Self-compassion for troubling times

A woman reading a book with the title "Chaos"

At the moment lot of people are suffering more than usual. They are anxious, exhausted, and overwhelmed about the awful things going on in the world. They’re often glued to the news and steeped in the commentary that takes place on social media, their amygdalas on overdrive and their endocrine systems jangling with adrenaline.

I recently shared three slogans that have been helping me stay in balance. They are: Feet on the ground. Heart wide open. Keep looking upward. These are phrases I suggest we all bear in mind.

I want to explain now how they relate to the practice of self-compassion.

What is self-compassion?

Self-compassion is a major part of my spiritual practice. It helps us when times are hard. (I wrote a book on it called “This Difficult Thing of Being Human.“)

Self-compassion is treating ourselves as if we, and our suffering, matter. It’s where we are our own advocates. It’s where we provide ourselves with emotional support when times are rough. It can involve cutting yourself some slack when you realize you’ve messed up. After all, who doesn’t mess up? It can mean recognizing that suffering is normal, and not a sign of failure. Again, everyone suffers; it’s part of the human condition. It can mean offering yourself emotional support and reassurance. We all need those things. It can involve self-care, which means recognizing your needs for rest, nutrition, friendship, recreation, and so on, and making sure you meet those needs as best you can.

Let’s see how this works under the headings of the three slogans I’ve suggested.

1. “Feet on the ground”

We need to learn to keep our feet on the ground, emotionally.

Reactive emotions such as worry, anger, and despair hijack the mind and create suffering. In response to our feeling bad, the mind generates catastrophizing thoughts that make us feel even worse. These reactive emotions seem to imply that they will help; the unspoken assumption seems to be something like, “If I just keep worrying about this enough, thinking about all the things that might go wrong, I’ll be safer.” But instead, we suffer even more intensely and make it even harder for ourselves to do things that might actually help.

Recognize you’re suffering

The first step with self-compassion is recognizing that we’re suffering. You can’t meet your suffering with compassion if you don’t recognize how it’s there. So instead of being caught up stories about how awful things are, we need to recognize that these stories are part of our suffering. We need to recognize that worrying, anger, and despair are forms of suffering.

Drop the story

Having recognized that worry, anger, and despair are patterns of thinking that intensify our suffering, we next need to gently let go of them.

You can recognize, “This way of thinking doesn’t serve me” and decline to put any more energy into it. You drop the story.

But we don’t just drop the story and find ourselves in a mental vacuum. What we do instead is to turn toward the body, so that our awareness is filled with sensation, rather than thinking.

Turn toward painful feelings

We do this by noticing and accepting our suffering as it manifests in the body.

When the mind gives rise to worry, anger, and despair, what it’s reacting to are painful feelings in the body. Emotions are responses to feelings.

Any time you’re in a reactive state, notice what’s going on down in the chest, around the diaphragm, and in the belly. You’ll notice that there are unpleasant sensations there. There might be tightness, tingling, fluttering, heaviness, pressure, and so on. None of it feels good.

These are “feelings,” which are not the same as the reactive emotional patterns I described above. Feelings are just sensations. Emotions are something we do. They are our attempts to address those feelings.

Feelings may be unpleasant, but they are never “bad.” So we can accept them. They’re just sensations. They’re just signals arising in the body as communications from ancient parts of the brain that are saying, “Look. I think there’s a threat here that you should pay attention to.”

Accept what’s difficult

Rather than reacting emotionally to our feelings, we can just accept them and allow them to be present.

If necessary, you can say to yourself things like, “It’s okay to feel this. It’s just a sensation. Let’s just experience this. Let’s just allow it to be. There’s nothing to fear here. It’s unpleasant, but it’s not bad.”

This kind of self-talk helps support us as we bring our attention back, over and over, to our feelings.

You can notice the qualities of the feeling: the pressure, tingling, etc. You can notice how it changes.

The more the mind is engaged with observing the feelings as if they were any other sensation, the less the mind is able to react to them. And so observing our feelings reduces our tendency to be reactive, and helps us become calmer.

2. Heart Wide Open

Yet there’s much more to self-compassion than accepting painful feelings, no matter how important that may be. Compassion is when we meet our suffering with kindness. So we need to evoke kindness.

One of the easiest ways to awaken our innate capacity for kindness is the practice of “kind eyes.” We simply remember what it’s like to look with kindness, and notice the qualities of warmth, tenderness, softness, etc. that arise in and around the eyes. Then as we turn our attention toward a painful feeling, we find those qualities follow, having permeated our inner gaze of interoceptive awareness. In this way, we meet pain with kindness.

We can also talk to our pain. In effect this is the compassionate part of us communicating with and offering support and reassurance to the hurt or frightened part of us. We can say things like, “I know this is hard for you, but we’ll get through this. I’m here for you. I love you and I want you to be happy.”

Often when we’ve done all these things — recognized that we’re suffering, dropped the story, turned toward and accepted painful feelings, and offered ourselves support — we lose our reactivity, which benefits others. As the Buddha said, “Taking care of myself, I take care of others.”

Turn outward

Our reactivity had previously been keeping our attention running in circles like a dog convinced that its own tail is an enemy to be pursued. Now the mind has stopped running in circles, and is able to have a wider view. We’re able to see, for example, that others are suffering just as much, and often more, than we are. And because we’ve already aroused our empathy and compassion, we meet their pain with compassion as well.

Having self-compassion frees us up to have compassion for others.

Feeling compassionate toward others who are suffering — whether it’s because they’re in a war zone, are having their civil liberties withdrawn, or are scared about the future — is a good start, but ideally it sets us up for taking action so that we help where we can. That action might just involve asking someone how they’re doing, and listening with an open heart as they tell us. We should be wary of jumping in to give advice, but we can at least let the other person know that they’ve been heard and understood.

Being compassionate toward others helps us as well as them. It helps us meet our deep need for connection with others. And it reminds us that we’re not alone in suffering. Suffering is a universal feature of the human condition. Because compassion helps both parties, the Buddha said, “Taking care of others, I take care of myself.”

3. Keep Looking Upward

We need to remember what’s good and normal, even when it’s been replaced by viciousness and chaos. This is hard to do, because our expectations tend to slide. One tragicomic element of the first Trump administration was the repeated eagerness of some journalists to declare Trump as having been “presidential” because he’d managed to read a script from a teleprompter without going into word-salad digressions and without tossing around childish taunts and unkind nicknames.

Those journalists had made the mistake of letting their standards slide: being presidential no longer meant having personal qualities of decorum, leadership, wisdom, and emotional maturity. Now it simply meant “being able to read a prepared script.”

Remember “normal”

In so many ways, we need to remind ourselves of what “normal” used to be, so that we can, hopefully, return to normal. I highly recommend Masha Gessen’s “Surviving Autocracy” as a reminder of what “normal,” how we’ve departed from it, and how the media normalized those departures. Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” is, however, a better guide for how to stay sane when a government slides into autocracy.

Keep hope alive

We need to keep hope alive. As Howard Zinn said, “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.”

Hope helps us psychologically. As Thich Nhat Hanh said, “Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.”

We can change things. Maybe not much. But we can change things a little. And one person changing things can inspire others, which leads to more meaningful change.

There’s strength in numbers

Remember that there are more decent people than there are cruel people. We are the majority.

And according to a study by Erica Chenoweth of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Maria Stephan of the U.S. Institute of Peace, no democracy moment has ever failed when 3.5% of the population has protested over a sustained period.

It’s hard for us to sustain hope. But it’s essential, for our own emotional well-being, for us to be able to sustain others, and for the world.

So these are some of the ways in which self-compassion can manifest as we keep our feet on the ground, live with our hearts open, and keep hope alive.