5 Self Caring Practices

 

The Joy of Self-Caring

We’ve been sold on the idea that self-care means chocolates and bubble baths, but Cyndi Lee says real self-caring is a practice, not a treat.

Cyndi Lee

5 November 2021
Before everybody started talking about self-care, they talked about detoxing. Cleanses were the trend and many (if not most foods) were vilified. Daily emails arrived letting me know the many ways that I was toxic—food, air, relationships, inner dialogue. The programming director for a huge yoga conference told me that if I wanted my classes to sell out, I just had to put the word “detox” in the title.

This consumeristic approach to ancient yogic practices was accurate in some ways: a need had been identified and a solution proposed. We feel incomplete, unloved, inadequate, and definitely not fit enough. Being toxic might be our own making, but fortunately, we could easily purify ourselves by purchasing a juice cleanse. We could even purify ourselves this way daily, which was really good because it meant we could then continue our toxic ways. So as long as we kept detoxing, we could also keep toxing.

It seems to me that the purification trend has faded and evolved into the latest health directive —self-care. Now the daily emails tell me that I need to get more sleep, do restorative yoga, take time out to get together with a friend, do more barefoot walking on the grass, keep a gratitude journal. Actually, I think these are all really good ideas. But none of them is going to satisfy our dissatisfaction, reduce our craving, or relieve our suffering.

You might be right that your life is super stressful and you deserve a special treat now and then. But applying a materialistic approach to our pain, boredom, need for attention, or aching back is just a band-aid. The discomfort will cycle back up and then we will “do” another self-care activity, and then another when we feel bad again. The momentary relief of a pedicure is like a painkiller that works so well it discourages us from trying to remove the thorn in our foot that is causing our suffering. Besides, it’s our suffering that makes us feel deserving of the yummy self-care goodies.

What our suffering really deserves is compassion. This is what initially inspired me to take the bodhisattva vow. When my teacher, the late Gelek Rimpoche, introduced this concept to me, I was inspired by the idea that my life, my good efforts in practice, and my caring and compassion could be dedicated to the benefits of others.

Actually, Rimpoche didn’t say that. But that’s what I heard. For about twenty years. Then I finally woke up to what he really said, which is that a bodhisattva dedicates their practice for the benefit of all beings, and that includes me.
That was against the stream of what I grew up thinking, which was that good and nice people don’t put themselves first because it’s selfish. So when I first heard about self-care, I kind of thought, “Eewww.” It seemed icky. Like taking yourselves out for a date or something. Sad and lonely.
But sometimes, I am sad and lonely. And it’s nothing a bubble bath can fix because applying a band-aid is not the same as having a caring heart. As Reb Anderson writes in Being Upright, “All suffering is worthy of compassion.” That means that our own suffering too is worthy of our own compassion. Self-care might be a one-off event, but self-caring is a living practice that allows our innate capacity for caring to emerge and, even more, to ripen and increase.

As a yoga and Buddhist meditation teacher, when I talk about practice I’m usually referring to yoga asana or meditation or breath work. When we engage in these practices, we don’t say that we’re doing “self-yoga,” “self-meditation,” or “self-pranayama.” So when we think of “self-caring” as just “caring,” we are already moving toward a larger view of this practice, one that is for benefit of all beings, including ourselves.

How can we shift from the band-aid approach to a practice of self-caring? Even asking the question is a good start. The Tibetan word for practice is gom, which means “getting familiar.” The practice of self-caring is about getting familiar with the part of us that is naturally caring and getting familiar with what it feels like to apply that tenderness to ourselves.
Sometimes I think about how much I suffered when I was a dancer in my twenties. I saw myself in the mirror every day and I was never, ever good enough, thin enough, special enough. I was grumpy a lot of the time and all those drugs I did didn’t make me like myself better. Now that I am in my sixties, my heart breaks when I remember that young woman, and I vow to be kinder to myself. I don’t want to be that way to myself anymore because I don’t deserve it. I also know that when I am not caring to myself, I am more difficult to be around.

This is motivation. It is how we start all spiritual practices. You can say to yourself anytime, “I am going to cultivate my innate ability to be caring, for the benefit of all beings, including myself.” Or you can say, “I am going to get familiar with when I am uncaring toward myself and vow not to go there. I vow to grow my capacity for being a caring person.” If you like, you can place your hands over your chest and feel your heartbeat, as you say this.

Even if you don’t think you can do it or you label it as “magical thinking,” you can still say it because you’re getting familiar with opening to your own potential
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This is how you begin to move into tend and befriend. “Tending” is when you engage in nurturing activities and attitudes that help you feel safe and calm. “Befriending” means spending time with community and family—experiences that also support “tending.” By attending to yourself with kindness and being willing to take responsibility for your own caring, you are tending and befriending yourself. “Tend and befriend” increases the anti-stress hormone oxytocin, which lowers cortisol, blood pressure, and other stress responses. In other words, self-caring feels good.

“Tend and befriend” sets the ground for you to engage in the practices of self-caring, which are all ways of getting familiar with the two aspects of your nervous system, the sympathetic and parasympathetic.

When a stressful situation arises, the sympathetic nervous system, which is connected to the spine, will respond by telling you to move now, via the fight or flight instruction. This response sends blood to the muscles, speeds up the heart, and slows down other functions that are not needed for running or fighting, such as digestion. Conversely, the parasympathetic nervous system is close to the inner organs and tells each of them when to relax and quietly do their jobs. This is known as rest and digest.

We need both of these systems to be toned so that our nervous system can be nimble and go fast or slow, depending on the need. Unfortunately, most of us are already hyped up to a certain degree. So, I offer some short, simple, and powerful practices below that will stimulate the rest and digest response. Think of this as toggling between the active requirements of your life and the receptive moments that you choose—together they help you become more resilient through the gateway of your body.
The number one thing to remember is to do them. Like all such practices, it might be boring at first and you don’t always feel results right away. Without results, it’s hard to have faith in the process and you can lose your motivation. This is where you just have to trust the practice and look to the wisdom of great teachers. Like Gelek Rimpoche always said, “Drip, drip, drip, the bucket fills.” Being patient is also a way to practice self-caring.

5 Self-Caring Practices

As With any practice, begin by reviewing your motivation. This is a reminder that practice is not just about what you do, but also about how you do it, and that makes the difference.


These practices help you touch into your capacity for caring and develop a sense of genuine closeness with yourself.

Savasana
In the yogic tradition, savasana is a way to let your body and mind rest at the end of a strong, active practice. Savasana is a Sanskrit word that means “corpse pose.” This practice is for letting go of our physical bodies. It is a good opportunity for generating thoughts of gratitude for one’s precious life.
Recently my ayurvedic doctor prescribed a daily savasana to me as a way to recover my energy after the stress of two surgeries. It made me happy to be reminded that something so easy was also so good for me. It nourishes and revives me, both mentally and physically. Savasana will also calm the brain, reduce fatigue, lower blood pressure, and relax your body.

Lie down on your back on your bed or on the floor. Place a small pillow or folded blanket under your head and neck, but not under your shoulders. Your legs are straight, feet as wide apart as your hips. Position your arms about twelve inches out from your sides, palms up. You can also place a pillow or blanket on top of your thighs. Close your eyes and rest for five to ten minutes. If your legs are especially tired, do savasana with your calves up on a stack of two or three large pillows. Or you can lie on the floor with your lower legs and feet on the couch or a chair. This variation also helps invigorate stagnant lymph fluid.

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Grounding Touch
In this exercise, you are using your own hands to weight your body, which helps reduce anxiety and create a sense of calmness and stability.

Standing up or sitting in a chair, begin to gently rock side to side. Eventually let your weight settle firmly and evenly on your two feet. Place your right hand on your belly and left hand on the center of your chest. Tune in to the feeling of your breath, the sensation of warmth from your hand, and the strength and softness of your body. Take a few breaths between each of the following movements: place your right hand on your forehead, your left hand on your belly, then both hands on the center of your chest.

Finally, place your palms together and rub them, making some heat. Cup your warm hands over your face and let their warmth melt the tension in your face, eyes, and jaw.
Slide your hands down your face and all the way to the tops of your legs. Press gently on your thighs to enhance the downward-moving energy in the body called apana. Apana supports the immune system by promoting elimination of all that is not needed: physical waste, confusion, doubt, fear, or feeling lost.

Loving-kindness

Sit comfortably. Place your palms on the center of your chest. Close your eyes. Take a few moments to feel your natural breathing and the feeling of your hands on your body.
Then say each of these expressions of loving-kindness toward yourself:
May I be happy.
May I be healthy.
May I be safe.
May I live with ease.
After you recite each of these, notice what comes up in your mind. Whatever you notice is fine and interesting. This is another way of getting familiar with yourself, but it doesn’t mean every thought is true. If you get way off-track, repeat the phrase.
After noticing what comes up, take a big breath in, and as you exhale, let go of that phrase. Go on to the next one.

Gathering and Grounding Breath

This is a way to get out of your head and into your body. You can also do this during a challenging conversation or meeting or even while you are walking down the street.
Sitting or standing, find an upright posture. Close your eyes and tune into the feeling of your natural breath coming in and out. Slowly begin to lengthen your inhalation and extend your exhalation, just a little bit at a time. When you breathe in, imagine all the scattered parts of your mind collecting together in one spot at the edge of your nostrils. As you exhale, let that soft ball of energy drop down into your body, giving you a feeling of earthiness and stability. Repeat slowly as many times as you like.

Bedtime Foot Massage

Sit on your bed with some oil or lotion nearby. My favorite is arnica oil with lavender, as the arnica helps heal bruises and tender spots, and the lavender helps you relax. Put a little oil in your hand and start to rub circles around your ankle. Take your time moving down your Achilles tendon and around your heel. Use one hand to gently flex your toes back and, with the other hand, pull your heel away, stretching the sole of the foot. Interlace your fingers with your toes, as if you were holding hands with them, and slowly circle your foot in both directions, like winding up a toy. Finally, place your other hand over the top of the toe-holding hand and lightly squeeze.
Gently release your hands and place your feet together. You will see that one foot looks fresh and pink, flush with circulation. Time to do the other foot and then tuck yourself in for a nice sleep.

Each of these practices I’ve suggested is easy to do—they don’t require any equipment or expertise and can be done in less than five minutes. All of them integrate body, breath, and mind; they feel good while you are doing them; and when you finish, you will feel better than when you started.
Know that if you forget to practice, you can always make a fresh start. One January, I made a New Year’s resolution to do a daily restorative yoga pose for one month. I did it for two days, but on the third day I completely forgot. I didn’t remember it for the entire year, until the following January. Once I realized, I had a good laugh and then re-upped for the last year’s resolution. Anytime is a good time to cultivate a light heart and generosity toward oneself.
I also want to encourage you not to make a job out of this practice of self-caring. The idea is not that you must do one or more of these practices every day in order to succeed with self-caring. The idea is that these are all methods for helping you get close to yourself. When you pay kind attention to yourself, noticing when your breathing is too tight or your posture is too loose, you develop a thread of awareness around your own energetic habits. As you naturally become more familiar with what is actually nourishing for you, because it’s easy and it feels good, your self-caring practice will grow.

Cyndi Lee

Founder of the world-renowned OM yoga Center in NYC (1998-2012), Cyndi is known for her contemplative classes and soulful teachings. She is the author of 5 books, including Yoga Body, Buddha Mind: A Complete Manual for Physical and Spiritual Well-Being, and the New York Times critically acclaimed May I Be Happy: A Memoir of Love, Yoga, and Changing My Mind. In 2019, she launched a new online course, “Taking Refuge In Your Body,” available from Lion’s Roar.

Self-care & appropriate attention

 

How to Practice “Self-Care” 

Koshin Paley Ellison on why true self-care begins with understanding that there’s no separation between self and other.

Koshin Paley Ellison

25 August 2024

Who doesn’t feel blown around by the hurricane winds of modern life? Information overload, job burnout, political and ecological threats, and seemingly endless culture wars make daily life feel challenging, isolating, and draining. Into this speedy wonderland of algorithms come soothing voices saying that what we need is self-care. They tell us to take time out and have a spa day, binge some Netflix, do some yoga, or attend an online seminar on mindfulness or mental health. 

Granted, these things can be good and nourishing. Slowness and stillness are needed to reconnect with ourselves and attend to our own well-being. Yet from a Buddhist point of view, the notion of “self-care” calls for rigorous and tender questioning. The buddhadharma centers around the idea of no-self, or going beyond thinking in terms of self and not-self, and dharma practice is intended to gently shift our focus away from the “self.” In contrast, the focus on self-care may, ironically, harden our perception of a  boundary between self and others, a perception that causes us suffering and feeds our obsession over whether we’re good enough. So, what is a dharmic perspective on self-care?

This question arose in me while speaking to a doctor in the Contemplative Medicine Fellowship, which I lead with my husband, Chodo, at the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care. The doctor told me, in tears, that he felt he was failing at self-care; unlike some of his peers, he couldn’t seem to find time for it. Self-care had become, for him, just another item on his checklist of being a good person. And it isn’t just this doctor who feels this way. I’ve heard similar accounts of defeat from people of various ages and walks of life across the United States and abroad. 

“The focus on self-care may, ironically, harden our perception of a  boundary between self and others, a perception that causes us suffering and feeds our obsession over whether we’re good enough.”

This, I believe, is because not all questions posed in the pursuit of self-care are based in what the Buddha called “appropriate attention.” He defined inappropriate or unskillful attention as asking, “Who am I? What am I? Where did this being come from, and where is it going to?” In other words, thinking in terms of self isn’t helpful. But if we’re honest, I, me, and mine is usually the crux of our internal dialogue—even though getting entangled in issues of self is so often followed by waves of depression or self-recrimination.

Appropriate attention is paying attention to what we’re doing and to the effects of our actions. In the sutta Instructions to Rahula at Mango Stone, the Buddha explains this to his son, the young monk Rahula. The Buddha advises him to ask himself, before doing something, whether it will lead to suffering or well-being for himself, or others, or both himself and others. While doing something, he should be mindful of the likely results, and afterward he should note the actual results and how they’re impacting others. This contemplation is all about relationships.   

One of the many healing things about the Buddha’s approach is that it protects us from the isolation of our own theories, opinions, thoughts, and feelings. It redirects our attention from concepts to what actually works for us—the big us. Although slowing down, seeking support, and taking care of your mental and physical health are essential things to do, framing this as “the importance of self-care” may not work well in the long term. The simple litmus test is to notice how pursuing self-care affects our lives. If it works for you, do it in good health. You may find, though, like many people I know, that the very pursuit of self-care is often a short-term solution at best. At worst, it becomes another thing to feel pressure and shame about. 

The wisdom literature of the bodhisattvas says that one should abide in compassion beyond subject and object. What’s needed, perhaps, is not self-compassion, but the cultivation of compassion as an unconditional attitude, a home for the mind beyond dualities and concepts. And in each moment, we can discern where the suffering lies, and where our attention—and therefore our compassion and care—is needed. Sometimes what calls to us is our own suffering, sometimes it’s that of others. Which one we’re attending to is not so important. What’s needed is simply “care,” not “self-care.” 

We can learn a lot about care and compassion from the Chinese text The Complete Tale of Guanyin. The bodhisattva of compassion, Guanyin vowed to free beings from hell realms, and after freeing a huge number, she turned around to see that just as many remained to be saved. As her head exploded in grief and her arms shattered in frustration, Amitabha Buddha, who some say represents the mind’s inherent wisdom, supplied her with eleven heads and a thousand arms to reach out to the suffering.

What does this mean? The way I see it, this teaches us that the solution to Guanyin’s problem is found in the multiple heads and arms of community. Even introverts need community, and many studies show that connection, giving to others, and being heard and supported by them, can be so rewarding that they are regularly recommended by mental health experts as essential replacements for heroin and other addictive sources of dopamine. “Sangha” is the Buddhist term for supportive community, those who have realized they need to band together, fight for sanity, and support each other with love. Sangha is one of the three jewels of Buddhism. You can’t have the other two—buddha and dharma—without it.

I personally have struggled and thrived through engagement with buddha, dharma, and sangha: engineering buddha mind through practice and my relationship with my Zen teacher; diving deep into experience through dharma study of moment-to-moment experience and sutras; and committing to sangha where I am constantly being shown the edges of my compassion and encouraged to widen the circle more and more—just like the vow of Guanyin.

Our own arms are not enough. We need the thousand arms of Guanyin, which can only be found when we surrender both our isolation and fixation on “self,” giving ourselves over to the prickly, uncontrollable, contrary, diverse, healing, nourishing, wise, educational, and essential reality of true community. So, the next time you’re feeling guilty because of your lack of self-care, set it down gently. Slow down, rest, and find the help you need. Then rest in the nondual mind and the bodhisattva’s relentless intention of compassion. Join the dance of Guanyin’s thousand arms, moving together in the flow of a beloved community. Let it carry you, and you may find that soon you’re not thinking about whether or not you’re caring for yourself adequately anymore. You’re neither seeking to inflate the self through martyrdom nor coddling it through pampering. Instead, you’re living in the free, open sky of compassion, seeing what Guanyin’s thousand arms can do next. Let’s do this together.

Koshin Paley Ellison

Koshin Paley Ellison is an author, Zen teacher, Jungian psychotherapist, leader in contemplative care, and co-founder of an educational non-profit called the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care. His latest book is Untangled: Walking the Eightfold Path to Clarity, Courage, and Compassion.

Kaira Jewel Lingo: Coming Home

 

Come Home to Yourself

Your true home is this body. This mind. This moment. There, says Kaira Jewel Lingo, you’ll find peace and freedom.

Kaira Jewel Lingo

15 April 2024

But the stone that the builder refuse
Shall be the head cornerstone,
And no matter what game they play,
Eh, we got something they could never take away;
We got something they could never take away

—Bob Marley, “Natty Dread Rides Again”

You already are what you want to become.

—Master Lin Chi

All of us go through times of transition, challenges, and difficulties. We may have faced or will face times of loss, confusion, or heartbreak, when we realize we cannot control the way our life is unfolding, whether in our personal lives or in the world around us. With mindfulness, we can learn to move through these intense, challenging times in ways that don’t add to the suffering and difficulty that are already there. We can even learn to open our hearts to the richness and wisdom these times of immense disruption can bring us.

When we touch this experience of coming home, it is like we have finally arrived home after a long journey.

A key step that can help us begin to settle ourselves when we are profoundly unsettled is to come home, to ourselves, in this moment, whatever is happening. This is one way of speaking about mindfulness, or being present: coming home to ourselves. When we bring our mind back to our body we come home. We could consider this state as our true home. This home inside of us is a home no one can take away from us, and it cannot be damaged or destroyed. No matter what happens around us, if we can find this home inside of us, we are always safe.

When we touch this experience of coming home, it is like we have finally arrived home after a long journey. We experience a sense of peace and even freedom, no matter how confining the outer circumstances. Coming home to ourselves feels like belonging; it is a state that holds us and enables us to hold others.

This is so important because we can live our whole lives estranged from this home within ourselves.

My mentor Thich Nhat Hanh, whom his students call Thay, or “teacher” in Vietnamese, sums up his whole lifetime of teachings with one sentence: “I have arrived, I am home.” For him, the principal aim of mindfulness practice is to experience that we have already arrived, here and now. There is nowhere we need to run to or be, other than right here in the present moment. And we experience ourselves at home, no longer looking for some refuge outside of us, in some other place or time, when we touch the truth that all that we long for and search after is here inside of us.

We can experience encountering this spacious and free place of our true home in unexpected moments as we spend more time tuning in to what is happening inside us and around us. One morning, when I was a novice nun, in slow walking after our early morning sitting meditation, I was very present and able to be aware of nearly every step. I began by being aware that as I was stepping with my left foot, I was at the same time stepping with my right, because my left foot could not be without my right. And vice versa. Then I saw that my arms were also contained in my feet, so I was also stepping with my arms. Then my hands, my stomach, brain, sense organs, heart, lungs. I was 100 percent with my body. So I was tasting the earth with my feet, listening to it, looking at it, feeling it, knowing it, smelling it with my feet. My heart was loving it, my lungs breathing it in and out.

Then I turned my attention more toward the Earth and knew I was also walking on cool streams of water flowing under me, and hot, fiery liquid deep below, in the center of the Earth. I imagined walking on the feet of those directly opposite us on the other side of the planet. The soles of my feet touched the soles of a little baby taking tentative steps, and a pregnant woman, and an old grandpa. My feet touched the feet of a lonely, isolated person, and someone carried away by hatred and anger. I was also walking on the feet of someone who was right then doing walking meditation and enjoying the present moment. I was one with those walking the Earth whose hearts were filled with love and peace.

We can’t find what we need to meet tomorrow or a month from now because we can’t control or exactly know the future, but we will find what we need for right now.

If we’re not aware of what is happening in the moment because we are caught up in our thoughts or reveries, or in the grip of worry or other strong emotions, it’s like we have left our house. If we stay away for a long time, dust accumulates and unwanted visitors may take up residence in our home. Things like stress and tension accumulate in our bodies and minds, and over time, if we don’t tend to them, they can lead to physical or psychological illness.

But the beauty of awareness is that we can always return home to ourselves. Our home is always there, waiting for us to come back. There are numerous ways we can go home to ourselves: by being aware of our breath, by being aware of body sensations or bodily movements, and by connecting with the reality around us, like the sounds in our environment. And when we come back home in these ways, we are able to take stock and survey the territory of our being, seeing clearly what parts of our inner landscape need more support, where we need to pay more attention.

It is especially tempting in times of transition and challenge to abandon our homes, to leave our territory, in search of answers, perhaps by worrying about what will happen in the future. This is precisely the moment when we need to return to the present moment, feel our bodies, and take good care of ourselves now. Because the future is made of this moment. If we take good care of this moment, even if it is very difficult, we are taking good care of the future.

It may also be hard to come home if we sense that unresolved pain has accumulated and we don’t want to face it. We may get into the habit of avoiding our home completely. We don’t want to be with those raw, unprocessed parts of our experience that are painful and may be quite scary.

If this is our situation, it is important to have compassion for ourselves for not wanting to return home to face these places inside of us. And yet the only way we can heal them, move through them, and make our home a more cozy place is to turn toward them. As the teaching goes: “The only way out is in.” Or through.

How do we do this? One of the ways is to stay with what is here and now, on the platform of the train station so to speak, watching the trains of our thoughts and plans come and go, rather than jumping on a thought-train that is heading into the future, or another thought-train that takes us into the past.

Those plans, worries, and anxieties will surely arise in our mind, but we can learn to notice them and take good care of them rather than feed them and get pulled away by them. Bringing our attention to our breath or to the sensations in our body helps us to stay on the platform of the now. The past and future are not the place where we can come home to ourselves and resource ourselves with the elements we need to move through our difficulties. We can only come home to ourselves in the present moment, in the here and now.

We can spend lots of our time and energy trying to predict or control what the future will bring. This doesn’t usually serve us. In truth, we don’t need to know what the future will bring. We just need to be right in this moment, and if we touch it deeply, mind and body united, we will find we have all that we need to meet the present. We can’t find what we need to meet tomorrow or a month from now because we can’t control or exactly know the future, but we will find what we need for right now.

Meditation: I Am Home

Let’s practice connecting with our present moment experience. Sit, lie, or stand in a comfortable position that supports you to be alert and also relaxed. You may like to set a timer with your phone or an alarm clock for ten minutes if you wish to be aware of time. Most of these meditations are short, and you can practice them throughout your day.

Begin by feeling the contact between your body and whatever surface is supporting you. Let yourself rest in this place, returning to this moment, here and now. Invite whatever parts of yourself that may still be dispersed to come back and settle.

Set the intention to come home to yourself, to be present for yourself. You deserve this care, you are precious and unique, in all the world there is no one else who brings the precise combination of gifts that you bring. Allow yourself to arrive here as fully as you can. And welcome the many parts of yourself home.

You may already begin to feel yourself settling into the home inside of you: the place of your strength, wisdom, and clarity. A place that is trustworthy and capable of providing you with refuge in the storm. But if not, continue to stay with awareness of your body sensations, sounds, or breathing. A sense of coming home will develop over time. It may not happen the first time you meditate, but as you become more attuned to yourself, you will find you have been at home all along.

If it’s helpful you can repeat inwardly, I have arrived. I am home.

If it supports you, you can connect the words with your breathing, arrived with the in-breath, home with the out-breath.

Arrived in the present moment, home in myself, just as I am.
Arrived, arrived,
at home, I am at home,
dwelling in the here and dwelling in the now.
Solid as a mountain, free as a white cloud,
the door to no birth and no death is open,
free and unshakeable.
—Plum Village song

This teaching is excerpted from Karia Jewel Lingo’s book, We Were Made for These Times, published by Parallax Press.

Hugh Byrne on acceptance - March 9

 Live Session Summary, Sunday, March 9, 2025: It was good to be with you for our live session today. The focus of the session was on three core practices to cultivate peace in these turbulent times.

Here are some of the main themes, poems, and quotes from today’s Live session:

The first core practice I highlighted to help us strengthen peace and resilience is the willingness to be with our experience as it is—the joys and sorrows; the pains and pleasures; the good, the bad, and the ugly—without clinging, resisting, or escaping. 

When we train the mind to open to our experience, everything can come and go without being a problem. It might be a difficult emotion or sensation, but if it is met with kindness and acceptance, we can learn to tolerate challenging experiences and don’t have to add the ‘second arrow’ of suffering to the ‘first arrow’ of pain: As the saying goes, ‘pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.’

The Sufi poet Rumi invites us to ‘Welcome the guests //Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows.’ Dorothy Hunt reminds us that ‘Peace is this moment without judgment // This moment in the heart space where everything that is is welcome.’ And Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now counsels that ‘What you accept fully, you go beyond.’ 

Saying ‘yes’ to what is; cultivating radical, or deep-rooted, acceptance; meeting our experience open-heartedly without judgment or resistance, are all skillful ways of finding peace whatever the circumstances or conditions. Peace is always possible, always available, always already here. Turning towards what we are experiencing here and now is the gateway to peace and the deepest freedom.

The second core practice that I discussed is training the mind to untangle ourselves from stories and narratives that keep us locked in suffering—for example, when we identify with our fear or anger and get swept up in thought patterns that control us rather than being a product of our conscious choosing. 

Once we become habituated to these forms of thinking it can be difficult to untangle ourselves because we identify the mental stories—about how things ‘are’ or how a person always is, how life is, or how we ourselves are. I shared the story of the person riding a horse that’s galloping along at top speed and someone shouts to the rider, ‘Where are you going?’ and the rider shouts back, ‘Don’t ask me, ask the horse.’ 

When the unconscious, unmindful mind is in the driver’s seat, we keep ourselves locked in suffering. It takes training and attention to notice when the mind is swept up in afflictive thinking and to choose to come out of the mental narrative and back to our direct experience. Over time, we can retrain the mind to be present and find peace here and now. In the words of Eckhart Tolle, ‘You can always cope with the present moment. but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection — you cannot cope with the future.’ 

The third core practice we explored to cultivate peace whatever the conditions is to practice self-compassion. Self-compassion consists of three key qualities: 1) meeting our experience with kindness rather than with harshness or judgment; 2) recognizing our ‘common humanity’ rather than identifying with the illusion that we are alone and separate from others and from life; and 3) mindfulness—meeting our experience with a balanced awareness rather than with clinging, aversion, or unconsciousness. 

We can practice self-compassion by repeating phrases rooted in kindness and care: ‘May I be safe // May I be happy // May I be kind to myself // May I accept myself as I am.’ Cultivating self-compassion is associated with a wide variety of health benefits. 

When we cultivate these three core practices we deepen peace and well-being, free ourselves from suffering, and open with compassion to the suffering of others.

I shared the poems ‘Wild Geese’ by Mary Oliver and ‘The Good News’ by Thich Nhat Hanh. 

Have a good week ahead and I look forward to seeing you next Sunday, March 16 at 9am eastern. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜 🌻

Below is a post attached to the daily Quote on insight timer on March 11: 

How ironic is this quote on my special day, and Tanisha's comment about embracing the 'uncertain present'...this day really is a present for me, one that I am truly grateful for, because as I celebrate my 'existence', two other people I know are being laid to rest today. 

So I hope that each and every one of you realizes that every morning when you are 'woken up', you have been gifted with another day, another chance to make the most of your time here. Life moves fast, and the only moment we truly have is right now. So enjoy it, appreciate it, and show love to those around you. Follow your heart, find joy in the little things, and live fully, because what really matters is not how long we live, but how we spend each moment. ❤🙏🌈💫

Ralph Waldo Emerson: The pace of Nature

You can't push the river, as the saying goes. 

and - we live in a world which rewards speed and willpower over living in attunement with our deeper selves and nature, which we are a part of. we are taught to push and get things done, with too little regard for the consequences. instead of tuning in. i think that's why many of us are here. to slow down, become still, tune in, ask, let go of resistance, act with wisdom, and surrender... 

Meditation is making friends with yourself - Kate Johnson

Making Friends with Ourselves

Being our own best friend is a challenging feat. Kate Johnson explains how meditation can help us get to know our inner critics and prevent them from hindering our path to liberation.

KATE JOHNSON

24 AUGUST 2021Meditation is making friends with yourself. It’s a statement that struck me as hokey when I first heard it, but the more I practice, the more profound it seems. Truth be told, there are things I’ve said to myself that I would never, ever say to a friend. I’ve flaked on my own self-care dates, broken promises of rest and quality time, and pushed myself too hard by telling myself that my best wasn’t good enough.

Meditating from the belief that we are broken and need to be fixed will only undermine our efforts to develop calm and ease.

I’ve forced myself to be silent when I wanted to speak. I’ve scolded myself for being sick or tired, and refused myself the opportunity to ask for help. Basically, I’ve had moments of treating myself like someone I didn’t even like, let alone love. What makes friendship with ourselves so radical is that we dare to do it in a world where the dominant culture would rather we be at war with ourselves. In The Body Is Not an Apology, author and activist Sonya Renee Taylor names this pervasive force of cruelty toward ourselves as a paradigm of “body terrorism” in the Western world. “Our economic systems,” she writes, “shape how we see our bodies and the bodies of others, and they ultimately inform what we are compelled to do or buy based on that reflection.”5 In other words, self-hatred is a big business. Radical self-love, Taylor proposes, can heal the harms caused by misogyny, ageism, fatphobia, and ableism, among other oppressive ideologies. If we think our bodies are actually OK, if we’re kind to them—feeding them when they’re hungry, accepting them even when they can’t do something they used to do, understanding that they sometimes get sick and eventually get old, dressing them in a way that makes us feel fabulous and happy anyway—then we don’t need to build our worth through products and services. So often, the things we buy don’t fill the void anyway.

Meditation is making friends with yourself. How many of us can truly say we are our own best friend? I know I mentioned in the introduction that meditation alone is not enough to undo the conditioning that has been perpetuated by systems of injustice. It’s also true that meditation can be a part of the healing process for those of us who have been deeply harmed by these systems. The key is not making meditation yet another way to beat up on ourselves for not being good enough. Meditating from the belief that we are broken and need to be fixed will only undermine our efforts to develop calm and ease. Self-aggression squeezes the mind, and discursive, aggressive thoughts spill out everywhere. Meditation, at its best, is an offering of love to ourselves. It gets even better with practice.

I learned this lesson in a big way once, while practicing on yet another three-month silent meditation retreat. I’d quietly decided before I arrived that I would do it “the hard way.” Which meant acting on a subtle belief that being mentally brutal with myself was the best way to swiftly spur myself toward enlightenment. At the end of each day, I felt mentally fatigued and physically sore. Still, I soldiered on, paying attention to mind moment after mind moment with obsessive dedication. After one particularly long and uncompromising day of following the retreat schedule to the minute and cramming in extra meditation sessions during mealtimes, I was crossing the threshold from the meditation room to the hallway when I heard an inner voice comment: Not good enough. It felt like a tiny jab.

Meditation, at its best, is an offering of love to ourselves. It gets even better with practice.

In the short walk from the meditation hall back to the dormitory, I noticed that voice chiming in at least a half dozen times. Walking: not slow enough. Stopping on the way to my room to get some tea: not focused enough. Putting honey into said tea: not hardcore enough. Every action I took seemed to provoke this harsh inner commentary. I realized that the internal criticisms had been coming for quite some time, only they were so subtle and familiar I hadn’t noticed them. I heard them, but they appeared in my mind as if they were simply the truth. Each comment only hurt a bit, like a pinprick. But, at the end of a day of being pricked every few moments, I was aching and full of holes.

When I shared this experience in a meeting with the guiding teacher on that retreat, he suggested that I relate to this inner voice as if it were coming from a cartoon character. Externalizing it, picturing the voice coming from something I could have a sense of humor about, might help me at least tolerate the experience, since I couldn’t control it. Because each criticism felt like a sharp jab, I nicknamed this inner critic “Jabba the Hutt.” I’d never actually seen Star Wars at the time (I know, I know), so I imagined Jabba looking something like Marvin the Martian—a tiny knight perched on my shoulder who jabbed me with a sharp staff from time to time.

My teacher advised me to be really aware of when the mind state I now called Jabba was present and to reflect on whether it had some purpose it was trying to serve. When I dropped that question into my mind—Is Jabba trying to help me?—the answer felt clear as a bell. Being hard on myself had worked so beautifully in so many other areas of my life; I’d managed to exceed society’s expectations, to be regarded in schools and workplaces as impressive, exceptional. Mastering Buddhist meditation, I thought, should be just like conquering any other obstacle that I’d blasted through up until this point.

Turns out, I couldn’t just put my head down and bulldoze my way to nirvana. When I tried to flick Jabba off my shoulder and go back to my breath, or when I spent an entire practice period inwardly yelling at him to push off, he just came back. Jabbing with a flourish, he whisper-screamed a defiant Not good enough! inside my mind.

At some point, I said to this inner voice, Listen. I understand that you’re trying to help me. But what you’re doing—it’s not helping right now. I’m already doing the best I can. So, why don’t you just come sit with me while I watch my breath? I imagined pulling the angry little guy into my lap, tucking him under my arm, and putting a blanket over him. From time to time, Jabba would stir and get rowdy, and I would soothe him again: It’s OK. We’re doing fine. Just a few more minutes, just like this. One breath at a time.

Sitting with Jabba seemed like such a humble use of this meditation retreat. I wasn’t busting through any new dimensions of consciousness, I thought, or dissolving my ego into pure bliss. I was just sitting there, calming an imaginary enemy that wouldn’t let me get into the real meditation. Oddly enough, when I gave in and treated myself and Jabba (who was, of course, also me) with kindness, I found that I did not end up plagued by a dumb cartoon character for the remainder of the retreat. I spent a good few days offering friendship and understanding to the voice inside me that told me I wasn’t good enough, and after turning to face it with love in my heart, it started to soften and subside all on its own. It was as if, by committing to making friends with that cranky, critical part of my own mind, it no longer had anything to poke at or stick to. The experience also yielded great insights into the nature of self and consciousness, by the way. Insights I don’t believe I ever could have found if I hadn’t given up fighting my experience and started allowing it to be, dropping the struggle and trying my best to love it even when I didn’t like it.

The reason why making friends with ourselves is so essential on the path to liberation is that the forces of privilege and oppression are not just out there in the world somewhere. We’ve all inhaled harmful societal messages and unknowingly integrated them into the most intimate structures of our bodies and minds, where they manifest in a seemingly personal way. Perfectionism is just one example. In their classic manual Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, anti-oppression trainers Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones wrote about the perfectionism that manifests in unjust systems as “the failure to appreciate our own and others’ good work.” We can recognize it, they suggest, through the presence of a “harsh and constant inner critic” that points out our faults, failures, inadequacies, and mistakes in a way that makes it nearly impossible to actually learn from them.6

Okun and Jones identified chronic perfectionism as just one of the characteristics of “white supremacy culture”— the expression of which isn’t limited to skinheads and the Ku Klux Klan. It’s a set of ideologies that can be perpetuated by anyone acculturated within societies that systematically advantage white people to the disadvantage of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. Their complete list of characteristics of white supremacy culture also includes:

• Perfectionism: identifying self and other with mistakes, little appreciation for assets
• Sense of urgency: the drive for quick and visible results
• Defensiveness: an inability to tolerate feedback or criticism
• Valuing quantity over quality: if results can’t be measured, they have no value
• Worship of the written word: little respect for other ways information is shared
• Paternalism: lack of clarity around how power is held and decisions are made
• Either/or thinking: oversimplifying complexity and creating false binaries
• Power hoarding: little value around sharing power at the level of leadership
• Fear of open conflict: those who raise issues are seen as problematic or inappropriate
• Individualism: a culture of competition instead of collaboration, leads to isolation
• Progress: bigger and more: an appetite for growth without considering impacts of continuous expansion
• Belief in objectivity: a premium on logic and reason, privileging what can be known through the mind, invalidating expressions of emotion

You probably see where I’m going with this. So many of the norms of white supremacy that are observable in our organizational and community cultures can also be seen at the microlevel in our meditation practices—because, if you’re like me, you probably learned to meditate within the dominant cultural paradigm. This culture reinforces a sense of urgency to get somewhere in our meditation practice. Valuing quantity over quality by competing or comparing with others about how many minutes we meditate for. Engaging in either/or thinking by approaching the practice as if there is only one right way or obsessing about which lineage is the best. Reinforcing individualism by approaching spiritual practice primarily as a solitary pursuit, preferring an app over a relationship with a teacher and a community. The sad fact is that these values, so normalized and even prized within white supremacy culture, actually undermine our spiritual progress, and they usually make us miserable in the process.

Here’s the good news though: in our meditation practice, we can hardly help but see these characteristics arise in us if we’re willing to honestly look. Recognizing them for what they are (forms of suffering) and establishing a new relationship with them (the wish to let go) sets us firmly on the path to dismantling them for good. Meditation itself is a practice that can help us to heal these tendencies and develop new ones that don’t rely on violence and domination to help us grow.

Liberating our bodies, hearts, and minds from internalized oppression takes time, energy, and lots and lots of love. We need to believe we are worth the effort. And, we need to find others who are in it for the journey too. Liberation is not, and was never meant to be, a solitary path. So, let’s talk a little about what it takes to accompany each other on the journey.

From Radical Friendship: Seven Ways to Love Yourself and Find Your People in an Unjust World by Kate Johnson © 2021 Kate Johnson. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. www.shambhala.com

KATE JOHNSON

Kate Johnson teaches classes and retreats integrating Buddhist meditation, somatics, social justice, and creativity at leading meditation centers, universities and cultural institutions around the country. Kate also works as a culture change consultant, partnering with organizations to help them achieve greater diversity and sustainability. She’s a graduate of Spirit Rock Meditation Center’s four year teacher training, as well an utterly unprofessional dancer and performer who earned a BFA in Dance from The Alvin Ailey School/Fordham University and an MA in Performance Studies from NYU. For more information, please visit www.katejohnson.com