Learning to be Compassionate

I read both of Brené Brown's books and I really enjoyed them. One of the things I got out of her books was how we need to learn to be compassionate. I think most of us can manage to feel compassion for others, even those we don't know. Friends tell us their embarrassing stories and we are able to allow for their raw humanity. However, when it comes to ourselves we are a lot less forgiving.

Tiffany at Gimme Bliss wrote a great post entitled Welcome Your Inner Critic. She talked about how we try to shut our inner critic out, which is often unsuccessful. Since we waste a lot of energy doing this, we should instead invite our inner critic in.  Pema Chödrön is a Buddhist nun who wrote about a similar thing in her book called The Places That Scare You. She said to imagine that we have a large sky inside of us so we are capable of embracing all these negative feelings we usually to suppress. We are not to hold on to them, but to learn to become comfortable with them so that they don't grow. Too often we try to do everything in our power to get rid of these feelings and we end up doing things that will hurt us in the long run.

This is the Buddhist concept of Samsara. When we search for things that we think will make us happy, we end up suffering more and then continue to do the things that we think will make us happy. It is a cycle of suffering. Prior to reading this book I only understood this concept intellectually, but now I understand how it can be applied to real life.

In order to break the cycle we must invite our inner critic in and visit. We don't need to do anything with it but sit in awkward silence until we no longer feel awkward. This is when we can truly learn to be compassionate, not just towards others but to ourselves.

"Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others." - Pema Chödrön