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Compassion A recent trend in therapeutic interventions is the use of compassion to improve mental health. It's warranted, don't get me wrong, it's just the big buzz word, which usually means people think they "should" do it but don't always know how. Kristen Neff's research shed a lot of light on the importance of having compassion for yourself. And neuroscientists have shown that when we have compassion, shame is reduced and we are more likely to make changes. So it's a very positive action and I myself encourage it in my clients.
It's not exactly easy for most people to turn on inner compassion however. That's because self-compassion is a skill, that most of us never learned because most of our parents never learned it from their parents. Rick Hanson's book Resilient helps us cultivate skills needed to live with resilience by helping us understand how to plant the seeds of a skill and grow them. Summary of Resilient: Compassion Rick Hanson, Ph.D. describes compassion as the recognition of pain with the warmhearted desire to relieve it. He classifies compassion as a way to meet our need for safety, by simply recognizing it is happening. To plant the seed of compassion he asks thoughtful questions: what would it feel like to be on your own side, if you felt a duty to care for yourself how might your behaviors change, and how would it benefit others if you felt more peaceful. If the questions don't spark inner kindness he also offers reflections: bring to mind someone who you cared for and bring to mind when someone cared for you. From here Rick Hanson encourages us to get the most out of positive experiences. When we have a positive experience, he says it goes wasted if we don't make efforts to turn it into lasting neural changes. To make the changes a key factor is to have repeated experiences of it. So frequent small experiences of compassion throughout our day is more helpful to us then one big compassionate moment once a month. A second key factor is that when you have the positive experience you want to let it sink in, such as after feeling compassion for yourself, notice the sensation of compassion in your body and how it impacts your state of mind. Within the chapter he also speaks of acceptance and enjoyment. I'll leave it to you to discover the connection with compassion, if you explore his book. Resilient: How to grow an unshakable core of calm, strength, and happiness by Rick Hanson, Ph.D. with Forrest Hanson, copyright 2018 Chapter 1, pages 9-21 Comments are closed.
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