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.
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