaks of how easy it is for adults to move out of direct experience and into story-telling mode:

Much of what we actually know, we know in a non-conceptual way. Thinking and memory come in a bit later, but very quickly, on the heels of an initial moment of pure sense contact. Thinking and memory can easily color our original experience in ways that distort or detract from the bare experience itself … Bare perception is raw, elemental, vital, and thus, creative, imaginative, revealing. With our senses intact and by way of awareness itself, we can attend in such ways. To do so is to be more alive.

When my oldest son found out that I like to go to Cambridge Insight Meditation Center for four hour mini-retreats when I get the chance, he said, “I could never sit still for that long.” My youngest son said, “Our school day lasts six hours; we sit for most of that. Meditating is much easier than sitting still at school!” We spoke about what was different between sitting at school and sitting in meditation. The children felt that school would be much more interesting if they could sit in awareness rather than sitting and paying attention. My oldest son said that paying attention feels like it takes a lot of force and control, but awareness just happens. Our experiment together, now, is for the children to try sitting in “awareness” at school rather than “paying attention”. We have not gathered any results from this research yet, but we all are looking forward to the process.

*I changed the children's names here, in honor of their privacy.

References

Kabat-Zinn, J. (2005). Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness. New York, NY: Hyperion.

Kaur Khalsa, S. (2008). Radiant Child Yoga Level 3: Heart and Soul Work with Children. Herndon, VA: Shakta Khalsa.

 

Why Practice Self-Compassion? What are the Possible Outcomes?

If we wish to make a quantum leap to greater awareness, there is no getting around the need for us to be willing to wake up, and to care deeply about waking up. In the same vein, if we wish for greater wisdom and kindness in the world, perhaps we could start by inhabiting our own body with some degree of kindness and wisdom, even for one moment just accepting ourselves as we are with kindness and compassion rather than forcing ourselves to conform to some impossible ideal. The world would immediately be different.

- Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses

 

In her work, Kristin Neff (2012) has shown that Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) “… is effective at increasing self-compassion, mindfulness, compassion for others, and other aspects of wellbeing. Moreover, the benefits of MSC appear to be enduring, lasting at least 1 year after completion of the program.” (p. 40) This study measured participants’ perception of increases in the following aspects of well-being: mindfulness, compassion for others, and life satisfaction while also measuring participants’ perception of decreases in depression, anxiety, stress, and emotional avoidance. Further, Neff found: “…the more MSC participants practiced formal meditation, the more they increased their self-compassion levels. Similarly, the degree that participants practiced informal self-compassion techniques (e.g., putting a hand over one’s heart in times of stress) in daily life also predicted gains in self-compassion. This implies that self-compassion is teachable skill that is ‘dose dependent.’ The more you practice it the more you learn it.”

It appears that healthy early childhood experiences and relationships may lay the groundwork for development of self-compassion. “Research supports the notion that self-compassion is related to the care-giving system and early childhood interactions. People who lack self-compassion are more likely to have critical mothers, for instance, come from families in which there was a lot of conflict, and display insecure attachment patterns, while the opposite is true for those with higher levels of self-compassion.” (Neff & McGeehee, 2010) Even though early childhood experiences play a part in developing healthy levels of self-compassion in an individual, self-compassion skills can be taught, as Neff shows in her work with MSC. One limitation of her work so far is that most of her study participants had prior mindfulness experience, but Neff (in press, p. 18-19) addresses this, “… it might be that practices taught in the program are only effective for those who already know how to meditate. On the other hand, the fact that MSC participants increased in wellbeing even though most had prior meditation experience suggests that MSC offers tangible benefits over and above mindfulness meditation alone.”

This difference between the practice of mindfulness and self-compassion bears further study. As we have seen, Kabat-Zinn feels that the two practices are similar enough, and that mindfulness encompasses self-compassion to such an extent, that one can ease suffering simply through mindfulness itself. Neff, however, appears to be interested in trying to separate the two practices out in an effort to further boil meditative serenity down to its most basic ingredients. To this end, Neff continues to research MSC practices in settings comparable to those that Kabat-Zinn has used to quantify the effects of MSBR. Neff is showing that: “Overall, research findings so far suggest that self-compassion may be a stronger predictor of depression, happiness, life satisfaction and psychological wellbeing than mindfulness alone.” (in press, p. 23) She describes situations where one can be mindful without being accepting, and any meditator who has practiced for any length of time will be familiar with this scenario:

 

Feelings of self-kindness and common humanity may often accompany mindfulness of painful experiences, of course, so that self-compassion may automatically co-arise with mindfulness itself. The two do not always co-arise, however. It is possible to be mindfully aware of painful thoughts and feelings without actively soothing and comforting oneself, or remembering that these feelings are part of the shared human experience. Sometimes it takes an extra intentional effort to be compassionate toward our own suffering, especially when our painful thoughts and emotions involve self-judgments and feelings of inadequacy. (Neff, in press, p. 20)

In her ongoing research, Neff is continuing to look into differences between mindfulness, self-compassion, and lovingkindness to see where the greatest successful outcomes for practitioners can be found. Her work is showing that it is these practices of loving support for the self, beyond any other meditative practice, that hold the key to wellbeing, but she admits that there is plenty of room for more quantifiable research in this area.

Although no studies have yet directly compared MSC with MBSR or MBCT [Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy], studies examining the outcomes of each program independently suggest that explicitly teaching self-compassion does make a difference … Research that directly compares the relative impact of MBSR, MBCT and MSC will be needed before understanding the overlapping and unique benefits of each. While MSC appears to raise self-compassion more than mindfulness-based interventions, it is likely that MSC raises mindfulness levels to a lesser extent than MBSR or MBCT, given that teaching mindfulness is only a secondary emphasis of the program … This suggests that the MSC program is complementary to MBSR or MBCT, and that it may be an effective supplement to these MBIs [Mind Body Interventions], especially for those who are self-critical … Research might also fruitfully explore whether wellbeing is maximized when both types of programs are taken, and, if so, in what order. Intuitively, it would seem optimal to learn mindfulness before self-compassion given that mindfulness is needed for compassion. However, for people suffering from severe shame or self-criticism, they might need to first cultivate self-compassion in order to have the sense of emotional safety needed to fully turn toward their pain with mindfulness. (Neff, in press, p. 26-28)

While we wait for more research into these practices to be undertaken and published, the work that Neff and Kabat-Zinn and others already have done on self-compassion and mindfulness is solid enough to point us all towards incorporating these practices into our daily lives immediately. Following the lead of these researchers, we all can begin to practice true presence with ourselves in each moment and true acceptance of ourselves as well. We can work to recognize the ubiquity of suffering as a part of what makes us human, rather than running away from suffering, denying suffering, or hiding our suffering from ourselves and others. We can learn to lean into our own personal suffering and soothe ourselves as we would do for a beloved friend or a child rather than distracting ourselves or pushing our suffering down or away. We can practice being gentle and kind with ourselves, replacing patterns of harsh self-talk with mantras of self-compassion: “May I feel safe, may I feel peaceful, may I be kind to myself, may I accept myself as I am.”

 

References

Forbes, B. (2014). Workshop entitled “Yoga for Empaths”.

Germer, C. (2009). The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion: Freeing Yourself from Destructive Thoughts and Emotions. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (2005). Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness. New York, NY: Hyperion.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. New York, NY: Bantam Dell.

Mitchell, D.W., & Jacoby, S.H. (2014). Buddhism: Introducing the Buddhist Experience, Third Edition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Neff, K. D., & Dahm, K. A. (in press). “Self-Compassion: What it is, what it does, and how it relates to mindfulness”. To appear in in M. Robinson, B. Meier & B. Ostafin (Eds.) Mindfulness and Self-Regulation. New York: Springer. Retrieved from www.self-compassion.org.

Neff, K. D., & Germer, C. K. (2013). A Pilot Study and Randomized Controlled Trial of the Mindful Self-Compassion Program. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 69(1), 28-44. doi:10.1002/jclp.21923

Neff, K. D. & McGeehee, P. (2010). Self-compassion and psychological resilience among adolescents and young adults. Self and Identity, 9, 225-240. Retrieved from www.self-compassion.org.

Salzberg, S. (2004). Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, Inc.

 

 

How is Self-Compassion Practiced?

 

 

 

 

Several years ago a small group of Buddhist teachers and psychologists from the United States and Europe invited the Dalai Lama to join them in a dialogue about emotions and health. During one of their sessions, an American vipassana teacher asked him to talk about the suffering of self-hatred. A look of confusion came over the Dalai Lama’s face. “What is self-hatred?” he asked. As the therapists and teachers in the room tried to explain, he looked increasingly bewildered.

-          Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

 

The Buddhist teachings tell us that we all have Buddha Nature, or the embryo of the Buddha, tathagata-garbha, within us. This is identical to the Dharmakaya of the Buddha, the pure essence of the Buddha. We are all born whole and pure, embodiments of the Buddha nature, and we all have the capacity within us to reach enlightenment. (Mitchell & Jacoby, p. 163-165) In some Buddhist traditions, we can do this immediately, in this lifetime, and in others, it is the effort of many lifetimes. This Buddha Nature at our center can give us something very beautiful and innate to tap into when looking for ways to learn to practice self-compassion. As the Dalai Lama expresses in the above quote, how can you not love yourself if, at your core, you are the Buddha, in a very real and tangible way? The Dalai Lama could not even understand the concept of the type of self-loathing that is everywhere in Western society.

            Western culture in particular teaches us that we only can love ourselves if we are worthy of love. This is the difference between self-esteem and self-love or self-compassion. Self-esteem has conditions attached to it, for example, “I will love myself if I get that big bonus during my review at work tomorrow,” or, “If only I could lose ten pounds, then I would be able to love myself.” Self-compassion is loving yourself simply because you are. To overcome potentially a lifetime of learning that we only are worthy of love under certain conditions, practicing self-compassion must be just that – a practice.

I was taught a very simple way to incorporate self-compassion into my daily life and meditation and yoga practice. When encountering a difficult moment, one can make a practice of saying to oneself, “This is a difficult moment. Everyone has these moments. Where in the body do I feel this? Can I breathe/sit with this sensation?” (Bo Forbes, Yoga for Empaths Workshop, 2014) These affirmations and gentle questions mirror Neff’s three components of self-compassion: self-kindness, a sense of common humanity, and mindfulness.

            Neff (in press, 26) teaches a comparable way to deal with difficulty as it arises in daily life, or a way to go back and revisit difficult moments from the past:

The self-compassion exercises taught in the program are also designed to help people bring self-compassion to actual situations with which they are currently struggling. For instance, MSC [Mindful Self-Compassion] teaches something called the ‘self-compassion break,’ which involves intentionally calling to mind a current life struggle, finding a soothing physical expression of compassion such as putting both hands over one’s heart, then silently repeating words that convey the main elements of self-compassion (‘This is a moment of suffering, suffering is part of life, may I be kind to myself in this moment, may I give myself the compassion I need.’) These types of tools are likely to help people learn to use self-compassion in their lives with greater efficacy.

 

These are moment-by-moment ways to practice self-compassion in everyday life as difficulties inevitably arise. There are more formal ways to practice as well. Traditionally, as we have seen in reviewing the metta practices, one begins by wishing happiness, health, and peace to oneself then expands these statements of goodwill to a beloved teacher or guru, to a difficult person, and to the universe at large. In Kristen Neff’s current work with self-compassion, which in many ways mirrors Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness work of decades ago, she has aspired to boil down the broader practices of metta to just self-compassion and to simplify and systematize these practices so that they can be experienced by a broad group of people in the general public and in clinical populations. Neff also aspires to have her work be quantifiable so that the outcomes and effects of the practice on the various populations can be observed and reported on. To that end, she has developed a program called Mindful Self-Compassion, or MSC. In Neff 2012 (p. 30-31) she describes the particulars of this program as follows:

The structure of MSC is modeled on MBSR, with participants meeting for 2 or 2 ½ hours once a week over the course of 8 weeks and also meeting for a half-day meditation retreat … MSC teaches both formal (sitting meditation) and informal (during daily life) self-compassion practices. There are experiential exercises and discussion periods in each MSC session in addition to homework assignments to help participants learn how to be kinder to themselves. The goal is to provide participants with a variety of tools to increase self-compassion, which they can integrate into their lives ... The program also teaches general skills of loving-kindness, which is a type of friendly benevolence given to oneself in everyday situations (compassion is mainly relevant for situations involving emotional distress) … The program makes it clear how judging oneself when things go wrong tends to exacerbate emotional pain, while self-compassion helps to alleviate that pain … At the beginning of the program a distinction is also made between self-compassion and self-esteem, as many struggles with self-judgment are actually struggles with self-esteem. Self-esteem is often based on self-enhancement and downward social comparisons … In contrast, self-compassion provides kindness and understanding in the face of life’s disappointments, does not require feeling “above average” or superior, and provides emotional stability when confronting failure or personal inadequacies.

In place of the traditional metta phrases, in Mindful Self-Compassion, practitioners are taught these phrases: “May I feel safe, may I feel peaceful, may I be kind to myself, may I accept myself as I am.” The final phrase, “may I accept myself as I am” may prove to be the crux of the self-compassion practice, and, indeed, the crux of mindfulness as well. As more and more research and effort is put into finding out why meditation is so beneficial to well-being, as the practices are dissected and each part is quantified and measured, this piece, this accepting oneself as is, is beginning to come out on top.

To begin to practice self-compassion, one merely has to look at oneself and accept oneself in this moment. Or, as Jon Kabat-Zinn argues, practicing mindfulness itself – merely noticing each moment as it passes - is a radical act of self-compassion. There’s no excuse: We all can begin right now if we are interested in experiencing the relief from suffering that these practices have been shown to foster.

 

 

Self-Compassion Practices: A Brief History

A mind filled with love can be likened to the sky with a variety of clouds moving through it – some light and fluffy, others ominous and threatening. No matter what the situation, the sky is not affected by the clouds. It is free.

 

- Sharon Salzberg, LOVINGKINDNESS: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness

What is Self-Compassion? How does it relate to Buddhism and mindfulness?

Self-compassion as a practice was born from both the mindfulness meditation movement and the form of meditation known as lovingkindness. Mindfulness meditation traces its lineage back to vipassana meditation in the Buddhist traditions. The modern mindfulness movement was spearheaded by Jon Kabat-Zinn and his groundbreaking Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program which he started in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts. Lovingkindness as a practice is a translation of the metta meditative practices in the Buddhist traditions. To trace the roots of the current self-compassion meditation movement, one must delve into each of these traditions, mindfulness and lovingkindness, in more detail. Jon Kabat-Zinn (1990) describes mindfulness as “a particular way of paying attention … in the spirit of self-inquiry and self-understanding.” (p. 12) Kabat-Zinn studied meditation personally and over time began to feel that meditation would have great benefit to individuals and societies if it was studied by a larger number of people. He also believed that it would be easier to teach mindfulness and that mindfulness would have greater acceptance in the West if he were to separate mindfulness from its Buddhist origins. He saw the great power of mindfulness in helping to ease all manner of human suffering in his Stress Reduction Clinic and was able to report on these outcomes scientifically, which, at the time, was a breakthrough. Kabat-Zinn (1990) says, “Mindfulness stands on its own as a powerful vehicle for self-understanding and healing … one of its major strengths is that it is not dependent on any belief system or ideology ... Yet it is no accident that mindfulness comes out of Buddhism, which has as its overriding concerns the relief of suffering and the dispelling of illusions.” (p. 12-13)

The Buddha taught two types of mental practices that could be used to engender Right Concentration, one of the steps he listed on the way toward enlightenment on the Eightfold Path. One of these meditations is tranquility meditation, or samatha meditation, directing the mind to a single focal point. The second type of meditation is called insight meditation or vipassana meditation. These practices were listed by the Buddha as ways to bring about the cessation of duhkha, or suffering (Mitchell & Jacoby, 2014, p. 58). Mindfulness traces its origins back to these specific teachings on vipassana meditation by the Buddha. Jon Kabat-Zinn (2005) explains: “The attentional stance we are calling mindfulness has been described by Nyanaponika Thera as ‘the heart of Buddhist meditation.’ It is central to all the Buddha’s teachings and to all the Buddhist traditions ... Their relatively recent arrival in the West is a remarkable historical extension of a flowering that emerged out of India in the centuries following the death of the Buddha and ultimately spread across Asia.” (p. 10)

Jon Kabat-Zinn, as a long-time meditator and one of the greatest proponents of the meditative movement in the West, has distilled down his years of study and practice to find what he feels is the most powerful aspect of meditating – noticing what is happening in each moment as it happens and staying present through as many of these moments as possible. There is a distinction here between what many in the West consider meditation and the type of moment-to-moment awareness that mindfulness practitioners are working towards. In the West, many have come to understand meditation as somehow “quieting the mind” or controlling the thoughts, which is more like the meditation described in the Yoga Sutras of ancient India and samatha meditation as described by the Buddha. With vipassana meditation, or mindfulness meditation as it is commonly called today, the training is in watching the mind as it moves through thoughts and feelings, as one who sits on a hilltop can watch the clouds passing overhead in a summer sky.

Jon Kabat-Zinn makes mention of many other meditative practices in his writings on mindfulness, including the other ones discussed here – lovingkindness and self-compassion practices - and, while recognizing the power of lovingkindness practices, he has long believed that, in teaching meditation for health and well-being, there is no need to stray beyond the basics of mindfulness:

For a long time, I was reluctant to teach lovingkindness as a meditation practice in its own right in the Stress Reduction Clinic because I felt that all meditation practices are fundamentally acts of lovingkindness, and when taught and practiced that way, obviate the need for a single practice claiming that orientation. After all, the emphasis we place on mindfulness as an affectionate, openhearted attention … is itself a gesture of great hospitality and kindness toward oneself, and the suggestion that just sitting with and by and for yourself is a radical act of love captured, I felt, the essence of lovingkindness … it might be confusing for people who were in the early stages of being introduced for the first time to the attitude and practice of non-doing and non-striving that underlie all the meditation practices ... I did not want it to undermine that orientation of direct, moment-to-moment, non-reactive, non-judgmental attending, which is so unusual for us Americans to even consider adopting … The reason for my hesitation was that in the instructions for lovingkindness meditation, there is an inevitable sense that you are being invited to engage in doing something, namely invoking particular feelings and thoughts and generating desirable states of mind and heart. This feels very different from and often outright contradictory to simply observing whatever is naturally arising without recruiting one’s thoughts or feelings to any particular end other than wakefulness itself. (2005, p. 285-286)

To practice formal mindfulness meditation, one first takes a deliberate seat. Then the practitioner begins to focus on what is happening in the body, attending to the breath, or sensations in the body, or the thoughts as they play across the screen of awareness. The practitioner could choose, instead, to focus on external stimuli such as the sounds in the room. Or one could attend to whatever stimulus becomes most prominent on a moment-by-moment basis. The crux of this type of meditation is to simply pay attention to what is. But it is not always so simple. The mind will drift away from the present many times during any formal practice, and the job of the meditator is to catch it and bring it back, refocusing on the internal or external stimuli time and time again. With regular formal practice, it becomes easier to begin to practice informally, catching the mind ruminating during daily life, reminiscing over the past or planning for the future, busying itself with anything other than what is going on in the present moment. As Kabat-Zinn (2005, p. 57) explains, “Stringing moments of mindfulness together in this way allows us to gradually rest more and more in a non-conceptual, a more non-reactive, a more choiceless awareness, to actually be the knowing that awareness is, to be its spaciousness, its freedom.”

As Kabat-Zinn describes, the simplicity of noticing practiced in mindfulness is very different from the practice of lovingkindness. What, specifically, is lovingkindness, then? “Metta, which can be translated from Pali as ‘love’ or ‘lovingkindness,’ is the first of the brahma-viharas, the ‘heavenly abodes.’ The others – compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity – grow out of metta, which supports and extends these states.” (Salzberg, 1995, p. 22-23) One lives in the Four Divine Abodes when one attains enlightenment, when one enters Nirvana (Mitchell & Jacoby, p. 61) but, until then, one can practice meditation in any of the four abodes to cultivate these pure mind states thereby “overcoming such unwholesome states of mind as the Three Root Evils of greed, hatred, and delusion.” (Mitchell & Jacoby, p. 82) This is comparable to the idea in yoga that one can replace root samskaras or patterns of habit or thought in the body or mind with healthier samskaras or patterns. The simplicity of lovingkindness is that we are replacing other, perhaps less healthy ruminations of the mind with healthier ones.

Buddhaghosa, a fifth-century C.E. monk, describes the history of lovingkindness and its practice in the Visuddhimaga, a classic Theravada text known in English as the Path of Purification: One should seat oneself comfortably on a well-prepared seat in a secluded place. Then one should contemplate the dangers of hate … Thereupon, one should begin to develop loving kindness in order to rid the mind of hate … First of all, loving kindness should be developed only toward oneself by repeatedly thinking, “May I be happy and free from suffering. May I keep free from enmity, affliction, and anxiety, and live happily.” … One should develop this attitude in this way, “I am happy. And just as I want to be happy and dread pain and death, so too do other beings.” Then with one’s happiness as an example of what others want, the desire for others’ well-being and happiness will arise in oneself. This method was indicated when the Blessed One said, “I visited all parts of my mind, and found none dearer than myself. The self of every other person is likewise dear to them. Who loves oneself will never harm another.” (Mitchell & Jacoby, p. 82)

Sharon Salzberg, teaches and writes on metta, and is a longtime practitioner. She describes the history of the practice in her book on lovingkindness in a story about the Buddha and some monks. The Buddha sent these monks to meditate in a forest occupied by tree spirits. The spirits tried to expel the monks, and, indeed, the monks were afraid and ran back to the Buddha, begging to be sent somewhere else to practice. The Buddha sent the monks back to the same enchanted forest but with the protection of the metta practices. “This was the first teaching of metta meditation … it is said that the monks went back and practiced metta, so that the tree spirits became quite moved by the beauty of the loving energy filling the forest, and resolved to care for and serve the monks in all ways.” (p. 25)

Salzberg (p. 39-40) describes the beginning steps of the metta practice from the Buddhist traditions, where one gently repeats phrases of goodwill for ourselves and then for others. First, practitioners sit comfortably and reflect on good things about themselves or on their wishes for happiness. Then practitioners choose phrases that express what they most deeply wish for themselves and they repeat these phrases, coordinating this repetition with the breath or just resting on the phrases themselves in turn. Traditionally, the metta phrases follow a pattern similar to the ones Buddhagosa suggested in the Path of Purification, or, as I have been taught: “May I be safe, may I be happy, may I live with ease.” As a word of warning, Salzberg notes: “There are times when feelings of unworthiness come up strongly, and you clearly see the conditions that limit your love for yourself. Breathe gently, accept that these feelings have arisen, remember the beauty of your wish to be happy, and return to the metta phrases.” (40) In a formal metta practice, these phrases are then turned outward to focus on a dear teacher, a difficult person, and the universe at large, each in turn, as follows: “May [my dear teacher] be safe, may [my dear teacher] be happy, may [my dear teacher] live with ease. May [difficult person] be safe, may [difficult person] be happy, may [difficult person] live with ease. May all beings be safe, may all beings be happy, may all beings live with ease.”

Self-compassion, then, is the very basic seed of the practice of lovingkindness. Self-compassion, at its core, is the beginning of the formal metta practice where one wishes oneself safety, happiness, and ease, but it goes deeper. Kristin Neff is a leading contemporary scholar of self-compassion who is working to understand the efficacy of self-compassion in wellness and to spread the practice of self-compassion in a way that mirrors Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work with mindfulness. She defines self-compassion thusly: “Self-compassion comprises three interacting components: self-kindness versus self-judgment, a sense of common humanity versus isolation, and mindfulness versus over-identification when confronting painful self-relevant thoughts and emotions.” (2012, p. 28) We will look at each of these three components - self-kindness, a sense of common humanity, and mindfulness - separately.

In the West, we put great value on being kind to others, but, either directly or through messages from the omnipresent media, we are often taught to be harshly critical of ourselves. Imagine, for a moment, if you were to direct your own harsh self-talk toward a loved one and actually gave that self-talk voice. We can be cruel to ourselves in ways that we would never tolerate if we directed that cruelty outward. Neff (in press, p. 5) explains self-kindness as working to be “… supportive and understanding toward ourselves. Our inner dialogues are gentle and encouraging rather than harsh and belittling. This means that instead of continually punishing ourselves for not being good enough, we kindly acknowledge that we’re doing the best we can.” And, when difficult situations arise, “instead of immediately trying to control or fix the problem, a self-compassionate response might entail pausing first to offer oneself soothing and comfort.” (Neff, 2012, p. 28)

Common humanity, the second basic tenet of self-compassion, involves recognizing that, as human beings, we suffer. This is one of the primary philosophical building blocks of Buddhism. For some, when difficulty arises, there is a sense of isolation or a sense of “Why me?” or a general feeling that everyone else is somehow better off, somehow immune to suffering. Instead of seeing suffering as a basic human trait, it is easy to find oneself feeling singled out. “Self-compassion connects one’s own flawed condition to the shared human condition, so that features of the self are considered from a broad, inclusive perspective … When failures and disappointments are experienced as an aberration not shared by the rest of humankind, people may feel isolated from others who are presumably leading ‘normal’ happy lives.” (Neff, 2012, p. 29) Again, in the West, it is a common part of our identification as fiercely individualistic that we act alone, and we suffer alone and privately, putting on masks of positivity for the outside world. In our culture, asking for help – or even acknowledging to oneself that one might need help - can be seen as weakness. Common humanity asks us to see that we are all connected, that we all suffer, and that we all need compassion and help (even from ourselves) during times of suffering. “With self-compassion … we take the stance of a compassionate ‘other’ toward ourselves, allowing us to take a broader perspective on our selves and our lives. By remembering the shared human experience, we feel less isolated when we are in pain … Self-compassion recognizes that we all suffer, and therefore fosters a connected mindset that is inclusive of others.” (Neff, in press, p. 5)

It is interesting to note that Neff considers mindfulness to be a part of self-compassion, whereas Kabat-Zinn views self-compassion to be a part of mindfulness, a great illustration of the many different filters through which a meditative practice can be viewed. Though mindfulness is a component of self-compassion, the two are different, as Neff (2012, p. 29) illustrates:

Although mindfulness is required to experience self-compassion, it is important to recognize that the two constructs are not exactly the same. First, the type of mindfulness entailed in self-compassion is narrower in scope than mindfulness more generally. The mindfulness component of self-compassion refers to balanced awareness of the negative thoughts and feelings involved in personal suffering. Mindfulness in general refers to the ability to pay attention to any experience – positive, negative, or neutral – with acceptance and equanimity … Mindfulness tends to focus on one’s internal experience (sensations, emotions, thoughts) rather than oneself as the experiencer … Self-compassion emphasizes soothing and comforting the “self” when distressing experiences arise, remembering that such experiences are part of being human.

It is this emphasis on the experiencer that sets self-compassion apart and that can be useful for people learning the contemplative practices, especially for those who tend to be self-critical. Sometimes mindful awareness can be a difficult place to sit without having the tools of self-compassion at hand.