Develop your capacity for warmth and compassion, as it is the medicine for what ails you, making you happier and healthier without making you weak or a doormat.
Learn to become a profoundly healing holding environment for your feelings, neither suppressing nor fully identifying with them, which allows for intimacy, freedom, and agency.
Recognize that your own feelings, triggered by others, are what truly bother you, and practice becoming a profoundly healing holding environment for all your feelings as they arise.
Avoid approaching compassion cultivation as an autonomous, isolated individual trying to remake yourself solely through self-help techniques. This framework creates inner obstacles and is not how successful practitioners traditionally engaged.
Start your compassion practice by tapping into an external resource of care, like a benefactor memory or saintly figure, to feel held in love and compassion. This relational starting point initiates deeper practices and draws out innate capacities.
Re-experience a recalled caring moment as if it’s happening right now, sensing yourself held in deep care, compassion, acceptance, and warmth. Relax into and steepen these loving, tender qualities, letting them infuse your entire being and world.
When thoughts and reactions arise during practice, notice them and allow them to be embraced within the current experience of warmth, love, and acceptance. Become a healing holding environment for them rather than identifying with or reacting from them.
Learn to connect with and trust the non-conceptual, basic simplicity of the deepening mode, relaxing into it more and more. This space is considered our most natural state, offering ultimate safety and being the ground for love and compassion.
Allow yourself to become simpler and simpler, becoming more receptive to the power of simplicity from your being’s depth, rather than trying to think hard about non-dual experience. Overthinking takes you further away from this foundational simplicity.
Engage in strategic action and respond to others without being in the grips of hatred, allowing emotional reactions (anger, fear, anxiety) to rest in a space of warmth, safety, and curiosity. This provides access to the full brilliance of the human mind and increases agency.
To address burnout, become more of a holding environment for all your feelings, which can empower you to challenge institutional dysfunctionality without excessive reactivity. This allows you to act with more effectiveness, sensing the humanity in all involved.
After becoming familiar with a receptive mode practice in a dedicated meditation, weave it into your daily life by touching in on it many times during little breaks or moments of waiting. Repeatedly accessing these loving qualities will empower you for further practice.
Pay attention to simple, everyday experiences that help you feel at ease and relaxed, recognizing them as “benefactor experiences” that can interrupt mental streams and serve as doorways to a more relaxed state.
Pay attention to your internal state when acting with kindness, gentleness, or curiosity towards others. This helps confirm that you feel better when being kind and compassionate, reinforcing it as a natural state.
Repeatedly engage in relational compassion practices, calling to mind resources of comfort and safety, like visualizing professional athletes or piano players do. This simulates the experience and helps natural capacities for compassion emerge effortlessly.
Briefly call to mind a resource of security by looking at an image, visually imagining it, or reading words related to safety and security. This technique increases tolerance of negative emotion, patience, and establishes a deeper sense of security.
When dealing with frustrating people, be honest about your anger, then remember that their actions don’t define their entire being. Simultaneously, cultivate an embodied stance of warmth and stillness to compassionately hold your own anger and frustrations.
Gently come down from the thinking mind and settle into your body by relaxing, letting it unify you, especially when transitioning from thinking. This prepares you for deeper awareness and connection.
Recall a simple, heartwarming caring moment with a person or pet where warmth, happiness, or deep listening was present. This helps access feelings of care and upliftment.
Learn to gently settle your mind into simpler, intrinsically calmer dimensions of awareness, moving beyond constant thinking and worrying. This helps access deeper levels of consciousness that are more peaceful and grounded.
Relax the grip of your worrying, reacting mind and allow it to settle into tranquil states, letting tender qualities from receptive mode help your mind and body relax deeply. This allows another level of consciousness to naturally emerge without force.
Before cultivating qualities like love, compassion, or mindfulness, bring to mind a figure (e.g., Buddha, saintly figure) who embodies love, compassion, and wisdom. This acts as a traditional starting point for contemplative practice.
Explore compassion training, as it is applicable and beneficial for people from any religious, spiritual, secular, or scientific worldview. The principles draw from various traditions and cognitive science, making them universally relevant.