Practicing compassion

In my work as a therapist, I often use Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT) as I have found it to be profoundly healing.

This style of therapy focuses on growing our inner resource of compassion to help us increase our capacity to be with and move through challenges in our lives.

Part of being human is to experience suffering - the challenges, defeats, difficulties, barriers, failures, fears, doubts, mistakes, regrets, anxieties, sadness...

Compassion is an emotion that serves us as an inner resource to help us cope with suffering.

Now imagine this…

Something difficult happens to you - you say something hurtful to a loved one, you forget to do something you had promised you would - and instead of spiraling into a cycle of self-criticizing or self-blame or self-judgement you practice compassion.

You take a soft, deep breath and acknowledge that you feel bad right now, and you remind yourself that these things happen, that feeling like this is part of the human experience, and remind yourself that things will be okay.

Then you take a moment to consider what you can do to help make things better - like initiating that tough conversation or offering an apology.

I’m wanting to move through my days with this more of this kind of gentleness, deep acceptance, and loving awareness for all of those human moments when things don’t go as planned.

Practicing compassion can help us be with and even learn from our suffering.

So here we go, our invitation for this month is to explore and practice compassion.

Compassion invites us to tune into parts of us that are suffering, listen to what those suffering parts are needing, and use that body wisdom to inform what actions we can take to prevent and/or alleviate our suffering.

We can think of compassion as having two components:

The first component is about holding / being present with / tending to / getting to know / validating / acknowledging the suffering we are experiencing versus avoiding / ignoring / pushing aside / judging / criticizing / minimizing our suffering.

The second component is about taking courageous, fierce action to prevent and alleviate this suffering.

With these two components, compassion gives us a powerful opportunity to tune into our own body wisdom and find our own answers to help us move through suffering.

Now I’ll like to invite you to practice.

Here is a short audio recording of a Compassionate Check-In practice.

The practice invites our attention to return to our body, noticing what is present for us right now, with compassionate awareness. You may notice a little pain in your body somewhere. You may notice some stress. You may notice numbness or blankness. You may notice calmness. Whatever is present for you, the practice invites a loving, compassionate awareness of whatever may be present.

It is a simple and sweet practice inviting you to check-in with how your body, your inner world is doing right now.

Here’s to practicing and growing together!