acceptance

“This is just how things are right now”

December 2, 2025

I’ve been practicing and teaching self-compassion for a long time now. My book on that topic, “This Difficult Thing of Being Human,” was published six years ago. (I hope you’ve read it. If you haven’t, I hope you will.)

My approach to practicing self-compassion hasn’t fundamentally changed in that time, but from time to time a particular approach will come into focus for me..

One of the things I’ve been finding helpful recently is simply saying to myself, when something unpleasant happens, “This is just how things are right now.”

Also see:

I’ll talk a bit more about that in a minute, but first I want to outline the way I usually practice self-compassion, so you have an overview of what I’m talking about.

“This is just how things are right now.” This phrase is a short-cut to radical acceptance.

Naturally you have to first notice that you’re suffering in some way. The word “suffering” can be misleading, because it conjures up strong states of distress, illness, etc. And those things could be included here, but essentially “suffering” covers any experience that’s uncomfortable in any way.

Here are three examples, taken from my own life, of how this has been useful.

Example 1

I’m meditating and I happen to be so tired that I’m dipping in and out of dreams.

Now, anyone who’s been meditating for a long time knows that we’re supposed to just accept that distraction and sleepiness happens. Sure, we can try and stay awake, but we don’t give ourselves a hard time for being tired.

And I always thought I didn’t. But I find that saying “This is just how things are right now” frees me from a subtle frustration that I hadn’t even realized was there. That frustration seems tied in to the immediate reflex, “I must try to stay awake!”

When I say to myself, “This is just how things are right now,” I no longer make any willed effort to stay awake. I just appreciate those times that I am conscious.

Oddly, this doesn’t make me go to sleep any more than I did before. It’s almost like “trying to stay awake” doesn’t really do anything anyway.

What it does do is to bring me more peace. I lose the sense that falling asleep is a bad thing. (And yet I don’t surrender to sleep. Weird!)

I now find I’m perfectly happy with the situation, which is that I’m meditating, and sometimes I fall asleep.

Even as I write this I think it sounds like I’m saying that I’m just giving in to sleep. But I’m not. I think it only sounds like that to me because this subtle striving has been part of my makeup for so long.

Example 2

I’m meditating and my youngest dog starts licking my hand. My other two dogs tend to ignore me when I’m meditating, but the youngest dog is a bit clingy. And she’s a licker. When the other dogs lick me during meditation, which is only when I’m forced to meditate lying down, I don’t mind. But there’s something kind of gross about the way Pippa licks me. It’s slimy. I can find it annoying. I get irritated with her. I just want it to stop!

So I say “This is just how things are right now,” and instantly I don’t mind the licking. It’s still unpleasant, but I’m okay with it being unpleasant.

A whole layer of reaction gets removed, and I’m able to sit with equanimity. The licking continues, or doesn’t, and I just don’t mind.

Example 3

I’m feeling sad for some reason I can’t put my finger on. Of the three examples here, this one is potentially the most serious, because sadness can go on for a long time and after a while it can start to shade into depression.

But when I say to myself “This is just how things are right now,” immediately it’s like a weight has been lifted. The feelings of sadness are still there, but they’re very mild and I can happily live with them. There’s just a dull ache that doesn’t at all trouble me.

Because the sadness continues, my unconscious reactivity and resistance can creep back in. When this happens I keep reminding myself, this is just how things are right now. And every time, there’s the sense of a weight being removed.

Anyway, I’m finding this a very useful tool. I’ve been recommending it to a lot of my meditation students. This isn’t a new tool. In fact I wrote about it eight years ago.

Saying “This is just how things are right now” corresponds to the first three steps of my self-compassion process — 1) recognizing that suffering is present, 2) dropping the story, and 3) turning toward and accepting painful feelings. The acceptance stage is what it most resembles, but it implies the first two stages as well.

The fourth step in that process is offering kindness and reassurance to the suffering part of us. Usually I haven’t needed to do this. I guess the phrase itself — “This is just how things are right now” — itself provides reassurance.

So I toss this out there, as I tend to do, hoping that you, too, find it a useful shortcut for alleviating suffering.

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Self-compassion for troubling times

February 24, 2025

Bodhipaksa

on practice

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At the moment lot of people are suffering more than usual. They are anxious, exhausted, and overwhelmed about the awful things going on in the world. They’re often glued to the news and steeped in the commentary that takes place on social media, their amygdalas on overdrive and their endocrine systems jangling with adrenaline.

I recently shared three slogans that have been helping me stay in balance. They are: Feet on the ground. Heart wide open. Keep looking up. These are phrases I suggest we all bear in mind.

I want to explain now how they relate to the practice of self-compassion.

What is self-compassion?

Self-compassion is a major part of my spiritual practice. It helps us when times are hard. (I wrote a book on it called “This Difficult Thing of Being Human.“)

Self-compassion is treating ourselves as if we, and our suffering, matter. It’s where we are our own advocates. It’s where we provide ourselves with emotional support when times are rough. It can involve cutting yourself some slack when you realize you’ve messed up. After all, who doesn’t mess up? It can mean recognizing that suffering is normal, and not a sign of failure. Again, everyone suffers; it’s part of the human condition. It can mean offering yourself emotional support and reassurance. We all need those things. It can involve self-care, which means recognizing your needs for rest, nutrition, friendship, recreation, and so on, and making sure you meet those needs as best you can.

Let’s see how this works under the headings of the three slogans I’ve suggested.

1. “Feet on the ground”

We need to learn to keep our feet on the ground, emotionally.

Reactive emotions such as worry, anger, and despair hijack the mind and create suffering. In response to our feeling bad, the mind generates catastrophizing thoughts that make us feel even worse. These reactive emotions seem to imply that they will help; the unspoken assumption seems to be something like, “If I just keep worrying about this enough, thinking about all the things that might go wrong, I’ll be safer.” But instead, we suffer even more intensely and make it even harder for ourselves to do things that might actually help.

Recognize you’re suffering

The first step with self-compassion is recognizing that we’re suffering. You can’t meet your suffering with compassion if you don’t recognize how it’s there. So instead of being caught up stories about how awful things are, we need to recognize that these stories are part of our suffering. We need to recognize that worrying, anger, and despair are forms of suffering.

Drop the story

Having recognized that worry, anger, and despair are patterns of thinking that intensify our suffering, we next need to gently let go of them.

You can recognize, “This way of thinking doesn’t serve me” and decline to put any more energy into it. You drop the story.

But we don’t just drop the story and find ourselves in a mental vacuum. What we do instead is to turn toward the body, so that our awareness is filled with sensation, rather than thinking.

Turn toward painful feelings

We do this by noticing and accepting our suffering as it manifests in the body.

When the mind gives rise to worry, anger, and despair, what it’s reacting to are painful feelings in the body. Emotions are responses to feelings.

Any time you’re in a reactive state, notice what’s going on down in the chest, around the diaphragm, and in the belly. You’ll notice that there are unpleasant sensations there. There might be tightness, tingling, fluttering, heaviness, pressure, and so on. None of it feels good.

These are “feelings,” which are not the same as the reactive emotional patterns I described above. Feelings are just sensations. Emotions are something we do. They are our attempts to address those feelings.

Feelings may be unpleasant, but they are never “bad.” So we can accept them. They’re just sensations. They’re just signals arising in the body as communications from ancient parts of the brain that are saying, “Look. I think there’s a threat here that you should pay attention to.”

Accept what’s difficult

Rather than reacting emotionally to our feelings, we can just accept them and allow them to be present.

If necessary, you can say to yourself things like, “It’s okay to feel this. It’s just a sensation. Let’s just experience this. Let’s just allow it to be. There’s nothing to fear here. It’s unpleasant, but it’s not bad.”

This kind of self-talk helps support us as we bring our attention back, over and over, to our feelings.

You can notice the qualities of the feeling: the pressure, tingling, etc. You can notice how it changes.

The more the mind is engaged with observing the feelings as if they were any other sensation, the less the mind is able to react to them. And so observing our feelings reduces our tendency to be reactive, and helps us become calmer.

2. Heart Wide Open

Yet there’s much more to self-compassion than accepting painful feelings, no matter how important that may be. Compassion is when we meet our suffering with kindness. So we need to evoke kindness.

One of the easiest ways to awaken our innate capacity for kindness is the practice of “kind eyes.” We simply remember what it’s like to look with kindness, and notice the qualities of warmth, tenderness, softness, etc. that arise in and around the eyes. Then as we turn our attention toward a painful feeling, we find those qualities follow, having permeated our inner gaze of interoceptive awareness. In this way, we meet pain with kindness.

We can also talk to our pain. In effect this is the compassionate part of us communicating with and offering support and reassurance to the hurt or frightened part of us. We can say things like, “I know this is hard for you, but we’ll get through this. I’m here for you. I love you and I want you to be happy.”

Often when we’ve done all these things — recognized that we’re suffering, dropped the story, turned toward and accepted painful feelings, and offered ourselves support — we lose our reactivity, which benefits others. As the Buddha said, “Taking care of myself, I take care of others.”

Turn outward

Our reactivity had previously been keeping our attention running in circles like a dog convinced that its own tail is an enemy to be pursued. Now the mind has stopped running in circles, and is able to have a wider view. We’re able to see, for example, that others are suffering just as much, and often more, than we are. And because we’ve already aroused our empathy and compassion, we meet their pain with compassion as well.

Having self-compassion frees us up to have compassion for others.

Feeling compassionate toward others who are suffering — whether it’s because they’re in a war zone, are having their civil liberties withdrawn, or are scared about the future — is a good start, but ideally it sets us up for taking action so that we help where we can. That action might just involve asking someone how they’re doing, and listening with an open heart as they tell us. We should be wary of jumping in to give advice, but we can at least let the other person know that they’ve been heard and understood.

Being compassionate toward others helps us as well as them. It helps us meet our deep need for connection with others. And it reminds us that we’re not alone in suffering. Suffering is a universal feature of the human condition. Because compassion helps both parties, the Buddha said, “Taking care of others, I take care of myself.”

3. Keep Looking Upward

Keep looking upward. We need to remember what’s good and normal, even when it’s been replaced by viciousness and chaos. This is hard to do, because our expectations tend to slide. One tragicomic element of the first Trump administration was the repeated eagerness of some journalists to declare Trump as having been “presidential” because he’d managed to read a script from a teleprompter without going into word-salad digressions and without tossing around childish taunts and unkind nicknames.

Those journalists had made the mistake of letting their standards slide: being presidential no longer meant having personal qualities of decorum, leadership, wisdom, and emotional maturity. Now it simply meant “being able to read a prepared script.”

Remember “normal”

In so many ways, we need to remind ourselves of what “normal” used to be, so that we can, hopefully, return to normal. I highly recommend Masha Gessen’s “Surviving Autocracy” as a reminder of what “normal,” how we’ve departed from it, and how the media normalized those departures. Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” is, however, a better guide for how to stay sane when a government slides into autocracy.

Keep hope alive

We need to keep hope alive. As Howard Zinn said, “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.”

Hope helps us psychologically. As Thich Nhat Hanh said, “Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.”

We can change things. Maybe not much. But we can change things a little. And one person changing things can inspire others, which leads to more meaningful change.

There’s strength in numbers

Remember that there are more decent people than there are cruel people. We are the majority.

And according to a study by Erica Chenoweth of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Maria Stephan of the U.S. Institute of Peace, no democracy moment has ever failed when 3.5% of the population has protested over a sustained period.

It’s hard for us to sustain hope. But it’s essential, for our own emotional well-being, for us to be able to sustain others, and for the world.

So these are some of the ways in which self-compassion can manifest as we keep our feet on the ground, live with our hearts open, and keep hope alive.

Try gentler, not harder

November 9, 2020

Bodhipaksa

on practice

There’s an old story that goes something like this. A young man wants to learn to be an expert swordsman. So he travels far to seek out a famous teacher who lives in a remote place in the mountains. After much difficulty he tracks down the sword master and begs to be accepted as a student. To his joy, the master agrees to take him on.

“How long will it take for me to become as good a swordsman as you?” the student asks.

“Perhaps fifteen years,” replies the master.

The student is dismayed at this prospect. “How long if I try really hard?” he asks.

The master scratches his chin as he ponders, and then finally says, “I suppose, if you try really hard, it might take you … twenty years.”

The point of the story is that for some things, the harder you try, the more you get in your own way. Meditation is very much like that.

“Trying hard” inevitably involves an element of grasping. But meditation is about letting go of grasping. It’s about being, accepting, and opening up. Yes, within that context there can be a sense that we’re working in our meditation practice. But it’s important to establish a sense of openness, receptivity, and acceptance before we begin working, so that that work is not imbued with grasping but is instead more of matter of paying attention gently and kindly.

For me this all starts with the eyes.

The striving, grasping mind leads to a tight, narrow gaze. I imagine this is because striving requires us to focus narrowly on a single thing that we either want to have or want to avoid. When we narrowly focus our gaze we become physically tense, and the mind goes into overdrive. It’s not a pleasant way to exist.

Letting the eyes soften — letting the focus within the eyes be gentler and letting the muscles around the eyes relax — triggers a state of relaxation. This relaxed gaze is familiar to us from when we stare into space. That’s something we do when we feel safe and relaxed, and there’s no need to be hyper-aware of danger.

As soon as the eyes soften in this way the mind calms, our thoughts slow down, and the body begins to relax. The breathing slows and deepens.

This is what I always do when I start meditating.

One thing that happens when the eyes soften is that our gaze is no longer narrowly focused, and we’re able to take in the whole of our visual field. This happens quite naturally and effortlessly.

And this immediately translates to our inner field of attention being open and receptive, and able to take in the whole of the body (and other inner sensations) at once. This too happens naturally and effortlessly.

Now we can sense the movements of the breathing in the whole body, offering us a rich sensory experience that helps us remain in mindfulness.

So while we might start off thinking that we need to do a lot of work in order to calm the mind , we discover that all we have to do is let the eyes soften. And then it’s a question of letting our inner field of awareness connect with the body. And then with gentleness, kindness, and curiosity, we remain mindful of the whole body breathing. Often at this point our thoughts are few and far between. Mostly they arise and pass away without distracting us. And when our thoughts do draw us in, it’s easier to let go of them; we just let the eyes soften again.

If we tried through “trying harder” to achieve this depth of mindfulness it might take many hours, and probably even then only on a retreat. Making a lot of effort in meditation creates mental turbulence, distraction, and resistance. Think about what it’s like to try to grab a slippery bar of soap you’ve dropped in the bath. If you lunge after it you push it away. It’s very similar in meditation. If we want to achieve something, we need to let it happen, not make it happen.

By doing the opposite of trying hard, we can get much further.

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Liking yourself is not the antidote to hating yourself

May 8, 2019

Bodhipaksa

on practice

You might think that the antidote to self-hatred is liking yourself. But is that desirable, or even possible? We all contain impulses such as jealously, hatred, and greed. What would it mean to like them? Are we supposed to approve of them? To give them free rein and act upon them?

The idea of liking “ourselves” seems badly put. When I look at myself I don’t see any one thing. I see a broad range of phenomena, some that promote my wellbeing and others that sometimes compromise it. There’s no one “self” there to like.

I have plenty to work with. I have skillful impulses, of course. But I also have destructive or harmful habits such as irritability, a desire to be “right,” depressive doubts about my own worth, and so on. These cause suffering for me and also for others in my life.

But hating these things is pointless. Hating these aspects of myself would just be introducing more unskillfulness and conflict into my being. To hate ourselves is to be at war with ourselves. And in such a war, who can be the winner? Hatred, as the Buddha observed, can never conquer hatred.

That doesn’t mean that I approve of these impulses or want to express them. If I was to give those habits free rein, I’d just end up with even more suffering in my life.

I certainly don’t like these potentially destructive habits. To like something means we have pleasant feelings associated with it, and I don’t experience pleasant feelings with regard to my irritability, self-doubts, and so on.

I can accept them, though. And I can be kind toward them.

Practicing acceptance simply means that I accept that these things are a part of me. They are part of the broad range of emotional responses that I have inherited as a mammal and as a human being. I didn’t choose to have them. It makes no sense for me to judge myself harshly for having these habits. I don’t need to hate myself simply for being human.

An audience member at a discussion between two Buddhist teachers described how she came to see that it was possible for her to have compassion for herself:

I’ve been thinking a lot about loving myself, but I felt like I would have to like everything about myself to love myself. But then I had a realization … that I could just have some compassion toward myself. I don’t necessarily have to like every part of myself.

It’s possible for us to relate with kindness and compassion to every part of ourselves, including those destructive tendencies I’ve described. I can recognize that they are born from suffering. Our unskillful habits are simply ways of trying to deal with painful feelings that have arisen. Irritability tries to keep at bay some source of distress. Jealousy wants us to have for ourselves a benefit that someone else has access to. Doubt tries to analyze what’s not going right in our lives. Every single unskillful impulse any of us has represents an attempt to find peace and happiness. The problem with them is not that they are “bad,” but that they don’t work.

One of the most radical things the Buddha said was that if letting go of unskillful habits caused pain rather than brought us peace, he wouldn’t have taught us to do it. He didn’t seem to see them as inherently bad. He’d have encouraged us to keep on going with our greed, hatred, and delusion if they actually made us happy. But they don’t.

Our task is to find better strategies. This is what developing “skillfulness” involves—finding ways of being that actually bring about peace and harmony. To lack skill means aiming to create happiness but instead bringing about suffering and conflict.

When we react to our unskillful tendencies by hating them we’re treating them as if they were enemies. They aren’t. They’re just confused friends. They’re trying to benefit us, but most of the time failing. Once we start to empathize with what these confused friends are trying to do for us, we can find more skillful ways to accomplish the same aims. Mindfulness and self-compassion are the most powerful tools we have for doing that.

Our irritability and hatred maybe trying (and failing) to keep some source of distress out of our experience. We’re trying to push the distress out of our lives. Mindful self-compassion helps us see that it’s not the unpleasant feeling that’s our real problem, but our resistance to it. It allows us to be present with painful feelings until they pass, naturally, and can open up the way for us to have fondness and appreciation for whatever it was we were irritated by.

Jealousy may want us to grasp for ourselves some benefit that another has access to (this is of course painful), but self-compassion can help soothe the pain of grasping and also help us feel a sense of abundance; there is so much kindness we can show to ourselves! And this can allow us to feel glad for the other person.

Self-doubt may be a clumsy way of trying to discover if there’s something wrong in the way we are. Mindful self-compassion can help reassure the uncertain part of us, seeing that there’s nothing going on that we can’t work with, reminding us to trust in our practice, and helping us to see our inherent goodness.

In all cases empathizing with our unskillful tendencies helps us to be happier.

Practicing self-compassion is like learning to be a kind and wise parent to ourselves. If our children act badly in some way, they do not need either our hatred. That wouldn’t be helpful for them. Neither, however, should we blindly approve of everything they do. That wouldn’t help them either. When our children act badly they need our kindness, our empathy, and wise guidance.

And this, too, is how we need to learn to relate to ourselves if we want to flourish and be happy in the long-term.

From fear and denial to love and acceptance

April 16, 2019

Bodhipaksa

on practice

In the opening words to his book “The Road Less Traveled,” the late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck says:

Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult – once we truly understand and accept it – then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

I’d put this less absolutely than Peck does: once we know, understand, and accept that life is difficult, it becomes less difficult. This difficult thing of being human is made easier when we accept the inevitability of suffering.

I’d like to offer a series of suggestions to help you see the truth of this. And so I invite you to read the following points slowly and with care, allowing yourself time to take each suggestion on board, testing them in the heart and comparing them honestly with your own lived experience.

Drop any defensiveness or desire to be seen as perfect, and allow yourself to feel your own vulnerability. Let go of any desire to see yourself as “succeeding,” and let yourself be gloriously, humanly imperfect.

I suggest you spend at least a minute on each of these thoughts, and perhaps a bit longer on the final one.

First, as you read these words become aware of your vulnerable human body, with its beating heart, and the constant rise and fall of the breathing. This body is aging, and prone to injury and illness, as are all human bodies. Recognize yourself as an embodied, living being who will not be on this earth for long. If this is at all uncomfortable, see if you can regard those painful feelings with kindly eyes.
Next, allow into your awareness that your feelings are important to you. Perhaps in this moment you’re not feeling much, but sometimes you suffer, and sometimes you are happy. Consider the reality of this, recalling moments of happiness and of unhappiness, recognizing yourself as a feeling being.
Consider that you want, as your deepest desire, to find some kind of wellbeing, or happiness, or peace, and to escape suffering where that’s possible. When you remember times you’ve been unhappy, was there a desire to be free from that suffering? When you remember times of peace, happiness, or wellbeing, was there a wish to remain in that state? Recognize yourself as a being who desires happiness as your deepest yearning.
Now, remind yourself that happiness is often elusive, and that you experience suffering far more often than you’d like, were life ideal. Recognize yourself as a struggling being—as someone who is doing a difficult thing in being human.
Finally, try saying the following words to yourself for a few minutes: “May I be well. May I be at ease. May I be kind to myself and others.”

The first four activities help you empathize with yourself. Through them you sense yourself as a being in need of support, worthy of support. And this empathetic awareness of yourself provides a grounding for being kind to yourself. The phrases—“May I be well. May I be at ease. May I be kind to myself and others”— are ways of showing yourself support. By the time you got to the fifth suggestion you may have felt that you actually wanted to offer yourself kindness and encouragement, and that you wanted to offer yourself support.

These reflections open us up to experiencing our own vulnerability, and this can be an uncomfortable process. It may be, for example, that heartache or sadness arose. That’s a common response. These reflections can put us in touch with yearnings that we have, perhaps out of duty or fear, long suppressed. We can spend much of our lives pretending to ourselves that we’re much happier than we actually are. We can pretend that suffering is an unfortunate accident we’re on the verge of recovering from. It can be frightening to take on board the truth that we frequently suffer, and that we’re not fully in control of our own lives.

Should painful feelings of sadness or heartache arise, it’s wise to accept them and show them kindness. If they do appear, that’s a good sign, because it shows that we’re getting more fully in touch with the reality that life is difficult. Empathizing with ourselves, and being kind toward ourselves, is essential if we’re to accept that reality, because it allows us to let go of the fear that leads to denial.

These reflections help us to more from fear and denial to love and acceptance. Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable lets us see how challenging and difficult life is, but it also allows us to empathize with ourselves and to offer ourselves kindness and support as we do this difficult thing of being human.

The miracle of being here

February 7, 2019

Bodhipaksa

on practice

The main quality we’re cultivating when we meditate is mindfulness. Mindfulness is just another word for observing. To observe our experience we have to be present with it. Part of the mind has to be standing back a little from what it’s observing. So in a way, mindfulness is very simple. But it can take us a long way—to acceptance, living with self-compassion, and an appreciation that every moment of life is a miracle.

Where we start

Usually we start by paying attention to the body, observing the physical sensations that are arising there. We are not thinking about the body. We’re not visualizing the body. We’re simply observing the body’s sensations, paying attention to them in a relaxed way.

In particular we notice the sensations of the breathing. These are the most dynamic and obvious part of our experience of the body. We can notice the sensations of air flowing in and out of the body, the rise and fall of the chest and the belly, and even the ever-changing contact our skin makes with our clothing. But we may well notice other things as well—the sound of a passing truck, a breeze, our buttocks touching our seat. This is fine. We’re not trying to exclude anything.

Practicing acceptance

The mind will still create thoughts, and from time to time some of those thoughts will be compelling enough that we shift our attention fully or partly from our direct sensory experience, and back into the world of mental experience. We find ourselves planning some task, remembering and rerunning in our mind a conversation, or fretting about whether we’re doing the meditation practice properly. This is natural, and it’s not something we can stop from happening. But whenever we realize that we’ve been caught up in compelling trains of thought, we let go of them and return our attention to the body, the breathing, and anything else that presents itself to our senses.

Practicing self-compassion

Relative newcomers in particular tend to become disappointed and frustrated with the amount of thinking that’s going on. But accepting that it’s normal for us to become distracted is a self-compassionate act that helps us to be patient and accepting. We’re not failing when we get distracted; we’re just being human. Every time we realize we’ve been distracted is an opportunity to be kind to ourselves. It’s an opportunity to bring our attention gently back to the breathing again. Sometimes I suggest to meditation students that they be gentle in the way that they would if they were returning a baby kitten to its mother when it has strayed from the nest. Our distractions give us an opportunity to practice self-compassion.

In fact we have an opportunity to practice self-kindness and self-compassion just in the way we’re sitting. One way we can be unkind to ourselves is to hold the body in a tense and rigid way, or in a posture that we’re not able to sustain without discomfort arising. Often, for example, people will want to sit in a cross-legged posture even though they aren’t flexible enough to do this comfortably. But we don’t need to impress anyone, and there’s no one “perfect” posture that we have to sit in. We want to be comfortable.

At the same time we don’t want to slump, in the way we do when we’re relaxing in an arm-chair. Slumping compresses the chest in a way that makes it hard for us to breath effectively. And poor breathing causes the brain to be poorly oxygenated and makes is hard for us to be attentive. So, look for a posture that feels both relaxed and upright. One simple thing that sums this up nicely is the idea of sitting with a sense of dignity.

Lying down is another posture that makes is hard for us to be mindful. We’re likely to find that this makes the mind drowsy at best, and at worst it’ll send us to sleep. If you have some kind of injury that makes sitting upright impossible, then by all means meditate lying down. The sleepiness is something you’ll just have to learn to work with.

Seeing the miracle

As the Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donahue said, “It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here.”

Mindfulness helps us to appreciate the simple miracle of being here. It helps us to become a kind and compassionate presence for ourselves. And this is something we do not just in meditation, but in every area of our lives.

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A “feeling crap” meditation

September 20, 2018

Bodhipaksa

on practice

I’m sure that sometimes you feel crap.

The other week I was feeling particularly crappy. I have an idea what was causing me to feel that way, but that’s not particularly important. The thing is that I was feeling crap, by which I mean I felt sad, tired, and sometimes despairing.

The last thing I wanted to do, really, was to sit in meditation and experience how crap I was feeling. But I know from past experience that that’s the most helpful thing I can do. And so I sat on my meditation bench so that I could find a better way to relate to feeling crap.

Also see:

I settled in to meditate, I noticed the dark, heavy feeling around my heart. I noticed that there was an attitude of resistance around this feeling, since I didn’t particularly want to experience it. But it’s best if these things are allowed into experience. So I let go of the resistance as much as possible, and turned to face the darkness.

My meditation practice kind of has a life of its own. Sometimes I really have no idea what’s going to happen. I just have to see what my subconscious comes up with. This particular day, as I let go of my resistance and turned my attention toward the discomfort, a mantra of sorts appeared.

The mantra: “It’s OK. This is just how you’re feeling right now.”

I said to myself, “It’s OK. This is just how you’re feeling right now.”

Breathe in. Breathe out.

I said to myself, “It’s OK. This is just how you’re feeling right now.”

And so on.

As these words appeared, I recognized what they were doing.

“It’s OK…”

This is offering reassurance. It’s as if these words encode the message, “It’s OK to feel this way. It’s OK to turn toward the feeling. You’re on the right track. You got this. Deep down there’s really nothing to fear. Keep going.”

“…This is just how you’re feeling…”

This is saying that in a way, feelings are sensations like any other. If you touch something warm, you’ll feel warmth. Touch the point of a thorn, you’ll feel pain. If you’ve wanted something and you didn’t get it you’ll feel disappointed and sad. And if you’ve been criticized you’ll feel hurt. It’s just how things are. You’re not failing for feeling these things.

This is also a reminder that resistance, as they say, is futile. Resisting your pain—that sense of wanting desperately to not be experiencing it—doesn’t help. In fact it’s worse than unhelpful. It actually creates more pain. Resisting pain is like responding to having a stone in your shoe by pounding your foot with a hammer.

Sometimes you find that 50% of your pain is coming from the resistance, and sometimes you discover it’s more like 95%. The way to find out is to let go of the resistance.

So in saying “this is just how you’re feeling,” you’re facing how you feel as a fact, rather than as something to be resisted. And so you can start to drop the resistance and experience whatever discomfort remains, which becomes more bearable the more you are able to face it without trying to run away from it or make it go away.

“…Right now”

Feelings change. Everything changes. Remember that time many years ago when you felt awful because you got dumped? And that time you were really worried about money? Those feelings are gone now. Even if they’ve been replaced by similar feelings, those new feelings won’t last. “No feeling is final,” as Rilke said.

So that was my meditation the other day. I sat with “feeling crap,” and as I repeated the mantra the feeling lifted. It didn’t go away entirely, but that was OK. I’d realized that it was all manageable. I didn’t need to resist anything. I could experience it fully, without being overwhelmed.

And then just yesterday I guided a couple of friends through this same meditation, because one of them was feeling really crap.

And we went a bit further

We put our hands on our hearts, where the crap feeling was strongest, and we talked to our suffering: “I just want you to know I care about you, and I’m here for you. I love you and I want you to be happy. It’s OK. We’ll get through this. You’re doing OK. I know you’re feeling bad, but I’m going to take care of you.”

My friend who was feeling crap said she felt less crap after doing this. And that made me feel happier. The other friend suggested I should call this my “feeling crap meditation,” and so here we are…

Emily Dickinson: “The brain is wider than the sky…”

February 7, 2018

Bodhipaksa

quote of the month

The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.
— Emily Dickinson

Dickinson’s poem, “The Brain is Wider Than the Sky” suggests that because the brain contains the perception of the sky (and more besides) it must in some sense be larger than the sky. This might seem like no more than an interesting thought — the kind of thing you momentarily appreciate as a quote on Facebook before forwarding it to your friends and moving on to the next cute cat video.

But this is the kind of thing that becomes very profound when you choose to sit with it in meditation. I started to experiment with a practice strikingly similar to Dickinson’s verse back in the 1990s when I lived in the city center of Glasgow, in Scotland. I lived on a busy shopping street in a tenement building that had a bar and a restaurant on the ground floor. Being four floors up did little to remove us from the noise. There was a constant roar from cars, buses, and delivery vehicles, the sounds of conversations and (especially at night as the bars came out) fights. Passing airplanes and the sounds of emergency vehicle sirens weren’t rare, either.

At first this noise used to interfere with my meditation, but gradually it became my meditation. I learned that it was fruitless to try to push these sounds away, and that instead it was best to notice them as sensations, just like any other sensation. The noise of traffic was really no different from the movements of my breathing; it was all just sensory data. The noise was only a problem when I tried to fight with it.

What I did was simply to attend to whatever sounds were around me. Instead of trying to push them away I allowed them to be there. They became, along with the breathing or the act of well-wishing, my object of attention in meditation.

The result of doing this was a sense of expansiveness. The sounds that reached my ears came from a vast expanse around me. In fact, including passing aircraft, my sphere of attention might be miles in diameter. It felt that my mind was expanding to fill the space around me. It no longer seemed that mind my was a thing inside my head, receiving signals that traveled to it along nerves, but that my awareness was a vast space in which the phenomena it detected arose. My mind (and therefore my brain) encompassed the sky.

This changed my whole meditation practice. For one thing, I did a lot less thinking than I usually did. My mind spontaneously became much quieter. For another thing, when thoughts did arise they were just one very small part of my field of attention. They were less likely to catch my attention, and simply rose and passed away, without my getting caught up in them.

This was probably the single most revolutionary development in my meditation practice — one that provided an approach I’m still working within.

Later in the poem Dickinson says “The brain is just the weight of God.” This very bold comparison provides another connection with meditation. The expansiveness that I’ve been talking about is very helpful in meditations to do with cultivating kindness and compassion. These forms of meditation are known in Buddhism as the “brahma viharas” — literally “the abode of God.” Our narrow sense of self begins to break down, and we realize that the wellbeing of others is just as important as our own. Developing a sense of spacious awareness in meditation makes it easier for an expansive sense of care and concern for all beings to arise.

So I’d suggest that you experiment with expansiveness in your own meditation practice. It’s not hard. After setting up your posture, first, just allow your eyes to relax behind your closed eyelids. Then become aware of the space — and any sounds it contains — in front, behind, to the sides, and above and below you. Let your mind rest into that sense of spacious awareness. And then see where it takes you.

Fully embracing this present moment

August 1, 2017

Bodhipaksa

on practice

It was late in the evening when my son told me he’d left his backpack in the car. That’s not a huge deal, but there were things in it that he needed for camp tomorrow, and because of where I live my car’s parked a few minutes’ walk away from my apartment. Again, not a huge deal, but I was tired and I was in the middle of getting both kids together for bed, and would have to wait until they were asleep before I went to retrieve the backpack.

So, with the kids asleep, and my energy failing, I trudged downstairs to fetch the forgotten backpack. I was grouchy and a little resentful — you know, where you have to do something you hadn’t expected to do because someone didn’t do what they’re supposed to. Grumble, grumble.

I was just exiting the building when I realized that I was making myself unhappy with this train of thought. I noticed that my state of mild resentment had eroded my wellbeing, making me feel weary and put-upon. It wasn’t a pleasant state to be in.

Fortunately a wiser part of myself stepped in. If this part of me had been verbalizing, it would have said, “You’re making yourself suffer unnecessarily. Drop the story. Look at your actual experience, and you’ll find that there’s fundamentally nothing wrong.”

So, first of all I recognized that I was making myself suffer. That’s key. A lot of the time we don’t realize we’re doing this. Maybe we think it’s life that’s making us unhappy, and so we think we don’t have any choice about it. But it’s not life that makes us suffer: it’s our reactions to the things that happen to us in life. Realizing that we’re making ourselves suffer gives us the freedom to stop doing that. It gives us the freedom to act differently.

One of the things we can do differently is to drop our stories. It’s our stories about events that make us unhappy. I had a story about how my son “should” have remembered his backpack, and how I “should” have remembered to check he had it, and how I’d “failed” in that task. And the story was also that going to the car was an unpleasant task and that I could be doing better things with my time. Those stories were making me feel mildly miserable. To drop our stories, we need simply to turn our attention to something else. In this case, “something else” is our immediate sensory experience.

When we focus on what’s arising in our present-moment sensory experience, we reduce our capacity for rumination — overthinking that creates or increases our suffering. The mind has limited bandwidth, and the more attentive you are to the body’s sensations, to perceptions from the outside world, and to feelings, the less capacity there is for the mind to carry thoughts — thoughts that make us unhappy.

So when I turned toward my attention in this way, I was aware of the movements of my body, the rise and fall of my breathing, the coolness of the night air, the darkness outside, the smell of the river nearby, the sound of traffic on Main Street. I was aware also that unpleasant feelings were present. There was a tense, knotted ball of resentment in my chest. Now the important thing here is just to accept these unpleasant feelings. React to them or try to get rid of them, and you’ll just make things worse. So you need to find a way to remind yourself, “There’s an unpleasant feeling present, and that’s OK. There’s nothing wrong with having an unpleasant feeling present.” You just allow that feeling to be there.

This is a radical thing to do. Our mental reactions are attempts to escape or fix unpleasant situations. It seems counter-intuitive to turn toward painful feelings. But turning toward our suffering reduces our suffering.

Once you’re no longer bolstering your pain with reactive thinking, you’re still left with the feeling. It may still be strong, or it may be that now all you experience is a just a kind of “echo” of the original, which quickly dissipates. But even if the suffering is strong and persistent, in the absence of obsessing about what you think is wrong, each moment now becomes bearable. (If you think your feelings are unbearable, you’re back into rumination. So drop the thinking and turn back to the feeling again.) Simply let go of thinking, observe painful feelings, and you feel more at peace.

In fact you may become aware that there are pleasant things happening too. The night is cool. the darkness is soothing. You’re getting a little more exercise than you expected. You’re alive. You’re breathing. Fundamentally, everything in this moment is OK. You’re OK. There’s just this moment, and this moment is fine.

Enjoying the play of your inner toddler

December 19, 2016

Bodhipaksa

on practice

We can experience different kinds of distracted thinking in meditation.

There are obvious, compelling, and “in your face” thoughts in which we tend to become completely immersed. These are the full-blown distractions where we completely forget that we’re meant to be meditating, and instead become submerged in our inner dramas. We dip in and out of these all the time in meditation, returning to the practice every time mindful awareness reappears.

Then there are lighter background thoughts that babble on in the background, even as we continue to pay attention to the meditation practice. So we’ll be following the breathing, for example, while random thoughts keep popping up. Perhaps these thoughts take the form of a commentary on our experience, or perhaps they are completely unrelated to the meditation practice. But they’re not usually so emotionally compelling that we get caught up in them.

I mainly want to talk a little about this second kind of thinking, and how we can relate to it.

Regard your inner chatter fondly, as if you’re listening to a toddler talking to itself while playing.

So, if you’re aware of an inner voice chattering away while you follow your breathing, you can try regarding that voice fondly, as if you were listening to a toddler talking to itself while playing. When a child talks like that it’s usually charming and funny and endearing. It’s not the kind of thing we tend to get upset about.

The way we relate to our inner talk is often more of a problem than the thoughts themselves. When we start resisting our thoughts, wishing that they would go away, the resistance itself is a painful state of mind, and it’s also likely to give rise to distractedness. Our thoughts of “I wish this would stop” throw us off-balance, and we find that suddenly we’re back into becoming seriously distracted again. Our distractions resist our resistance, and before we know it we find they’ve “tricked” us into being unmindful.

Just allowing those babbling thoughts to be present helps us to prevent this happening. It also helps us to be more kind and accepting.

Taking a tolerant and playful attitude toward random thoughts, which is what you’re doing when you regard them as being like the sounds of a young child playing, lets you simply get on with the meditation. The thoughts are still there, but they no longer bother you. In fact you not only don’t mind them, but can be amused by and feel fondness for them. This is immeasurably more enjoyable and helpful than resisting them!

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Of course this doesn’t work so well with the first type of thinking I mentioned — the compelling kind. Those thoughts tend to be emotionally loaded, which is why we find ourselves repeatedly drawn into them. What helps there is to give our compelling thoughts plenty of space, and I discussed in a recent article.

When the mind is constricted our thoughts seem larger, and they’re harder to resist. It’s a bit like being trapped in a long car-ride with a child’s constant demands for attention. It drives us crazy! To quiet the inner child down, you need to give it plenty of space to play. Once you’ve done that, you’ll often find that it just quietly gets on with its own thing, and you can enjoy its babbling as you get on with doing your own thing. Eventually, perhaps, the toddler will take a nap, and you can enjoy the refreshing calm of a quiet and spacious mind.