self-care

Join me in “As the World Falls Apart”

January 6, 2026

I am launching a major new course for 2026, on the topic of how we deal with political turmoil.

Here’s why:

It sometimes seems that the world we’re living in is falling apart in terrifying ways.

I feel oppressed by the knowledge that the world is on a very wrong track at the moment. My fears of where things might go are a heavy burden to carry. The events unfolding around me were once unthinkable and are now shocking and I view them with a sense of disbelief. It’s like one day I woke up and found myself in the wrong timeline. How can all this be happening?

Much that we value is being lost or is under threat: a livable climate, free speech, the rule of law and due process, the reliability of the US as an international partner, our expectation that the world had learned “never again” with regard to genocide, the assumption that larger countries should not invade smaller ones just because they can, the belief that all human lives matter and that racism and xenophobia are wrong, economies in which ordinary people can better themselves, trust in science and medicine — even democracy itself.

n so many ways a familiar world (imperfect though it is) seems to be crumbling around us, being replaced by something crueler, less human. The forces of authoritarianism and fascism, although largely defeated, never went away, even in liberal democracies, but they’re undergoing a dark resurgence.

Change is coming at us so fast that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. We might feel paralyzed with terror. We might feel tempted to give up in despair. We might find ourselves consumed with rage.

I have to say, some of you might be sick of politics. You might want to just hide.

But that’s what authoritarians want. They do and say outrageous and cruel things at a breakneck pace so that we’ll feel overwhelmed and hopeless, and so that we’ll stop paying attention. We can’t let that happen, because things will just get worse. Many, many people will suffer.

We can’t directly change the upsetting things that are happening in the world around us. But we can change how we respond to them. And if we want the world to change direction, that’s what we’re going to have to do.

A new course

For the last few months I’ve been working on a new course on how we can learn to stay calm, open-hearted, and optimistic as the world is falling apart.

The course is structured around three broad headings for spiritual practice:

Feet On the Ground: This means learn to calm ourselves even in the midst of chaos and outrage. This involves not just mindfulness, but the sense of calm empowerment that comes from knowing we’re doing the best we can with the resources available to us. We practice self-care to keep ourselves in balance. We get smarter about reading the news and using social media.
Heart Wide Open: This includes actions such as supporting ourselves with self-compassion, staying open to the sufferings of others, and cultivating joy as a form of resistance. It includes becoming more fearless. It includes reconnecting with the good that exists in the world and remembering that there are more people who want peace and unity than want violence and division. It includes connecting with and working with those people.
Keep Looking Up: This includes developing and maintaining our faith in a better world. It involves becoming clearer about what a better world would look like. It’s about learning to work with other people of good will to make that a reality.

Taking action — which is one of the emphases of this course — doesn’t necessarily mean becoming an activist. It might mean encouraging those who are. It might mean holding a sign at a rally. It might mean contributing to groups that are working for good. It might mean staying in touch with others who know that what’s going on is wrong, and offering each other moral support. It might include smiling at strangers, and showing that you’re not cowed. It might mean reading an inspiring book with friends. However little we can do, it’s important we do it.

We can push for the creation of a better world, starting here, starting now. In the future, you’ll want to be able to say, “We couldn’t stop them. But we slowed them down. And when the insanity collapsed in on itself, we’d already worked out how we wanted to rebuild things.”

How it works

This course is based on others I’ve run in the past — especially “Love Your Enemies” and “Politics As a Spiritual Practice” — which many people found helpful. I’ve been substantially reworking the materials from those courses and creating new content to make sure I address the renewed threat of fascism and authoritarianism, how we resist it, how we live with it, and how we make it less likely to happen next time.

The course starts Wednesday, 28th of January.
This course has a weekly email, which will go out on Wednesdays at 5 AM US Eastern Time. Each email contains a substantial essay, or a part of one.
There will be meditations, but the emphasis is more on the readings, reflections, and practice suggestions.
The number of emails isn’t finalized, but the course will probably run for the whole year.
There will be live Zoom discussion groups every two weeks where we can talk about the articles, our thoughts and feelings, and our lives. I’m aiming to do these at two different times, to accommodate people in the US, the UK and Europe, and Australia and New Zealand. Bear in mind it’s not possible to suit everyone’s schedule. Details to follow.
We can also have written discussions in the community website. Participation and sharing are important.

Our world falling apart is an opportunity

The title of this course is not meant to be alarmist or depressing. In a sense the world is always falling apart. Our own bodies are falling apart, right now. The leaf in the photograph above is falling apart. What keeps things together is the ongoing work of building and sustaining. As well as falling apart, your body is constantly healing and growing. The leaf’s very falling apart is the condition that supports the growth of new leaves. Old institutions die, and new ones are created.

The falling apart of the old world is like the death of a leaf. It looks like a loss. But it’s also an opportunity for new growth. We know that the world we lost, no matter how much we mourn its passing, can never be put back together again the way it was. And it shouldn’t. It fell apart because it was a bad world for too many people. What we grow in the leaf litter has to be something better, fairer, more just, more human. It has to be a world in which all people can flourish. That’s what we need to aim for. What is that world like? How do we get there? We’ll talk about that together.

This course is only open to those who sponsor Wildmind, thereby giving me the opportunity to reflect and write. But it’s easy to become a sponsor, and it’s only $8 a month. That’s a sound investment in an exploration that will help you feel happy and balanced amidst the turbulence, and that will help you be of more use to our suffering world.

With love,
Bodhipakṣa

👉 Click here to become a sponsor and to join me in “As the World Falls Apart” 👈

Can empathy be unhelpful?

February 20, 2023

Bodhipaksa

on practice

One of the members of Wildmind’s community reminded me recently of an article, “The Surprising Downsides of Empathy,” that appeared on the BBC website two-and-a-half years ago.

The article says:

In recent years, researchers have found that misplaced empathy can be bad for you and others, leading to exhaustion and apathy, and preventing you from helping the very people you need to. Worse, people’s empathetic tendencies can even be harnessed to manipulate them into aggression and cruelty.

Empathy generally has a pretty good press. Most, people, although not all, would suggest that we need more empathy in the world. The hold-outs are often those who take a “tough love” approach and think that we are mollycoddling people (especially young people). I suspect, however, that many of those people are often just unkind individuals. I also think they misunderstand the nature of empathy, but since I want to write today about misunderstandings of empathy I’ll leave that there for now.

The BBC article quotes researcher Paul Bloom, who famously wrote a book called “Against Empathy” several years back. I previously commented in this blog on an article drawn from that book. One thing Bloom wrote in that article was:

It is worth expanding on the difference between empathy and compassion, because some of empathy’s biggest fans are confused on this point and think that the only force that can motivate kindness is empathetic arousal. But this is mistaken. Imagine that the child of a close friend has drowned. A highly empathetic response would be to feel what your friend feels, to experience, as much as you can, the terrible sorrow and pain. In contrast, compassion involves concern and love for your friend, and the desire and motivation to help, but it need not involve mirroring your friend’s anguish.

Bloom is perfectly correct to point out the difference between empathy and compassion. The two are not the same. Empathy is a state of feeling something in response to another person’s feelings (you’re talking to someone whose child has drowned) or in response to their situation (you hear about someone whose child has drowned). Despite what the article I’m quoting states, empathy doesn’t necessarily require an act of imagination. If someone tells you their child has drowned, you will (as long as you’re not a psychopath) feel touched by their situation. You don’t, hearing that awful news, have to imagine in detail what it’s like to be in that situation.

Compassion is the desire to help alleviate suffering. We can see the active nature of compassion in the root of the Pāli and Sansrit word karuna. This comes from the verb karoti, which means “to do.”

Empathy isn’t enough. We need compassion. But does that mean empathy is bad, or useless?

The BBC article seems to suggest that it is.

Bloom uses the example of an adult comforting a child who is terrified of a small, barking dog. The adult doesn’t need to feel the child’s fear to help. “There can be compassion for the child, a desire to make his or her distress go away, without any shared experience or empathic distress,” he writes.

So according to this, we don’t need empathy. We can just have compassion.

To Have Compassion, We Need to Have Empathy

But is that the case? Let just imagine an adult who completely lacks empathy. To them, the crying child is probably just an annoyance, and they shout at the child, terrifying it even more. This adult doesn’t understand what it’s like to be afraid. They don’t know what it’s like to be helpless and to need help. Nor do they understand that the child needs adult reassurance. They don’t recognize that a child can’t turn off its fear by force of will. To know these things requires empathy. To know those things is empathy.

This highlights that empathy actually is at work in Bloom’s example. The compassionate adult knows what the child is going through and what it needs, which is empathy. They know what it’s like to be helpless and to be in desperate need for support and reassurance. It’s because they’re empathetic that they offer compassion.

There’s No Such Thing as Too Much of a Virtue

I don’t actually believe in the concept of having too much of a virtue. What I do believe is that you can lack other qualities (also virtues) that are necessary to stop a good quality such as generosity from being toxic. For example, prudence and wisdom are qualities that balance generosity, telling you what the consequences of continued giving are (“Wait, I have to pay the rent next week”) and so suggesting limits.

“Empathic distress” is another of the ideas that can grow out of the idea that you can have too much of a virtue. Clearly, if you take on board so much of a person’s suffering that you paralyze yourself and are unable to help them, that’s unhelpful. You’ve taken a situation where one person is in trouble and needs help, and turned it into a situation where two people are in trouble and need help.

In vividly imagining distress to the point where you paralyze yourself, you’re no longer practicing a virtue. You’re doing what the Buddha called indulging in “grief, sorrow, and lamentation,” which is a cause of suffering. An ancient Buddhist commentary in fact says that “sorrow is failed compassion.”

Missing Virtues

So what virtues are missing, so that empathy is turning into something toxic?

As with generosity, we need to balance empathy with wisdom. As an example example, Bloom shows that people will want a girl who has been brought to their attention to skip the queue for life-saving surgery. They empathize with the girl and want to act compassionately. But they ignore the others ahead of her in the queue, who might be in even more urgent need of surgery. It’s easy to ignore them, because they’re anonymous.

Wisdom considers that the other people in the queue are deserving of care as well.

We also need to balance empathy with ethical awareness of what’s right and wrong. In another study, people were willing to inflict pain on someone who was competing in a mathematics competition with a financially strapped student. The researchers had encouraged them to empathize with the student, but not the student’s competitor. Ethics (the Buddhist variety, anyway) tells us that even if we feel motivated to punish another person by inflicting pain on them, we shouldn’t, because violence is wrong. Ethics also embodies wisdom, because it tells us that another person’s suffering is as real to them as ours is to us; why then would be inflict unwanted pain on an other when we would dislike having that pain inflicted upon us.

Most of all, though, empathy needs to be balanced by self-compassion. When we see that another is in distress, we can be moved by that. That “feeling moved” can contain an element of discomfort. Self-compassion teaches us how we support ourselves emotionally as we experience suffering. It also helps us recognize when we’re bringing too much suffering upon ourselves — suffering that’s more than we can cope with and that isn’t necessary in order for us to be helpful.

All of the “downsides” of empathy that the article describes are of this nature. They’re not actually the downsides of empathy at all. They’re the downsides of lacking virtues such as wisdom, ethics, and self-compassion or self-care.

Certainly, empathic distress isn’t helpful. It’s even harmful. But it’s not the sum total of what empathy is. To give money to help starving people on the other side of the world you most certainly don’t need to imagine what it’s like to starve. But you do have to care. And a person lacking in empathy doesn’t care, which the person who has real, balanced empathy does: they experience compassion and are moved to help.

It is wonderful that Bloom and others are showing the harmful side of unbalanced empathy, which leads to “empathic distress.” It’s just a shame that they’re not clearly pointing out what the problem is: the under-development of balancing virtues.

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Self-compassion and self-care

January 2, 2023

Bodhipaksa

on practice

It’s funny — I’ve known since I was 13 that January is named for the god Janus, who has two faces: one looking forward and one backward. But right now it strikes me how appropriate that is.

The period around New Year is a natural time to look back at and see what was good or wasn’t so good. We can also look forward into the coming year and think about what we might do, and what we might change.

Anyway, I want to tell myself that I’m not interested in New Year’s Resolutions. This is mainly because of youthfully naive attempts with them that I forgot within days. But I can’t help but look, Janus-like, at the year that’s just past and the year that’s just beginning.

A Good Year and a Bad Year

Last year was tough in some ways. Three people I had strong connections with, including my sister, died within nine days of each other. I re-injured my back quite badly by straining my left sacroiliac joint. I could barely walk for several days, and was still in pain months later. My elderly parents both got Covid, which was worrying, although they both pulled through. And a big concern was that a lot of Wildmind’s sponsors were forced to cancel their subscriptions for financial reasons. (Most of those were in the UK, where the post-Brexit economy is truly dire.)

It was also a good year in some ways. I had a book (“A Year of Buddha’s Wisdom”) published on my birthday last year. I remained in that ever-shrinking group of people who have managed to avoid Covid. Toward the end of the year I rekindled a habit of walking daily. My meditation practice kept going, through thick and thin. Although the pandemic has reduced my social life almost to zero, I’ve adjusted to that being the case.

I spent the entire year writing on one topic, which I’ve never done before: on January 14th I sent out the first email in a course called “Politics as a Spiritual Practice,” and the last email of the course went out on December 29th. I’ve never before had an opportunity to explore one topic in such depth. In essence I wrote a book, and in fact I hope to find a publisher for it this year.

Sometimes the good and the bad are connected. Yes, I did a lot of writing. But that meant sitting for long periods at a computer, and that wasn’t good for my body, which led to me injuring my back.

Self-Care and Self-Compassion

Which brings me (finally) to the point of this article: I’m pretty good at self-compassion but not very good at self-care.

Self-compassion is where we respond in a kind, supportive way to our own suffering. We give ourselves the comfort and reassurance we need in order to get through hard times, whether those hard times last for a few moments or for months on end. It’s a powerful practice. I’m pretty good at it. I even wrote a book about it.

Self-care is where we take care of our own needs so that we don’t create as much suffering for ourselves in the first place. Keeping our long-term happiness and well-being in mind, we do what we need to do in order to be healthy and happy. That includes things like eating healthily, getting enough sleep, taking breaks from work, and getting regular exercise and stretching. The first two on that list I’m very good at. The third (taking breaks) I’m not bad at. The fourth (exercising and stretching) I’ve been very bad at.

Some people are good at self-care but not self-compassion. They might live very healthily but not be emotionally self-supportive. They might even be very self-critical. I’m good at self-compassion, but not at self-care. Ideally, we should be good at both.

My back injury was a good reminder of the importance of self-care. I really don’t want to go through that ordeal again, so I’ve been to a physical therapist and learned some stretches and exercises that will give my core more strength and give my body more flexibility. Together, those things should keep my back in reasonable health. And once this chest infection is out of the way I intend to get back to walking daily.

Lessons Learned

Based on the lessons I’ve learned from booking backward and looking forward, it feels appropriate to have an overall aim for the year, expressed in general terms. I’d describe that aim as “Thriving Though Self-Care.” I want to thrive — healthily, happily. I have an image of myself later this year, full of energy and joy. And I want to get there through practicing self-care.

It also seems that having general aims isn’t enough, so I’m setting myself the specifically goals of walking for a average of 30 minutes a day (at a minimum), and stretching at least once a day for five minutes.

If I miss a day’s walking (sometimes I’m sick, sometimes the weather makes it impossible) I’ll do more walking on other days to keep my average up.

I know from previous experience that accountability helps, so I’m going to check in about this daily in Wildmind’s community website, letting people know how I’m doing.

So I hope that will help me with my practice of self-care.

Two More Things

Two more things in regard to self-care:

First, toward the end of last year I started working a four-day week. I did this because of reading about an international study showing that when businesses switched to a four-day week they actually became more productive. I’ve been doing this for a month now, and I think it’s helping. I’ve noticed that I’m more creative than I’ve been for a while. I’m ending my workweek in a state of joy rather than exhaustion. I feel more relaxed at weekends, too.

Second, I was so focused on finishing the year-long course I was teaching on politics that I did almost nothing in response to losing about a third of my income as supporters withdrew their sponsorships. This caused a fair bit of anxiety, so as part of my practice of self-care I will be working on building up my base of subscribers again. It’s hard to create when you’re worried about whether you can afford to pay rent. In fact, in the long-term I’d like to have someone working with me on Wildmind who is responsible for community growth and community engagement. I’d like to have someone to work with, and I’d rather devote 100 percent of my energy to teaching and not have to think about money.

So that’s what I’m learning, looking back at next year, and that’s how I intend to live 2023 differently, based on those lessons. (One last goal: I want to write in this blog three times a month for the rest of the year, even if the reports are brief. Some of those posts will be follow-ons from this one.)

Anyway, I wish you a very Happy New Year. If you have any thoughts about self-care, or about New Year’s aspirations, resolutions, aims, or goals, why not add them in the comments below?

The third arrow

February 5, 2019

Bodhipaksa

on practice

The weekend that my wife told me she wanted a divorce, she took our kids away so that she could spend a few days with a friend. The children, who were four and six years old at the time, had been at school all day and I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to them. My wife thought this was no big deal, but to me it was a hard blow at a difficult time, and it set me up for a lonely weekend in an empty home. As with many people, my first instinct was to stuff myself with unhealthy, fatty foods, and to open a bottle of wine.

I imagine that evolutionary biology would say that we’ve evolved the instinct to eat high calorie foods at times of crisis, to help us weather whatever trials are ahead of us. Experientially, fatty, salty, carb-laden food like burgers and fries just feel comforting in the short term. But they often leave us uncomfortable, bloated, sluggish, and unhealthy. I felt this urge, but since I’d been working on being self-compassionate, I decided that a Thai curry, full of fresh vegetables, would be healthier and more pleasurable in the long term. I also avoided the temptation to drink, since I knew that was likely to make me feel depressed and self-pitying. I touched base with a few friends in order to let them know what was going on, and to get some emotional support. I went for a walk. I meditated.

Kindness to you is kindness to me; kindness to me is kindness to you

June 11, 2014

Rick Hanson PhD

on practice

I usually describe a practice as something to do: get on your own side, see the being behind the eyes, take in the good, etc. This practice is different: it’s something to recognize. From this recognition, appropriate action will follow. Let me explain.

Some years ago I was invited to give a keynote at a conference with the largest audience I’d ever faced. It was a big step up for me. Legendary psychologists were giving the other talks, and I feared I wouldn’t measure up. I was nervous. Real nervous.

I sat in the back waiting my turn, worrying about how people would see me. I thought about how to look impressive and get approval. My mind fixed on me, me, me. I was miserable.

Then I began reading an interview with the Dalai Lama. He spoke about the happiness in wishing others well. A wave of relief and calming swept through me as I recognized that the kindest thing I could do for myself was to stop obsessing about “me” and instead try to be helpful to others.

So I gave my talk, and stayed focused on what could be useful to people rather than how I was coming across. I felt much more relaxed and at peace – and received a standing ovation. I laughed to myself at the ironies: to get approval, stop seeking it; to take care of yourself, take care of others.

This principle holds in everyday life, not just in conferences. If you get a sense of other people and find compassion for them, you’ll feel better yourself. In a relationship, one of the best ways to get your own needs met is to take maximum reasonable responsibility (these words are carefully chosen) for meeting the needs of the other person. Besides being benevolent – which feels good in its own right – it’s your best odds strategy for getting treated better by others. This approach is the opposite of being a doormat; it puts you in a stronger position.

Flip it the other way, and it is also true: kindness to yourself is kindness to others. As your own well-being increases, you’re more able and likely to be patient, supportive, forgiving, and loving. To take care of them, you’ve got to take care of yourself; otherwise you start running on empty. As you grow happiness and other inner strengths inside yourself, you’ve got more to offer to others.

Kindness to you is kindness to me; kindness to me is kindness to you. It’s a genuine – and beautiful – two-way street.

The kindness to others and to yourself that I’m talking about here is authentic and proportionate, not overblown or inappropriate.

In ordinary situations, take a moment here and there to recognize that if you open to appropriate compassion, decency, tolerance, respect, support, friendliness, or even love for others . . . . it’s good for you as well.

See the consequences of little things. For example, earlier today, in an airport, I saw a bag on the ground and didn’t know if it had been left by someone. Thinking about this practice, it was natural for there to be some friendliness in my face when I asked the man in front of me if it was his bag. He was startled at first and it seemed like he felt criticized, then he looked more closely at me, relaxed a bit, and said that the bag was his friend’s. His response to my friendliness made me feel at ease instead of awkward or tense.

Imagine what the other person’s concerns or wants might be, and do what you can – usually easily and naturally – to take them into account. Then see how this turns out for you. Probably better than it would have been.

Also see how taking care of yourself has good ripple effects for others. Deliberately do a small thing that feeds you – a little rest, some exercise, some time for yourself – and then notice how this affects your relationships. Notice how healthy boundaries in relationships helps prevent you from getting used up or angry and eventually needing to withdraw.

In effect, you are running little experiments and letting the results really sink in. That’s the important part: letting it really land inside you that we are deeply connected with each other. Helping others helps you; helping yourself helps others. Similarly, harming others harms you; harming yourself harms others.

It’s as if we are connected in a vast web. For better or worse, what you do to others ripples back to you; what you do to yourself ripples out to others.

Recognizing this in your belly and bones will change your life for the better. And change the lives of others for the better as well.

Get out of the war

July 15, 2013

Rick Hanson PhD

on practice

No Comments

What are you fighting? By “war” I mean here a mindset, not combat between nations with tanks and bombs. The “war” I’m referring to is an attitude of conflict and animosity toward a person, object, or condition. Parents can feel at war with a misbehaving teenager, and certainly vice versa. Neighbors quarreling over a fence. Spouses edging toward divorce; divorced parents continuing to battle over holidays. Someone stuck in traffic, at war with other drivers. Ideologues reviling the other side. Kicking the chair after stubbing a toe against it.

The summer when I was 16, I worked as a camp counselor beside the Pacific Ocean, and there was a lot of skin diving (without scuba gear) into the forests of kelp. One time I foolishly swam into a thicket of kelp, thinking there was clear water just on the other side, but there was only more seaweed, with thick orangish leaves and long strong vines reaching up from the seabed below. I was trapped, running out of air, and began to panic. I battled the kelp, thrashing and jerking, which only wrapped it more tightly around me. After I don’t know how long, a clarity came over me and my war with the kelp ended. My diving mask was around my throat, my snorkel ripped out of my mouth, and I’d lost a fin. I slowly disentangled myself from the kelp rather than fighting it, working my way upward, finally clearing it, seeing the bright silver surface of the ocean above my head, and rising up to it and then the precious air.

We need to be able to stand up for ourselves, deal with tough things – including nearly drowning – and change what’s wrong and uphold what’s right. But when we do this while also caught in anger like a swimmer caught in kelp, that’s not good for us or others. A mind at war feels bad, full of irritation and fear. The body revves up, accumulating the gradual wear and tear of stress activation. Perceptions and beliefs get biased and defended. Reactions are turbocharged. All this prompts others to go to war with us, which then drives vicious cycles.

Getting caught in the mind of war is understandable and all too normal. The capacity and sometimes inclination to go to war are a part of human nature (amidst many other parts, including empathy, restraint, altruism, and love). Next, this part of a person is shaped further by culture, economic hardship, childhood, and life experiences. Then psychological factors get involved, such as identifying with your “case” against others, vengeance, holding onto grievances, or a general mood of reproach.

But whatever its causes, still, a mind at war is the responsibility of the person who has it.

How?

Recognize the causes. Be aware of the emotional payoffs in being at war, and the inner justifications. How did your approach to conflict get influenced by your upbringing and life experiences? Do you go to war because you don’t know another way? As you understand these causes more deeply, they’ll have less power over you.

Recognize when you’ve slid into war mode. Notice the tension and activation in the body, the righteousness and rigidity in the mind, the tangles of recurring conflicts with others. Be very aware of the experience and the impact on others, including innocent bystanders such as children. Considering all these costs, ask yourself: Do I really want to be at war here? Then make a choice. This moment of sincere choice is key. Without it, the momentum of war takes on a life of its own.

Pick a particular situation and imagine being strong and taking care of things without going to war, without throwing the hot coals that burn both others and yourself. How could you be firm and clear without slipping into righteousness or antagonism? Imagine someone who embodies this combination of strength, moral confidence, self-control, and non-reactivity to the warlikeness of others (two models for me are Martin Luther King, Jr. and Aung San Suu Kyi); imagine how this person might act in your situation, and see if you could be more like this yourself.

Take care of your real interests as best you can. If appropriate, try to repair with the other person (“non-violent communication” is a good approach). But if the other person ignores or punishes your efforts at repair, that’s not a good sign. Then if you can, name and try to repair the lack of repair – and if this effort is blocked as well, that’s a really bad sign. You may need to shrink the relationship – at least inside your own mind, if you can’t do this outside in the world – to the scale that is trustworthy and safe for you.

Bottom-line, look to the war as it happens inside you rather than getting swirled into the accusations, positions, threats, and recriminations around you. See the suffering in the other people and yourself, and see if you can have compassion for all parties. The world outside may not change. But if you end the war in your own head, you’ll feel better and act better. Which just might help the world around you to change for the better as well.

Kindness is not weakness

November 19, 2012

Bodhipaksa

on practice

Recently I received a few questions about the relationship between lovingkindness and “toughness.”

1. When practicing lovingkindness, how do you respond if people around you warm to you, but misconstrue your kindness and friendliness, and then become disappointed that you don’t want a “relationship” with them?

Well, that’s an interesting question. I suppose the short answer is “kindly.”

It’s great if people are noticing you becoming friendlier and are responding. But these things can be complicated, especially when people have strong emotional needs (because they’re lonely, for example) or where friendliness is being interpreted as an overture to romantic involvement.

And sometimes we may need to look at the signals we’re giving out. Are we just being friendly, or is there an element of flirtatiousness? It’s hard to say from the inside, sometimes, because we’re often not aware of all our motivations and habits. It may take a lot of internal scrutiny and perhaps feedback from friends before we can sort that out.

Also see:

But assuming that you’re just being friendly, we just need to be kind and clear and to set appropriate boundaries. So you could thank the other person for their interest and say, kindly, that unfortunately you don’t have time in your social calendar to have coffee with them, or that you’re not interested in dating at the moment, or whatever seems appropriate for the circumstances.

Some people are not good at taking rejection, so the other person may be hurt or angry or become more persistent, so you may have to be very firm. But it’s still best to be gracious.

2. When practicing lovingkindness but still having to be part of the world work-wise, how do you reconcile others’ expectations that you must be “tough” to negotiate deals etc, that kind, gentle people are “pushovers” and should be taken advantage of, or treated with toughness?

There does seem to be a common assumption that if you’re friendly you can’t also be tough or firm, but that’s of course not the case. Sometimes you have to make hard decisions. Recently I had to lay someone off because of a financial crunch at work, which was a tough decision to make. But it needed to be done. I tried to do it as kindly as possible, and to give as much background information as possible so that she’d understand why I was doing what I was doing. The response was quite amazing: my former co-worker, when she heard about the financial difficulties we were going though said, “That’s terrible. What can I do to help?” This is not a testament to my communication skills and is more to do with the other person’s own kindness, but it shows that even a lay-off can be an affair free of bitterness.

Some business-people are tough to the point of being positively inhuman, because they are unable to empathize with others. One study reckoned that one in 25 business leaders may be psychopaths. In the long-term, business leaders like that are hugely destructive. They can make life hell for the people they work for. They can destroy trust with their own customers. They can bring their own companies down (Enron, anyone?). They can destroy entire economies.

There’s even a case for saying that corporations, which typically take returns to shareholders as the only meaningful benchmark of success, disregarding the welfare of their workers, clients, and the world generally, have psychopathic tendencies.

On the other hand, studies have shown that effective leaders are empathetic. One study showed that the most effective managers “consistently used the following four competencies: empathy, conflict management, influence and self-awareness.”

Being empathetic and kind is one set of skills. Being clear and tough is another. Having just one set of these skills makes you ineffective. But it’s possible to have both.

3. This all kind of rolls up to how much is it my responsibility to change my own behaviours based on what I perceive others expect of me? I know some people who do this unconsciously, and others who don’t do it at all a they have no consciousness of others perceptions. But once you are aware, how much is it my responsibility to change myself, and how much should I be “true to myself” and expect others to change around me – even knowing it may not get the response I seek?

If we confuse being kind with “getting people to like us” then we won’t be true to ourselves, and we’ll suffer. Being kind simply means recognizing that other people wish to be happy and don’t want to suffer. Being unkind means wanting others to suffer or not to experience happiness. Now we can be kind and still take actions that lead to other people being unhappy (you might need to lay someone off, and they probably won’t be happy about it) but it’s not our aim to make the other person unhappy, so we’re not being unkind. We recognize that the decisions we’re making are likely to evoke unhappiness, and so we try to take that into account in our speech and in other actions we take.

And being kind doesn’t mean negating your own well-being. If other people have expectations of you, you need to ask whether those expectations are right and reasonable. Your question’s rather abstract, so I’ve no idea what kind of expectations people have of you, or in what way they might want you to change. If they want you to fit in with some well-established and effective way of doing things, then yes, I think it’s reasonable for you to change to accommodate that. If they expect you to lose your sense of right and wrong, then you need to take a stand.

When we’re “being true to ourselves” we’re always being selective. In my opinion, we’re most true to ourselves when we’re true to the wisest and kindest parts of ourselves, rather than to the most rigid, grasping, or harsh parts. There’s inevitably conflict between these two sides. Pick a side.

But it’s a complex thing, this being human. Complex and difficult. There is a need for give and take, for compromise, for making concessions. But there’s also a need to be firm to your core values. If people don’t respect that, then sometimes the kindest thing you can do — for yourself — is to get the hell out of Dodge.

Mindfulness and energy

May 3, 2011

Saddhamala

on practice

Have you ever noticed that when you are with some people you feel energized and when you are with other people your energy is drained?

Do you have a difficult time saying “no” when someone requests something from you, and then find yourself feeling exhausted and resentful?

Do you put your own responsibilities on hold in order to do things for other people?

Have you been, or are you now, feeling like there are not enough hours in the day to do all that you need to do? Are you feeling overwhelmed and exhausted?

If you have answered “yes” to any of these questions, mindfulness can help you to be aware of how, and with whom, you expend your energy and therefore take better care of yourself by using your energy wisely.

There is an organization I have belonged to for eighteen years. I believe in the mission of this organization because it changes peoples’ lives for the better. It has changed my life for the better.

Over the years I have been happy to do whatever I could to see the organization thrive, including: fundraising, listening to people who are going through difficult times, teaching classes, catering for events and attending more meetings than I can count.

Because there were so many things that needed doing, and I believed in those things, and I knew I could do what was needed and do it well, I had a difficult time saying “no”. After so many years of doing so much, my energy was drained.

And I was exhausted. When I woke up in the morning I did not feel rested. I knew that exercising would help me feel more energetic, but I felt too tired to exercise, I just wanted to stay in bed as long as I could each morning.

When I became aware of the decisions I was making, in terms of how I was spending my time and expending my energy, I started to decline “invitations” to take on more and more responsibility – but it wasn’t easy.

People were used to having me take on more and more work. It was difficult to say “no” but I realized I needed to take care of myself as well as caring for others.

In fact, I realized that unless I took care of myself, I could not take care of other people wholeheartedly.

Is it time for you to become mindful of how you expend your energy in terms of what you do and who you spend time with?

Stress: What can we do about it?

February 23, 2011

Wildmind Meditation News

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Keith Upchurch, Herald-Sun, Durham, NC: Everyone has stress in their lives, but how you handle it makes all the difference, according to a world-renowned stress expert.

Jeffrey Brantley, a psychiatrist and founder-director of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program at Duke Integrative Medicine, says humans have always had stress, but some factors are making it worse today.

For example, with today’s global communications, people constantly hear disturbing news that they can do nothing about, which can increase stress.

Then there’s the tough economy and “the uncertainty about world terrorists and all that stuff,” Brantley said. “And all of our veterans and their families and the costs. So I think there are some forces in our cultural fabric right now that maybe weren’t so much there 10 or 12 years ago.”

“And the issue is that people know about these things, but what can they do about it? So there’s that sense of alarm without good response capacity. This is where the stress reduction-mindfulness practices are so useful, because people can become more aware of their own inner life. They can be more aware of their context, and they can make choices.”

“In a way, it’s very much common sense,” he said, “but people talk themselves out of doing the common sense thing a lot of the time.”

Being mindful, or just paying attention, is something everyone can do to relieve stress, Brantley said.

“Mindfulness is something we have as human beings,” he said. “It’s that part of us that knows what’s happening, so you know when you’re angry or sleepy. Usually, we haven’t been taught to cultivate methods for noticing that, and that’s what the meditation practices are about.”

Brantley said it can help to have someone experienced in mindfulness lead the person along, “because the mind is tricky.”

“We have a lot of defenses, and learning how to work skillfully with our natural patterns of thinking and reacting is something that a meditation teacher who is trained can help you with.”

What about other ways to handle stress?

“The thing I always preach is self-care and self-compassion,” he said. “So many people, when you really stop and listen to one’s own thoughts, tend to be negative and self-critical. And that’s really toxic and not correct. So I encourage people, when you notice yourself being hard on yourself, to give it a rest, and practice some kindness and compassion.

“It doesn’t mean to be selfish,” he added. “I say it means to be self-full. Just care as much about your own self as you care for a perfect stranger who is in pain. If you can do that, you’ll go a long way to help your stress.”

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See also:

There’s No Such Thing as Too Much of a Virtue

Missing Virtues

Self-compassion and self-care

A Good Year and a Bad Year

Self-Care and Self-Compassion

Lessons Learned

Two More Things

The third arrow

See also:

Kindness to you is kindness to me; kindness to me is kindness to you

Get out of the war

Kindness is not weakness

Also see:

Mindfulness and energy

Stress: What can we do about it?