Meditation for Happiness

OLLI

Fall 2024

Day 2

Compassion

Breathe

Agenda

• Loving Kindness Review & Discussion
• More Buddhist Philosophy
• Compassion
• What it is
• Short Practice
• What it isn’t/barriers/difficulties
• Strategies
• Questions/Discussion
• Guided meditation

Loving Kindness Review

• Buddhists believe that we are all connected – all beings are connected.
• “Not the same; not different.”
• By extending loving kindness to others, we develop a greater sense of joy and equanimity for ourselves and the world.
• Extend “unconditional friendliness” toward everything because we are all suffering.

Loving Kindness Review

• Things that are difficult:
• Impermanence – we want good things to stay and difficult things to leave, but everything changes.
• Wanting – wanting is its own thing. Wanting keeps wanting even when we have something.
• Suffering – life holds a lot of painful events.
• Harmful people – hurt people hurt other people. It’s difficult to see the hurt in others who are harmful.
• We are all suffering. Suffering is normal. Not an indication that we’ve done something wrong.

Loving Kindness Review

• We try things out.
• We set an intention – no need to press for 100% perfection, just set an intention to extend unconditional friendliness to whatever arises – even the difficult stuff.
• See what happens. See how you feel. Constantly experiment with it and see what you think.

Loving Kindness Review

• As we extend loving kindness to others, we can also extend it to ourselves.
• This becomes a virtuous cycle – our capacity for loving kindness grows as we practice.
• “We call people selfish when they WILL NOT give. But they CANNOT give what they DO NOT have. It’s like asking a starving child to share her food, and then making her feel guilty for not wanting to. When we have enough, we are eager to share.”

�— There Is Nothing Wrong with You: Going Beyond Self-Hate by Cheri Huber, June Shiver

Loving Kindness Review

• Begin by focusing on the feeling of love and kindness. Evoke it.
• What is a personal key for you that unlocks your heart?
• Words, poem, story…
• Images, pictures, paintings…
• Pets, children…
• Easily lovable people…
• Find your phrases – keep experimenting with the metta phrases.

Discussion

How’d your practice go?

Guidelines

• Speak about yourself only.
• Don’t give each other advice. Practice mindful listening.
• Recognize there are only a few people in the room, but many more online. Further, the recording of this session will be available in a library.
• Take home learning, but don’t identify anyone when you talk about it later. Observe the confidentiality of our space.
• We are all growing. Celebrate the victories.

Discussion

• How’s your practice go?
• Did you find the key to unlock that feeling?
• What difficulties did you have?
• What feelings came up?
• What went well?
• What are your phrases?
• Would you continue to try it out?
• What questions arose for you?

Buddhist Philosophy + Psychology

• Two main points:
• Our natural state is loving and compassionate. We are conditioned away from our true selves.
• We are all primarily concerned with our safety – emotional and physical safety. Attempts to keep ourselves safe have consequences.

Buddhist Philosophy + Psychology

• The core of everyone is good.
• Our natural state is kind and loving.
• Conditioning takes us away from our natural state of being.
• Societal conditioning tells us we’re not good enough. Conditioning can be harmful.
• We have natural impulses as children that are not socially accepted, so our parents correct us.
• We internalize that correction as criticism.
• The inner critic is born.

Dove Real Beauty Sketches: Watch video

Buddhist Philosophy + Psychology

• “It is confusing for someone to conclude that they aren’t loved because there is something wrong with them.”

�— There Is Nothing Wrong with You: Going Beyond Self-Hate by Cheri Huber, June Shiver

• We equate doing wrong or being imperfect with being unlovable. We confound things being wrong or imperfect with ourselves being wrong or imperfect.
• Even when we do wrong, we are still worthy of love.
• So, wrongdoing ≠ unlovable.
• Mindful self-compassion program finds that there is a short distance between “I feel bad,” and “I am bad.”
• We overgeneralize. We are conditioned this way.

​

Buddhist Philosophy + Psychology

• Safety is everything.
• When trauma hits, we try to keep ourselves safe.
• Trauma is harm. Harm from the world/life and harm from other people.
• Some people maintain their safety in unskillful ways.
• Sometimes, that harm is directed inward; sometimes it’s directed outward.
• Hurt people hurt other people.

Cycle of Harm

Increasing difficulty

Cycle of Harm: �It’s all suffering. We are all fighting for safety and worthiness.

Increasing difficulty

Defense Mechanisms

Buddhist Philosophy + Psychology

• What we can choose to do is separate the harmfulness from the worthiness to be loved. We can believe that everyone deserves love and we can extend compassion to everyone.
• If harm caused these awful behaviors, what will cure these behaviors? Punishment? More harm? No, that is our conditioning speaking. Compassion is what’s needed to undo harm.
• We hold people accountable during their healing. Some require prison to keep society safe. We hold boundaries.
• Buddhists, and all wisdom traditions, believe that everyone deserves love and compassion.
• IFS has found that compassion transforms even the most hardened criminals.

Buddhist Philosophy + Psychology

• The far enemy: What is the opposite of compassion?
• Hate.
• Compassion ≠ Hate
• Self-compassion ≠ Self-hate

Karuna: Compassion

• Heartfelt yearning that all be free of suffering and the causes of suffering.
• When Loving Kindness meets suffering, when empathy encounters what’s difficult, there is compassion: we want to do something to help.
• First: empathy;
• Then: compassion.

​

Karuna: Compassion

“When we are suffering, we invite another energy from the depths of our consciousness to come up: the energy of mindfulness. Mindfulness has the capacity to embrace our suffering. It says, Hello, my dear pain. This is the practice of recognizing suffering. Hello, my pain. I know you are there, and I will take care of you. You don’t need to be afraid.”

Karuna: Compassion

“The work of mindfulness is first to recognize and then to embrace the suffering with gentleness and compassion. You make use of your mindful breathing to do this. As you breathe in, you say silently, Hello, my pain. As you breathe out, you say, I am here for you. Our breathing contains within it the energy of our pain, so as we breathe with gentleness and compassion, we are also embracing our pain with gentleness and compassion.”

Karuna: Compassion

“When suffering comes up, we have to be present for it. We shouldn’t run away from it or cover it up with consumption, distraction, or diversion. We should simply recognize it and embrace it, like a mother lovingly embracing a crying baby in her arms. The mother is mindfulness, and the crying baby is suffering. The mother has the energy of gentleness and love. When the baby is embraced by the mother, it feels comforted and immediately suffers less, even though the mother does not yet know exactly what the problem is.”

Karuna: Compassion

“Just the fact that the mother is embracing the baby is enough to help the baby suffer less. We don’t need to know where the suffering is coming from. We just need to embrace it, and that already brings some relief. As our suffering begins to calm down, we know we will get through it.

When we go home to ourselves with the energy of mindfulness, we’re no longer afraid of being overwhelmed by the energy of suffering. Mindfulness gives us the strength to look deeply and gives rise to understanding and compassion.”

SELF-COMPASSION

What is self-compassion? The same as compassion for others:

• Notice suffering.
• Feeling moved by others’ suffering so that your heart responds to their pain (the word compassion literally means to “suffer with”)
• Having felt this shared pain, you feel warmth, caring, and desire to help. You offer understanding and kindness.
• When you feel compassion, you realize that suffering, failure, and imperfection is part of the shared human experience.

Short Practice

Soften, Soothe, Allow

SELF-COMPASSION IS NOT…

• Pity or self-pity
• Self-pity: immersed in your own problems, your own suffering, forget about others, exaggerate your own uniqueness in your suffering; isolation and disconnection, emotional drama. “No one else has ever suffered pain like this!”
• Self-indulgence
• You don’t let yourself “get away with anything.” Maintain health, acknowledge feelings, not numbing them with a quart of ice cream and an 8-hour binge of Gilmore Girls.
• Self-Esteem
• Self-esteem is related, but can focus on separating yourself in order to make yourself feel better. It’s about self-worth, perceived value, or how much you like yourself. There is no self-evaluation involved in self-compassion. You deserve compassion no matter what – all human beings deserve compassion and understanding – it’s always available.

Karuna: Compassion

• Opposite: contempt or cruelty or hate
• Near Enemy: polite, pity
• Newport Beach unhoused people charity
• Pity = Aw, poor baby; Bless your heart – condescending
• Compassion is side-by-side, not superior or inferior (my dog, Ethel)
• Empathy is related but not a synonym. Empathy is the trigger for compassion but we don’t stay in empathy.
• “Compassion fatigue” is really empathy fatigue.
• Remedy: sympathetic joy

​

“Do not confuse Nice and polite with compassionate. A compassionate person may be what we call nice and polite, but compassion does not try to be nice and polite. Nice and polite come from conditioning. Compassion comes from the heart and our shared connectedness.”��— There Is Nothing Wrong with You: Going Beyond Self-Hate by Cheri Huber, June Shiver

Karuna: Difficulties

• Getting stuck in empathy.
• We want to look away. It’s hard to look at suffering and really see it.
• We want to fix it.
• We don’t know what to do.
• We think something is wrong with us if we cannot summon these feelings.
• Fear of being weak: anger is strong, love is weak – know that love is also strong.

​

​

Compassion Shift

• We get stuck in empathy and we take on the other’s pain.
• This leads to burnout or “compassion fatigue.”
• You are a separate person.
• Feel your feet, ground in your body, your feelings.
• Notice that your feelings are not the same as the other person’s feelings, not your normal feelings.
• Shift focus to a neutral person for awhile.
• Shift focus to joy.
• What’s your purpose? Is your purpose to take care of these people?
• “THEY”

Stay With It

• We resist our societal conditioning to immediately move away from pain and go toward the pleasant. We want to avoid looking at suffering.
• We train in staying with pain – staying with it while it’s workable – and we stretch the boundary of what’s workable.
• We open to our own difficulties as we develop compassion for others.

​

Not About Fixing

• Be present with the difficulty of another – not caretaking or “doing”, but just being.
• We rush people out of their pain due to our discomfort. Can we stay with it until they are ready? (grief)
• Can we develop our capacity to abide with suffering until it transforms?

​

What can we do?

• Continuum of things to do depending on your relationship to the person/people/beings who are suffering.
• Sometimes, nothing. Send some metta and go on with your day.
• Listen.
• Sometimes, if you are moved to do so, support the cause with time or money.
• Sometimes, you will get more involved as you deem appropriate (child, neighbor, friend).

Karuna: Strategies

• 3 possibilities practice opens us up and dissolves our biases.
• Actions: volunteering, trying to work toward repairing something in your community
• Understanding that our buttons being pushed are our buttons – and we can decide to work on them.
• Get curious.

​

Self-Compassion Strategy

• Ask yourself what are the things you’ve always wanted someone to say to you, but no one ever has. Ask the child inside you what it needs to hear you say.
• Make a recording. Tell yourself the things you’ve always wanted someone else to say. 
• Play it for yourself as often as you need to hear it.

This is not easy.

Breaking Open instead of Breaking Down

“Suffering is an inevitable, defining feature of existence. The Buddha gained this insight when he attained enlightenment, and later declared this as the first of the four noble truths.��Escape from suffering is the goal of Buddhism, but the way out is not to turn away. The way out is through. So as we work toward the goal of escaping suffering, we must learn to endure pain, hardship, disappointment, and all the various ways suffering shows up around us and in our own lives.”  

• We train in opening up over time.

Breaking Open instead of Breaking Down

• “How do we confront and sit with suffering without letting it destroy us? How does intimacy with suffering advance insight and stir compassion instead of fear, hostility, or callousness?
• One way to help relieve the pain is simply to embrace suffering with care and attention, whether it is arising in ourselves or we’re watching atrocity unfold around the world. Another option is to cultivate compassion.
• As meditation teacher Scott Tusa says, “Compassion allows us to bear witness in a way that softens us and opens us, rather than breaks us down.” It brings us together and fortifies us where we otherwise might feel isolated and helpless.”

Practice Option: Where we can open up

• Where is it easy for you to feel compassion?
• Victims of natural disasters, hurt children or animals…

​

• Where is it a little more difficult to feel compassion?
• Nosy neighbor, whining children, pushy boss…

​

• Where is it currently impossible for you to feel compassion?
• Criminals, opposite political party, ???

“The things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.”

Discussion

Questions or Comments?

Meditation Rx

• Continue practicing metta.
• Pay attention to where your compassion flows easily and where it’s more difficult.
• See if you can get curious about that difficulty – either with yourself or with that other person.
• Extend compassion to yourself.

www.saltwater4breakfast.com

Practice

Metta Meditation with Difficult People/Seeing Past the Mask

Tonglen: inhale suffering, exhale peace

Soften, Soothe, Allow