Compassion Meditation

Developing Self Compassion

Bodhipaksa
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Ill will - a desire to think, speak, or act in a way that hurts another person - is seductive. Buried underneath our irritability, anger, hatred, and rage is an assumption that these emotions are going to be protective and will help us avoid harm. Of course in the short term they may do just this, which is why we've evolved these emotional responses. But in the long term our ill will eats us up from the inside, leading to a battery of ailments from heart disease to cancer.

The problem is that evolution never intended ill will to be anything more than a transient emotion. Recently I watched a bunch of geese and duck fight it out over a pile of grain that had been spilled by the river in the New
Hampshire town where I live. The smaller and more agile ducks would nip in when they could and would hoover up as much grain as they could before they were attacked by the larger and more powerful geese, who grabbed the ducks by the throat, threw them around, and tore out great clumps of feathers. There was a lot of aggression on display, but afterwards, when the grain was gone, the birds all just waddled away as if nothing had happened. There were no black looks being cast by the riverside as the birds returned to the water: no angry quacking or honking from either side. The whole incident had
apparently been forgotten. And this is pretty much how anger works in animals. For a brief time, while there's something to fight over, anger flares up in order to scare away the apparent threat. And then it's gone.

How different things can be with our own anger. Someone hurts us and we're not just angry once. We use our human faculties of memory to call up the incident over and over, repeatedly re-experiencing the hurt. We use our
faculty of imagination to imagine some form of retaliation in the future. We use our rich evaluative faculties to judge ourselves and the other person; they're cruel, we're innocent victims, they're thoughtless, we're stupid for
allowing ourselves to be hurt. The basic problem is that the mind can take one instance of hurt and multiply it many times over, or can take that instance of hurt and add yet more pain by creating stories about our own
lack of worth, unlovability, or failure. And it's this constant ruminating on our and other's faults, and on life's dissatisfactions that leads to stress and depression.

But it doesn't have to be like this. The mind may sometimes magnify and multiply our pain in this way, but we can learn to use our human faculties of mindfulness and creativity to reprogram the mind in ways that lead to
less suffering. Eastern techniques of meditation and the cultivation of mindfulness can help us to step back from the stories we tell ourselves so that those stories start to lose their hold on us. There's a saying in the East that nothing can cause as much pain as an unguarded mind, and mindfulness is just another way of saying "guarding the mind". With mindfulness we learn to look more skeptically at the thoughts that run through the mind, being aware the whole time that thoughts just thoughts and are not facts. As we become less caught up in the stories we can start to see more clearly the suffering we cause ourselves by recycling our pain.

Other meditation techniques, such as the Development of Lovingkindness (Metta Bhavana) practice help us to develop more enabling inner stories and to let go of resentment. When you have 10 to 15 minutes of uninterrupted time for yourself try the following exercise:

· Sit quietly for a few minutes in a posture that's comfortable and dignified.

· Notice any tensions in the body and let go of them as best you can.

· Begin to notice the area around the heart center - the place where you experience emotions such as sadness, tenderness, and love - and accept, as best you can, whatever emotions you find there.

· Then mindfully repeat a phrase, such as "May I be well," or "May I feel safe," or "May I find peace." Repeat this phrase for at lest 5 to 10 minutes.

· Then let the phrase fade way into silence and just sit quietly for a minute or two until you feel ready to move.

In time you can add to this practice by calling to mind someone who has hurt you in the past, and by directing phrases towards them. You can say things such as, "May you be well," "May you find peace," or "May you be free from suffering." Cultivating an attitude of lovingkindness in this way can enable us to let go of our hurt and to cultivate forgiveness.

Sometimes, however, there can be so much anger towards another person that it's hard to imagine wishing them well, or if we try to do so we find that the mind spins out of control into hurt or anger. In these circumstances we
may have to deepen our self-empathy and self-compassion before we can start to forgive the other person. I've found that a highly effective way to do
this is as follows:

· As before, sit quietly in a posture that's comfortable and dignified, and relax the body as best you can.

· Call to mind the situation that's leading to you experiencing pain.

· Ask yourself what's the worst thing about this situation. What is it you most fear will happen? Or what do you most fear you'll lose?

· Anger or fear may be present. Just notice and accept these emotions, realizing that they're transient and are not ultimately a part of you.

· Notice that underneath the anger or fear you're experiencing pain, and notice where in the body this pain is experienced. Often the pain will be focused in the heart or solar plexus, but it may be somewhere else.

· Realizing that your pain is neither good nor bad, but it simply is a part of you that's hurting, wish your pain well. You can use a phrase such as,"May you be well," "May you be happy," or "May you find peace."

· One you've repeated the phrase for 5 to 10 minutes, just sit quietly until you feel ready to move once again.

We need to love our pain in order to move on from it. This may seem counter-intuitive to many people. Pain is unpleasant and we naturally want to escape from it. But the truth is that the more we try to run from our pain the more it sticks with us, while the more we accept it the quicker it passes. When our pain is ignored or pushed away it's like pushing a buoy under water - as soon as it can it bobs straight back up to the surface. When we let the buoy simply rest on the surface of the water without trying to push it away, we'll find in time that it's simply drifted downriver. We've learned to love our pain, and in doing so we've moved beyond it into acceptance and forgiveness.

Copyright © 2005 Wildmind Buddhist Meditation and written especially for BeMyAstrologer.

About the Author

Bodhipaksa is a Buddhist teacher living in New Hampshire. He is the founder of Wildmind Buddhist Meditation. Wildmind is an organization devoted to offering teachings on Buddhist meditation. Bodhipaksa is the author of Wildmind: A Step-by-Step Guide to Meditation, published by Windhorse Publications, and of a number of other titles, including Guided Meditations for Calmness, Awareness, and Love, a popular audio CD.