self-compassion

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” 👈

“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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Books and cats

August 29, 2025

It was lovely to receive this photograph the other day. This is Mara, one of the people who wrote an endorsement of my forthcoming book, “The Heart’s Awakening,” receiving her advance copy.

The cat in the background is Cleo.

The book doesn’t come out until Oct 14, and I didn’t even know that it existed in physical form!

I’m looking forward to seeing one myself.

“The Heart’s Awakening” has the subtitle, “108 Steps to a Life of Love.” It explores how we can bring more kindness, compassion, and appreciation into our lives. These are things that enrich our lives and make us happier.

It explains how we can overcome anger, hatred, resentment, and contempt — which make us and others unhappy.

One of the things it addresses is the way we undermine ourselves through self-criticism. Lots of people in our lives have criticized us in order to “improve” us. We internalize that strategy to the point where we can’t imagine living without it, even though we hate it!

The teachings in my book show how we can support and encourage ourselves through kindness instead. It makes such a difference to our lives when we do this. We realize that we’ve been going through life traumatizing ourselves with self-criticism. Then we wonder why we procrastinate on doing important things. Well, isn’t it kind of natural to avoid doing things when you’re only going to criticize yourself for not doing them “perfectly”?

There is a better way. And it’s not that hard. It starts with learning to show ourselves a little warmth and encouragement, using soft, kind, eyes (which is something I explain in the book), kinder inner communication, and other methods.

The Heart’s Awakening is available for preorder now. Why not reserve your copy so that you can hit the ground running (or sitting) on October 14?

Here’s a link to the book on Amazon, and os bookshop.org (which allows you to support your local bookstore).

Democracy and spiritual practice

July 1, 2025

Because of the alarming political situation in the US, which has parallels with events in other countries, I’ve been writing about how we, as spiritual practitioners, might skillfully face the troubling emotions politics can give rise to.

The two emotions that stand out for me are fear (where is this all going? how bad will things get?) and despair (mourning the loss of democratic norms).

To help me to deal with these potent emotions, I’ve adopted three slogans: Feet on the ground. Heart wide open. Eyes upward (or keep looking up). These provide a framework for my practice.

Feet on the ground means finding ways to keep ourselves emotionally balanced, so we can avoid panic and despair. We might want to be mindful in our news consumption. We might choose not to follow those who build followings on social media by generating, outrage, and follow instead people who are informed, compassionate, and balanced. Keeping up a daily meditation practice helps us be calmer. Keeping up our friendships (especially with those who are wise and balanced) helps us with emotional regulation. We might also understand that what’s happening today is part of a long historical pattern of swings between more democratic and autocratic styles of government.
Heart wide open reminds me that it’s important not to shut down and disengage, no matter how overwhelming the news might be. We need to create an inner space of compassion — staying in touch with our own suffering — and live from that space. We need to stay in touch with the reality of others’ suffering, and do what we can to help.
Eyes upward reminds me that we mustn’t ever let what’s happening now seem acceptable. We must remember, at a time of viciousness and chaos, what’s good and normal, and how things should be. But a return to normal, difficult as it is to imagine the path that takes us there, wouldn’t be enough. “Eyes upward” means aspiring to create a better, fairer society than we had before. Above all, it means developing a deeper appreciation of democracy and wanting a better, more inclusive, less corrupt democracy.

Democracy Is Under Threat

In fact, one of the things we are losing, or might be losing — and this is a source both of grief and fear — is democracy itself. The grief comes because of the freedoms and security we have lost. The fear comes for many reasons, but chief amongst them is that when leaders are no longer subject to democratic accountability, very bad things start to happen, from political persecution up to torture, murder, and genocide.

Democracy goes through periods of expansion and contraction. There were very few democracies before World War I, but an explosion of them afterwards. Democracies in that period also became more truly democratic, extending the franchise to working class men and to women.

Before WWII there was rise of authoritarianism and a decline in democracy. But after that war, the former colonies shed their European overlords, former dictatorships became democracies, and democracy expanded again. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, many former communist dictatorships adopted democratic forms of government. The number of people living in democracies peaked around 2006, after which democracy there was a rise once again of authoritarianism. Sometimes this authoritarianism took the guise of “illiberal democracy” where elections take place, but the ruling party has rigged things so that they’re almost certain to stay in power. Orbán’s Hungary is a prime example of this.

Right now we’re seeing a stark decline in democracy in the United States. Danger signs include:

the president taking control of governmental spending (a function reserved for congress)
threats to media outlets and law firms that the president regards as enemies
threats against judges (and actual arrests)
the executive branch defying court orders
the government attempting to take over the running of universities, etc.

These are all classic moves in establishing a Hungary-type authoritarian pseudo-democracy.

Recognizing the long-term ups and downs of democracy reminds us that it’s not “game over” when a country becomes authoritarian or even an outright dictatorship. Authoritarian regimes tend to implode, and people’s hunger for freedom and self-determination can never be entirely suppressed.

Reasons to Have Faith In Democracy

I have faith in democracy as the best form of government for complex modern states. It is our best hope for a dignified human existence. And it is the best political system for facilitating spiritual practice.

I say this knowing that there is no such thing as a perfect democracy. Human beings are themselves not perfect, and we are emerging from a history soaked in blood. We cannot slough off the past, and have to learn from it, sometimes painfully, in order to move on.

I offer four grounds to support my claim that liberal democracy is the best form of government.

1. Liberal Democracies Are More Peaceful

It is exceedingly rare for democracies to go to war with each other. The establishment of democracy in virtually all of Europe and South America has drastically reduced the incidence of war in those areas of the world. The more democracies there are, the more peaceful the world is likely to become.

Autocracies are inevitably violent. Their leaders are themselves belligerent and intolerant. They see wars as a good way of distracting a population from the poor standard of living that results from their inept leadership. Their populations are often unable to protest against wars. This is the case in Russia, for example. People may be so misled by propaganda that they don’t understand what’s going on. Many people in Russia think their soldiers are fighting Nazis in Ukraine. The more freedom there is, and the more the media is able to report what’s going on, the more opposition there is to war.

When autocratic leaders don’t direct violence against other countries, they often do so against less-favored citizens of their own countries. Liberal democracies tend to be peaceful places to live. Citizens do not generally have to fear that they will be dragged off for holding dissenting views. As Orwell wrote, “No system except democracy can be trusted to save us from unspeakable horrors.”

2. Liberal Democracy Allows for Material Flourishing

Liberal democracies tend to provide a far higher standard of living than autocratic regimes. The 10 countries with the highest standard of living are all liberal democracies, and yet liberal democracies count for only a third of the world’s governments.

Liberal democracies tend to be stable, predictable, and durable. No democracy is perfect, but in the main they have strong political institutions and legal systems, and democracies usually choose people with demonstrated competence to staff its agencies. Authoritarian regimes, offer government posts as rewards to those who demonstrate loyalty to the leader. Corruption flourishes, and as a result, the country and its economy become inefficient. The more dysfunctional and corrupt a democracy is, the more likely it is that it’s in the process of becoming authoritarian.

The more flawed a democracy is, the worse the standard of living tends to me. Neither the UK and US is anywhere near the top of the standard of living chart (the US is 15th, while the UK is 22nd), and both countries have been downgraded by the Economist Intelligence Unit from “full” to “flawed” democracies.

3. Liberal Democracy Allows for Emotional and Spiritual Flourishing

There is a reason why so many great spiritual and philosophical teachers—including the Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, and Plato—arose in the so-called Axial Age. The invention of iron meant that society was no longer living at a subsistence level. People could use iron axes to clear forests for agriculture use, and plow fields with iron-tipped plows. The agricultural surplus they generated, they could transport long distances in carts with iron-rimmed wheels. This created cities, where minds could more easily meet and talk.

With a higher standard of living, and with more free time, people could now ask questions like, “What is my life’s purpose? What does it mean to live a good life?” To focus here on material flourishing is not to be materialistic. It’s to recognize that freedom from material want allows for spiritual flourishing.

Many of the qualities necessary in the political culture of a democracy — a democracy’s “personality,” so to speak — are skillful traits of trust, ethics, and empathy. These qualities give rise to well-being in those that bear them and open them up to spiritual growth.

By contrast, authoritarian regimes produce unhappy people. Authoritarian governments engender feelings of powerlessness and cynicism. People may believe a regime’s propaganda for a while, but eventually they realize that they are surrounded by lies. Everyone is corrupt, and nothing is done well, but changing things is almost impossible.

Authoritarian regimes have to distract their populations from their problems. One way to do this is to generate hatred. Leaders will often target a despised group that they blame for society’s problems. In this way, authoritarianism encourages unskillful emotions of hatred and intolerance. For the same reason it encourages simplistic black and white thinking, rather than more nuanced thinking that encourages truth-seeking.

4. Liberal Democracies are Tolerant of Spiritual Exploration

One of the “personality traits” of democracies being their tolerance of diversity, democracies tend to allow for spiritual experimentation. Mature democracies officially recognize, minority religions such as Buddhism, and often give them access to special benefits, such as tax-exemptions. Although in some ways the US is a religiously intolerant nation, people who are Buddhists or members of other minority languages have been elected to high office.

The American experiment took as axiomatic the idea that people should be free to follow their own conscience in seeking a life that’s meaningful. For that reason, the founders of the US avoided having a state religion. In contrast, autocratic nations often have a favored state religion, and minority religions may be disadvantaged, discriminated against, or even persecuted.

Because of these positive conditions, Buddhist sanghas tend to flourish in democratic nations.

So for these four reasons — democracies being more peaceful, prosperous, emotionally skillful, and supportive of spiritual exploration — I describe democracy as the most desirable form of political organization.

We Are the Majority

As democratic norms are eroded, we need to avoid panic (feet on the ground), yet we need to care deeply (heart wide open) and channel our love anger into opposing harmful changes. And as we do these things we need to keep reminding ourselves and others of democratic ideals, and of the material, emotional, and spiritual benefits of democracy (eyes upward). We need to keep democracy in people’s minds and on people’s tongues, and resist their tendency to see what’s happening as inevitable and unstoppable.

It’s the desire for freedom that’s unstoppable. Yes, sometimes people take democracy for granted. Sometimes they’ll vote for authoritarian leaders because they’re struggling economically or afraid of demographic change. And for some people the cruelty is the point.

But as I’ve written before, “[it’s] important to remember that there are many people in the US (and elsewhere, of course) who believe in kindness, generosity, tolerance, compassion, democracy, standing up to autocrats, and protecting the world that sustains us. That’s much more than half of the population. We are the majority.

We are the majority. And we will prevail.

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Self-love, self-kindness, and non-self

March 7, 2025

Someone wrote to me recently and asked two questions, which boiled down to:

Did the Buddha teach self-love?
Is loving yourself contrary to seeing through the illusion of self?

There was a third question, but it was a little quirky, and so I’ll deal with it at the end.

First, I explained that these days I find the language of “self-love” unhelpful, mainly because the word “love” is so open to interpretation.

Self-kindness rather than self-love

I prefer to think in terms of self-kindness — that is, treating yourself with the same warmth, supportiveness, encouragement, and forgiveness you’d show to a dear friend.

The idea of “loving yourself” can be tricky. If you talk about “loving” parts of your personality that are harmful to yourself or others, this can imply that you approve of them.

But if you talk about being kind to them, that implication isn’t there. You can be kind toward someone without approving of what they do. Being kind toward harmful parts of yourself implies working patiently with them and not judging yourself harshly for having them.

The Buddha on self-kindness

The Buddha mostly talked about self-kindness implicitly, but there is one place he talks about it fairly explicitly. Talking about people who act skillfully, he said,

Even though they may say, ‘We aren’t dear to ourselves,’ still they are dear to themselves. Why is that? Of their own accord, they act toward themselves as a dear one would act toward a dear one; thus they are dear to themselves

He explains that acting toward yourself “as a dear one” means behaving ethically — that is, acting with regard to your own and others’ long-term happiness and well-being.

He contrasts this with people who say they are dear to themselves but who act unskillfully, thus heaping up future suffering for themselves. In other words they think they are being dear (kind) to themselves but they are acting like their own enemies.

So for the Buddha, the thing was to genuinely be kind to ourselves (that is, to treat ourselves as we would treat a dear one) by acting skillfully. That’s a pretty explicit acknowledgement of the principle that we should be kind to ourselves and treat ourselves as friends.

We’re kind to others if we’re kind to ourselves

We should treat ourselves as we would treat a friend, and treat all others as we would treat ourselves. And so we should think and act as follows:

I want to live and don’t want to die; I want to be happy and recoil from pain. Since this is so, if someone were to take my life, I wouldn’t like that. But others also want to live and don’t want to die; they want to be happy and recoil from pain. So if I were to take the life of someone else, they wouldn’t like that either. The thing that is disliked by me is also disliked by others. Since I dislike this thing, how can I inflict it on someone else?

The general principle is both clear and beautiful: “The thing that is disliked by me is also disliked by others. Since I dislike this thing, how can I inflict it on someone else?” It applies to all actions. And so, the Buddha applies this principle to other forms of behavior, such as stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and so on.

We could call this “self-love,” but I don’t, as I said, find that term very helpful. I think it’s better to say that we should be kind to ourselves — that is, we should treat ourselves in the same way as we would treat someone dear to us.

But no form of words, whether it be “self-kindness” or “self-love” is immune from misinterpretation. We have to understand that whatever we call it, “treating ourselves as dear” means acting skillfully, which means treating others as dear.

Dharma teachings work together

This mutuality of kindness for self and other is something the Buddha talked about in the Sedaka Sutta:

Looking after yourself, you look after others; and looking after others, you look after yourself. And how do you look after others by looking after yourself? By development, cultivation, and practice of meditation. And how do you look after yourself by looking after others? By acceptance, harmlessness, love, and sympathy.

One of the things about Dharma teachings is you can’t take just one of them and expect it to “work.” They’re designed to work together, synergistically. So “self-kindness” and “other-kindness” are mutually supportive. When I’m kind to myself that helps me be kinder to others. When I’m kind to others I’m helping myself, too.

Being kind is not being “nice”

One thing I think needs clarified, though, is that being kind to others is not the same as being “nice” to them, which is what people often do.

Being “nice” involves seeking approval from others. The assumption is: “If I act in the right way, others will like me and show me kindness.” It’s insincere, flawed, and ultimately selfish.

Niceness is what happens when we don’t have self-kindness, and so we try try to manipulate others into being kind to us in order to fill the void inside us. That void arises because we haven’t learned to be kind to ourselves. We don’t regard ourselves warmly, talk to ourselves encouragingly, and forgive ourselves when we’re not perfect. Because we don’t relate to ourselves kindly, we crave the kindness of others. Hence the manipulation.

Genuine self-kindness is when we respect ourselves, treat ourselves as we would a dear one, and have kindness and empathy for ourselves. This naturally extends to others when we empathetically know that they are just the same as us: they want to be happy and they don’t want to suffer; their feelings are as real to them as ours are to us.

Self-kindness and non-self

My correspondent asked a third question:

The Buddha said to send metta/goodwill to all directions, but is towards oneself a direction? That would seem to be stationary, since you ARE yourself.

I replied that I thought this was an overly abstract way of seeing things that overlooks our actual experience.

My actual experience is, I perceive myself. Or at least I perceive various sensations, thoughts, feelings, and impulses that I collectively label “myself.”

This “myself” includes both perceiving and things that are perceived.

There is always an emotional tone to that perceiving. Someone can hate themselves — that is, they perceive themselves with disapproval. Someone can be kind to themselves, which means that they perceive themselves with gentleness, patience, supportiveness, and encouragement (as they would a dear friend).

So yes, I can have goodwill for myself. I can be kind to myself. When, in the final stage of lovingkindness practice, I “send” kindness in all directions, I’m simply letting my awareness be permeated by an attitude of empathy and kindness. I let my awareness permeate the world, which means I’m “sending” kindness everywhere. But I’m also permeating my own being with a kindly awareness, and so I’m “sending” kindness to myself. (Actually, there is no “sending” of anything. That’s just an imperfect metaphor.)

To say “you ARE yourself” is to treat yourself as a unified phenomenon — that is, as if you were a self. A true self (something completely unified) could not be in relation to itself. Rather, each of us is an amalgamation of various activities, processes, etc. That includes parts that can relate kindly, and parts that need to be related to kindly.

It’s because there is no unified self that we’re able to be kind to ourselves.

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Self-compassion for troubling times

February 24, 2025

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. Eyes upward. 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.

Create a space of compassion, and live from it

November 26, 2024

In the immediate aftermath of the US presidential election, most people I know were shocked. Since then they seem to be making emotional adjustments, which is good.

This is no doubt partly to do with the nature of emotions themselves. Emotions are created by the way we interpret and think about the world. At first, all people could think about was the election, and so their emotional responses were heightened. Quickly, though, we start to — and have to — think about other things, from what we’re doing at work to what we’re buying for dinner. As the thing that shocks us becomes just one thing that we focus on, rather than the one thing that we focus on,, our emotions settle. Or they do to a certain extent, anyway. The big thing is still a big thing. We’re never able to ignore it for long, nor should we.

So we need other tools to help us deal with troubling feelings.

There are more good people than bad people

Many people have been seeking useful perspectives that help them to feel calmer. In another post here I suggested it was helpful to recognize that we are not alone in a sea of terrible people, which is what we might at first think. Most people who voted did not vote for Donald Trump, and that many of them don’t even support his policies. They were simply expressing dissatisfaction with the current economy, often for very legitimate reasons. Many were misinformed and didn’t know what exactly what they were voting for. After all, we never do. Elections are a statement of hope. Sometimes things work out better than usual. Sometimes we’re disappointed. Perhaps you were overjoyed with the election results. I hope you don’t come to regret that, although I suspect you will.

It’s reassuring to consider that many people were low-information voters rather than supporters of authoritarianism. Many of the people who supported him don’t know what “authoritarianism” meant (it was a Republican who pointed this out). And some of them think of authoritarian leadership as no big deal (they’re just “owning the libs”) not realizing that authoritarian regimes can be hard to remove from power and inevitably do immense harm while they exist.

So that was one strategy for helping to calm the anxious mind; remembering there are lots of good people around us, some of whom are merely misguided rather than monsters. True authoritarians are found in all societies, but are a minority — perhaps thirty percent of the population in the US, meaning that seventy percent are not.

Self-compassion for political feelings

As another strategy for calming emotions, I’ve been encouraging people to practice compassion: first for themselves, and then for others.

We may be feeling grief, or panic, or fear. I suggest that we surround those feelings with a space of kindness and compassion, and then live from that space.

These troubling feelings are often around the diaphragm or heart. They are unpleasant, and this can make us want to avoid them. But that’s the worst thing we can do. We need to accept them. This can mean a number of things:

Remembering that in being in pain or discomfort we are not failing. Pain is a normal part of life.
Seeing these feelings simply as sensations like any other.
Breathing with the discomfort.
Telling ourselves, “It’s okay to feel this. Let me feel this.”
Seeing them as communications from a part of us that needs our support.

We can do all of these things. The more tools the better. The last one, though — seeing them as communications from a part of us that needs our support — is crucial.

The nature of feelings

Feelings arise from relatively ancient parts of the brain. They act as a communication when potentially harmful circumstances are detected. And the election of someone who has values conflict with our own, and who wants to enact those values through policies we consider harmful, is such a threat. Hence, these ancient systems send a signal into the body, alerting our whole system to the perceived threat.

The part of us that is alarmed is just part of us. There is a part that is afraid, but there are also parts that can offer it reassurance. The problem is, when we are panicking we don’t even realize that we have this self-reassuring capability.

Seeing with kindness

To trigger it, we have to mentally step back. We need to step, imaginatively, into a different time and place. Into a safer space. So try remembering, right now, a time you looked with love and affection. (I’m remembering what it was like to watch my children sleeping when they were young. You can recall looking at a child, a lover, a partner, a friend, a pet — it doesn’t matter as long as you’re immersing yourself in a memory of love.)

As you bear this memory in mind, feel the qualities that arise in your sense of vision. Feel what’s happening in and around the eyes. Notice qualities of softness, warmth, cherishing, tenderness, love. And then turn your attention — imbued with those same qualities — inward, toward your own feelings of dread, or anxiety, or grief, or whatever they may be.

Regard your painful feelings with loving eyes.

Talking to yourself compassionately

And talk to those feelings, or to the ancient parts of the brain that create them, with kind, reassuring words. Say things like:

It’s okay. I’m here for you.
I care about you and I want you to be at ease.
I know this is hard, but I’ll take care of you.
We’ll get through this together.

With this combination of regarding our pain with loving eyes, and offering supportive messages, we’re offering ourselves a lot of reassurance. This helps to calm down our emotional responses and make them more manageable.

But it does more than that. While before, it seemed like our painful feelings dominated our experience and were who we are (or as the Buddha put it, we sensed ourselves as “conjoined with them”) now our feelings are just one part of our experience.

Living from a space of compassion

Surrounding our feelings is a space of warmth, compassion, and stillness. And we are relating to our pain from that space. We feel ourselves securely in this compassionate space, regarding our painful feelings with empathy and warmth, offering them support. This is much better! We can feel comfortable with our discomfort.

But we can go further. Not only do we relate to our own painful feelings with compassion, but we can also relate to others’ pain with compassion. Aware that there are others out there in the world, suffering as we had been suffering. And we can regard them with empathetic, loving, supportive eyes. And we can think supportive thoughts.

And this helps us with our own suffering, because we’re no longer focusing narrowly on ourselves, and we’re aware we’re all in it together.

Taking compassion into our actions

But we can go further than that, do. Feeling compassion is hollow if it doesn’t lead to acts of compassion. So find something to do. Maybe it’s as simple as reaching out to some friends and letting them know they’re not alone. Maybe it’s donating to one of the many organizations we’re going to need if things get really bad. Maybe it’s attending a vigil or demonstration. Maybe it’s starting or joining a book discussion group, reading something like Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” together.

Doing something gives us a sense of power, of agency. It makes us feel stronger and less fearful.

So in this way, having created a space of compassion around our pain, we live from that space, both in an inward direction, supporting what is suffering within us, and in an outward direction, offering support to others and strengthening the fabric of civil society.

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Chinese translation of “This Difficult Thing of Being Human”

October 21, 2024

news

It took a while to get a copy of this book from the Chinese publisher, not just because of the distance involved but because of the local post office temporarily losing the package it came in.

But here it is: the Chinese translation of my book on self-compassion, “This Difficult Thing of Being Human.”

Behind it you can see various copies of my other books in a variety of languages. I’m pleased to say that my work is now available in nine different languages. I’d love that to be in doubt figures, but that’s not something I can hurry.

The story behind this book is a little weird. I discovered that “This Difficult Thing of Being Human” had been translated into Romanian by stumbling upon in on Amazon. My publisher had never mentioned the translation.

While I was asking about the Romanian translation, my editor mentioned in passing that a Chinese translation was being discussed.

In trying to find out whether the Chinese translation had gone ahead (it had, two years before!) I found there was also a Korean translation, which I’ve never seen.

I suggested to my publisher that they might want to look at their procedures for translations, so that they kept authors in the loop. They took this on board and it seems like it’s going to happen in the future. So when my work is published in a tenth language, I shouldn’t have to discover that accidentally!

By the way, This Difficult Thing of Being Human has been very well received. Every single review on Amazon gives it five stars. (There are some people who have rated the book with less than five stars, but none of them have written a review.) Several people have told me it’s been life-changing for them or people they knew. One woman whose son is in rehab said that every person in the rehab facility had found it revelatory.

New translations of “This Difficult Thing of Being Human”

September 20, 2024