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6 December 2022
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People of the noblest
dispositions think themselves happiest
when others share their
happiness with them.
Jeremy Taylor
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If growing up is the process of creating ideas and dreams
about
what life should be, then maturity is letting go again.
Mary Beth
Danielson
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The
greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action
by
stealth and to have it found out by accident.
Charles
Lamb
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Who
Will I Become? (an
excerpt)
Selfish
Nancy Colier
Self-compassion is something that most of us would claim
we possess. We say we care about
ourselves. But in fact, when it comes to actually
treating ourselves as someone we care about, now that is
considered selfish. How selfish of me to spend
all that time thinking about me when so many people are
suffering! The fear of being judged (by oneself
or others) as selfish is what keeps most people out of
counseling, even when they desperately need it. As
one woman who was decidedly not blessed with
self-compassion complained, "It's always about me me
me! Helping others is what makes us feel
better!" Indeed, helping others does make us
feel better but not if we are not helping ourselves as
well.
We are afraid that if we care for ourselves, there won't
be any caring left for others, as if caring were a finite
commodity. If we take the time to pay attention to
our own experience, we will become so self-involved that
we will end up only interested in ourselves, so
egotistical that we will stop wanting to ever be kind to
anyone else. In this belief system, our caring for
others is a façade of sorts, something we do to seem like
a good person. Underneath it, we are only interested
in ourselves and that truth must be kept rigorously in
check.
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We are
desperately afraid of who we would become were we to treat
ourselves with sweetness. And yet, it is only when
we feel well taken care of, when our feelings have been
properly heard and addressed that we have adequate
resources to offer others. When our own well is
full, we can experience our genuine desire to help
others. Relating to ourselves with kindness actually
increases our compassion and makes us less selfish.
Furthermore, when we are able to empathize with our own
suffering, we can genuinely empathize with the pain of
others. Conversely, when we reject our own feelings,
we cannot be truly compassionate with others, certainly
not to our full capacity, as a large part of our heart is
closed off and inaccessible. This is not to say that
we cannot be kind human beings without being kind to
ourselves, but, without the ability to relate lovingly
with our own experience, we are severed from the real
depth of our loving potential. It is as if we are
living in a puddle when we could have access to the ocean.
Those of us who are so-called givers can fall into
this trap with ease. We take care of everyone in our
life and we like this role. But somehow we don't
make it onto our own list of the deserving. It is
important for us to realize that we are also human beings,
to consider our experience as we would any other person's,
to know that we too are deserving of basic kindness, the
same kindness that we so readily offer to others.
With this small but profound shift in awareness, our
ability to love cracks open. Once our own suffering
and longings matter, we are able to love with the true
fullness of our being, ourselves included. While we
may have thought we were already being loving with others,
we now realize that we may not ever have been fully
openhearted with them either. A fellow helping
professional once confessed that she helped others because
she liked the way she felt about herself when she was
helping, but that she was not sure how to actually care
about others (and certainly not about herself).
When we know what loving attention actually feels like,
when we can receive it from our own self, it is then that
we can genuinely offer it to and for another
creature. What we bring to others then arises out of
our own compassionate heart, which includes compassion for
ourselves--as just another living creature. What is
remarkable too is that, in offering this kind of authentic
loving attention, it is as if we are receiving it at the
same time. As one friend expressed, "There is
no separation between the two, the giver and the
receiver. We are simply sharing one
heart!" When our heart cracks open to our own
experience, we benefit from helping others, but in an
entirely fresh and generous way.
The rapidly exploding field of neuroscience provides
further evidence for the link between self-kindness and
kindness for others. There are now scientific
studies coming from brain researchers like Richard
Davidson, which show that meditation (which includes
practicing compassion for oneself) actually develops the
part of the brain that feels and expresses empathy.
Using magnetic resonance imaging, we can now concretely
determine that empathy for our own experience builds our
neurological capacity for caring. Being kind to our
own feelings does not make us more selfish--it makes us
kinder.
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The
Power of Presence
Debbie Hall
I believe in the power of presence.
I was recently reminded of this belief when I and
several other Red Cross volunteers met a group of
evacuees from Hurricane Katrina. We were there,
as mental health professionals, to offer
"psychological first aid." Despite all
the training in how to "debrief," to educate
about stress reactions, and to screen for those
needing therapy, I was struck again by the simple
healing power of presence. Even as we walked in
the gate to the shelter, we were greeted with a burst
of gratitude from the first person we
encountered. I felt appreciated, but somewhat
guilty, because I hadn't really done anything yet.
Presence is a noun, not a verb; it is a state of
being, not doing. States of being are not highly
valued in a culture that places a high priority on
doing. Yet, true presence or "being
with" another person carries with it a silent
power--to bear witness to a passage, to help carry an
emotional burden, or to begin a healing process.
In it, there is an immediate connection with another
that is perhaps too seldom felt in a society that
strives for ever-faster "connectivity."
I was first hurled into an ambivalent presence many
years ago when a friend's mother died
unexpectedly. Part of me wanted to rush down to
the hospital, but another part of me didn't want to
intrude on this acute and very personal phase of
grief. I was torn about what to do.
Another friend with me at the time said, "Just
go. Just be there." I did, and I will
never regret it.
Since then I have not hesitated to be in the presence
of others for whom I could "do"
nothing. I sat at the bedside of a young man in
a morphine coma to blunt the pain of his AIDS-related
dying. We spoke to him about his inevitable
journey out of this life. He later told his
parents--in a brief moment of lucidity--that he had
felt us with him.
Another time I visited a former colleague dying of
cancer in a local hospice. She, too, was not
awake and presumably unaware of others' presence with
her. The atmosphere was by no means
solemn. Her family had come to terms with her
passing and were playing guitars and singing.
They allowed her to be present with them as though she
were still fully alive.
With therapy clients, I am still pulled by the need to
do more than be, yet repeatedly struck by the healing
power of connection created by being fully there in
the quiet understanding of another. I believe in
the power of presence, and it is not only something we
give to others. It always changes me--and always
for the better.
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Life Fully, the e-zine
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There
are those of us who are prisoners of the future. We don't
know what will happen but we worry so much that the future
becomes a kind of prison. The real future is made only of
one
substance, and that is the present. What else can the future
be
made of? If we know how to take care of the present moment
the best we can, that's all we can do to assure ourselves of a
good future. We build the future by taking care of the
present moment.
Thich Nhat Hanh
How
to Walk
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Not
a Way to Heal
I've been re-learning a
valuable lesson the last ten days or so. I've been
in a significant amount of pain due to, of all things,
an extracted tooth. Unfortunately, the extraction
led to a couple of other complications involving my
sinuses, and as a result I've been extremely limited in
what I can do lately. I haven't run for almost two
weeks, for example, which is something that almost never
happens to me. But I want to heal properly because
of the long-term benefits of healing properly, and I
don't want to sabotage that process by doing something I
shouldn't do.
The problem is, though, that I've been focusing far too
much on the pain. I've been focusing far too much
on how things are instead of how things will
and should be--I need to be focusing my thoughts on
healing rather than on pain, in order to allow the
healing to actually happen. If I keep focused on
pain, then I'm pretty much perpetuating that pain--it's
my reality, and I've accepted it as my reality and thus
I'm doomed to continue to feel it.
If, on the other hand, I shift my thinking to healing,
to what I want to feel like, then I'm giving my body
something to strive for, and I'm keeping my mind from
getting bogged down in the negative aspects of the
pain. Our bodies and our thoughts are intricately
and necessarily interrelated, so it's important that we
keep them in sync, and that we keep our thoughts about
our bodies as positive as we can make them.
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If a person
can turn from predicting illness to anticipating
recovery, the foundation for cure is laid.
Bernie
Siegel
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I don't believe, as
some people claim, that our thoughts can heal all
wounds and problems that our bodies face. This
may be a shortfall of mine, or it may be the
practical side of me that makes complete
sense. There are those who claim that we can
beat cancer with just our thoughts, that we can
recover from pneumonia by thinking positive, healthy
thoughts, but I don't buy that. There are some
things that happen in our bodies that are simply far
too complex, far too drastic, for us to be able to
change them just by thinking about them. Can
we kill bacteria and viruses just by thinking them
to death? Can we cause a bone to fuse just by
willing it to do so?
Personally, I don't know enough about the mind to
answer those last two questions. What I do
know is that a person would have to be very much
advanced in the art of using the mind to do either
of those things--if they're even possible--and
almost none of us are.
What I do know is that our bodies do react to our
thoughts. We see this on the very basic level
when someone is feeling down and the body reflects
those feelings--the face is sad, the shoulders
drooping, the step slow.
On a deeper level, we're all well aware of
psychosomatic illnesses, those illnesses that we're
able to cause with our own minds. Stress and
trauma can cause tension in the body, stomach
disorders, nervous tics, digestive problems, sleep
disorders, and many other problems in our bodies.
It would be rather silly to think that my mind can
cause a stomach disorder because of stress (and it
has done so), but not help me to heal when something
is wrong.
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It's
supposed to be a professional secret, but I'll tell you anyway.
We doctors do nothing. We only help and encourage the doctor
within. We are at best when we give the doctor who resides
within each patient a chance to go to work.
Albert
Schweitzer
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And that's where I
want to be--in the healing side of my thoughts, not
with the thoughts that are going to perpetuate the
pain and discomfort. I don't believe for a
second that my thoughts have the power to instantly
heal a significant wound, but I do know that
positive thoughts of healing can get my body working
in much more productive ways than negative thoughts
of pain and suffering.
One of the problems with persistent pain is the fear
that it will never heal. I've had that fear
rather often during the last ten days. I've
read too many cases in which a doctor made an error
that caused someone to have unforeseen reactions
that have caused them significant pain, sometimes
for the rest of their lives. I'm not naive
enough to think that something like that could never
happen to me just because I'm me.
But there's also no reason to worry about something
like that because millions of people have gone
through the same procedure that I just went through,
and they've come out fine. Some have had more
pain than others, and some have taken longer to heal
than others. That's life. When I
research the topic and find that 1-2 weeks is the
normal time for healing, it tells me that ten days
is still within the "normal" range--so why
am I thinking about permanent damage and pain if I'm
still within the normal time frame? That's
just my mind making things worse, and I really don't
need to do that to myself.
Of course, thinking positively doesn't absolve me of
the responsibility to take care of myself physically
in order to let the body heal. I've spent the
last ten days mostly indoors, resting--which is okay
because much of my work is preparing for classes,
grading papers and tests, and writing--without doing
any running at all, which has been very difficult
for me. If it were just pain, I'd be fine with
running through that, but because the sinuses are
involved, it doesn't seem like a good idea to force
myself to breathe more heavily than normal.
The bottom line is, though, that I'm willing to
sacrifice a couple of weeks of activity to allow my
body to heal itself properly.
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Your
body has natural healing capacities that nobody
in the
field of medicine can pretend ultimately to
understand. If you break a bone it will heal itself.
All the doctor does
is
make sure the pieces of the
bone are properly set back together.
Wayne
Dyer
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I will heal. I'm
sure of that. It may take a bit longer than I
want it to, but in the end, things will be
fine. The question is, how will my time be
until that time comes. Am I going to let a
little pain make me miserable and afraid, or am I
going to be confident that my body knows what it's
supposed to do, and will do so in the way that it
knows? Am I going to let the fear gnaw at me
and keep me in its grasp, or am I going to feel the
confidence that I know I should have, accept the
pain for what it is, and keep on keeping on with my
life?
I don't want to be that person who does nothing but
complain about my pain. I don't want to be
someone whom other people avoid because all I talk
about are my ailments. I want to be the person
who says, "Okay, something's wrong, so let's do
what we can to help the body to make it
right!" Healing depends on our thoughts
just as much as it depends on blood cells and
natural body processes, and our thoughts are really
the only thing that we can control in a healing
situation. So from here on in, whenever I find
myself starting to worry that this pain isn't ever
going to go away, I'm going to shift my focus to how
I'll feel when the pain passes--by comparing the
feelings of the left side of my mouth to the
feelings of the right side--and looking forward to
that pain-free existence.
And in the meantime, I'll feel much better because
I'll know I'm doing something important to
contribute to my healing, and I'm not giving up and
letting the pain and fear determine the hue of my
days.
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More
on healing.
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All
my life I used to wonder
what I would become when I
grew up. Then, about seven
years ago, I realized that
I was never going to
grow up--that growing is
an ever-ongoing process.
M. Scott Peck
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Some people don't seem
able to accept the things that come to them; they always want to go back
and dwell on how it was before and what mistakes were made by them and
others. Sometimes they want to prove, by this recital of past
errors, that they were right, sometimes they seem to want to dwell on
their own fallibility.
We can't make much progress toward serenity of the spirit without
reconciling the past. If old wounds or conflicts rankle, we need
to accept them, forgive them, and let them go. Above all, let's
forgive ourselves. Those past errors turned into valuable lessons,
didn't they? Life is too short to hold grudges, and they take up
energy and time that we could use for spiritual growth.
Each day is new, and this new day is all of time for us, right
now. This day can flow pure and clear or we can choke it with old
grudges, regrets, or fears--the choice is ours.
Karen Casey, Martha Vanceburg
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Happiness
does not come quickly. It is not conferred by any single
event, however exciting or comforting or satisfying the
event may be.
It cannot be purchased, whatever the allure of the next, the
newest,
the brightest, the best. Happiness, like Carl Sandburg’s
fog, “comes
on little cat feet,” often silently, often without our
knowing it, too
often without our noticing.
Joan
Chittister
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