Context Of Caring

When we give ourselves compassion, the knot of self-judgment starts to dissolve...replaced  by a peaceful sparkling diamond.

“Friends raised with a notion of original sin often tell me that guilt has shadowed them from the time they were very young. Common thoughts include things like, I was born bad; I was born broken; there is something fundamentally wrong with me. Even if such concepts weren’t part of our religious or family backgrounds, they persist in our culture and can result in a pervasive sense of defeat: nothing I am or do will ever be good enough. For some, the sin is being born the “wrong” gender, ethnicity, race, or sexual orientation, all of which can lead to feelings of not belonging. These cultural messages not only impede our ability to love and care for ourselves but can inhibit our potential by causing us to lower our expectations and rein in our dreams. At the same time, the opportunities available to us may realistically be diminished because of society’s projections onto us. We may even become the target of outright hatred and threats to our safety.

James Baldwin, the late, brilliant, gay African American author, described his process of coming to terms with such messages in his essay “They Can’t Turn Back”: “It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.” We may also be swamped by the pervasive messages of our materialistic culture, which stresses competition, status, and “success” over character and emotional intelligence. This makes it easy to fall into the lose-lose trap of comparing ourselves to others. But, as psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky points out in her book The How of Happiness, “The more social comparisons you make, the more likely you are to encounter unfavorable comparisons, and the more sensitive you are to social comparisons, the more likely you are to suffer their negative consequences … No matter how successful, wealthy, or fortunate we become, there’s always someone who can best us.”

When we constantly hear that we should be smarter, better connected, more productive, wealthier—you name it—it takes real courage to claim the time and space to follow the currents of our talents, our aspirations, and our hearts, which may lead in a very different direction.

Have you ever wakened in the morning feeling contented and quiet, and then, within fifteen minutes of checking your phone, felt out of sorts and jealous? Longing for something more? Many of us now spend as much time immersed in images on a screen as participating in the world outside our devices. Whether subtly or blatantly, ads tell us that our bodies need making over, our clothes just won’t do, our living room is a mess, and we’re not invited to the right parties—all as a way to sell us more and more. Along the way, what might be a source of pleasure becomes infused with anxiety.

Social activist Jerry Mander hypothesizes that media is deliberately designed to induce self-hatred, negative body image, and dejection, with advertising drummed up—and sold—to offer the cure. Regardless of the source of these messages, we can become more aware of them. We can see which messages we’ve adopted as our own beliefs and learn instead to hold them more loosely; in time, we can even replace them with an inquiring mind, an open heart, an enhanced sense of vitality. We may not be able to make the messages disappear, but we can question them. The more we do so, the less intrusive and limiting they become. In turn, we become freer to connect more authentically with others, as well as to our own deepest yearnings.

I have never believed that you must completely love yourself first before you can love another. I know many people who are hard on themselves, yet love their friends and family deeply and are loved in return—though they might have difficulty in receiving that love. But it’s hard to sustain love for others over the long haul until we have a sense of inner abundance and sufficiency. When we experience inner impoverishment, love for another too easily becomes hunger: for reassurance, for acclaim, for affirmation of our worth. Feeling incomplete inside ourselves, we search for others to complete us. But the equation doesn’t work that way: we can’t gain from others what we’re unable to give ourselves.

It’s important to recognize that self-love is an unfolding process that gains strength over time, not a goal with a fixed end point. When we start to pay attention, we see that we’re challenged daily to act lovingly on our own behalf. Simple gestures of respect—care of the body, rest for the mind, and beauty for the soul in the form of music and art or nature—are all ways of showing ourselves love. Really, all of our actions—from how we respond when we can’t fit into our favorite pair of jeans to the choice of foods we eat—can signify self-love or self-sabotage. So can the way we react when a stranger cuts us off in line, a friend does something hurtful, or we get an unwelcome medical diagnosis.

As Maya Angelou said in her book Letter to My Daughter, “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” I started meditation practice, as many do, with the need to turn around that tendency to feel reduced by life. Still, it takes a special courage to challenge the rigid confines of our accustomed story. It’s not that easy to radically alter our views about where happiness comes from, or what brings us joy. But it’s eminently possible. We truly can reconfigure how we see ourselves and reclaim the love for ourselves that we’re innately capable of. That’s why I invite students to set out on this path in the spirit of adventure, instead of feeling that real love is a pass/fail exam that they’re scared to take. Although love is often depicted as starry-eyed and sweet, love for the self is made of tougher stuff. It’s not a sappy form of denial. You might still feel rage, desire, and shame like everyone else in the world, but you can learn to hold these emotions in a context of caring.

Real love allows for failure and suffering. All of us have made mistakes, and some of those mistakes were consequential, but you can find a way to relate to them with kindness. No matter what troubles have befallen you or what difficulties you have caused yourself or others, with love for yourself you can change, grow, make amends, and learn. Real love is not about letting yourself off the hook. Real love does not encourage you to ignore your problems or deny your mistakes and imperfections. You see them clearly and still opt to love.

We begin to cultivate real love for ourselves when we treat ourselves with compassion. In a sense, self-compassion is like a muscle. The more we practice flexing it, especially when life doesn’t go exactly according to plan (a frequent scenario for most of us), the stronger and more resilient our compassion muscle becomes. Katherine says: “The hardest part of this practice for me has been listening to, feeling, and grieving the intense pain of my childhood and teen years. Avoiding this pain gradually closed down my life and awareness, but my heart has begun to warm back to life. I’m able to be present in new ways for myself, my husband, my children, and my grandchildren.”

When Katherine says her heart has warmed, it’s not just a metaphor. As psychologist Kristin Neff (Self-Compassion.org) writes in one of her blog posts, “When we soothe our painful feelings with the healing balm of self-compassion, not only are we changing our mental and emotional experience, we’re also changing our body chemistry.” She reports on research that suggests while self-criticism triggers increases in blood pressure, adrenaline, and the hormone cortisol—all results of the fight-or-flight response—self-compassion triggers the release of oxytocin, the “bonding hormone,” which increases feelings of trust, calm, safety, and generosity.”

~ Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

Photo ~ Sharon Salzberg & His Holiness Dalai Lama in the mid 1990s