Sharon Salzberg – Grow Mindfulness

Forgiveness: Forgiving Others and Ourselves

Forgiveness is hard to do, whether we are trying to forgive others or ourself. It’s not a one-off event but is an evolving process which is why experts in the area suggest that we start off small – with a minor incident or hurt. Forgiveness engages our feelings as well as our mind and body. It is something that we have to work at consciously if we are to achieve our goal of “letting go”.

Forgiving others

Frank Ostaseski, author of The Five Invitations: Discover What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully, suggests that one of the lessons from the dying is, “Don’t Wait to Forgive”. In his extensive hospice experience he found that too many people were consumed by anger and rage on their death bed because they were unable to forgive others. He argues that we should not wait until we are dying to forgive others and ourself. Frank maintains that there is a natural resistance to forgiveness because we have a need to maintain our self-image (of goodness/perfection) and find it difficult to acknowledge that we are carrying challenging emotions such as anger, resentment and regret. However, there is a real cost to ourselves and our relationships when we hold onto these emotions.

Danette May in her memoir, The Rise: An Unforgettable Journey of Self-Love, Forgiveness and Transformation, argues that we need to “cut the rope”, or as Frank puts it, “letting go”. These difficult emotions can hold us back, causing self-absorption and “emotional stunting”. There is a real challenge involved in acknowledging our part in an interaction (or multiple interactions) that was hurtful. We need to be able to see things from the other person’s perspective and understand what was driving their behaviour. Frank suggests that in the final analysis, we need to be able to honestly face up to “what we don’t like in ourselves”.

Fred Luskin contends that there are three elements of a grievance that contribute to our “maintaining the rage” and sustaining the hurt:

Preoccupation with the ”offence” and exaggerating its negative impact on us
Insisting that others are to blame for our negative/difficult feelings
Developing and perpetuating a “grievance story”.

Fred argues that the real costs of not letting go are extensive. Not only do we lose our personal power because we are “controlled by emotions”, but also we lose the ability to focus and achieve peace and wellness. If we are consumed by anger, hatred, resentment or envy we can’t see past our hurt and we use all our energy in sharing our story and maintaining our sense of hurt.

Forgiving ourselves

The starting point for self-forgiveness is acknowledging our part in the hurtful interaction. It is incredibly difficult to forgive ourselves for the hurt we cause to others – it can be a lifelong process. Part of the challenge is dealing with strong feelings of guilt and shame – feelings that go against the grain and undermine our sense of who we are. We can blind ourselves to our negative impact on others because it is too hurtful to ourselves to own up to our part in hurtful interactions.

Jack Kornfield in the Power of Awareness Course argues that there are three myths that underpin our reluctance to engage in self-forgiveness:

Self-forgiveness is a sign of weakness – the reality is that it takes a lot of strength and courage to face up to our hurtful words and actions
We can forgive ourselves through a “quick fix”, e.g., a short meditation or exercise
Forgiving ourselves is condoning our hurtful behaviour.

Elisha Goldstein cites Lily Tomlin when discussing forgiveness of others, Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past. This insight can as readily apply to self-forgiveness as to forgiving others. In self-forgiveness, we have to give up our “grievance story”, let go of wishing that we had behaved better and dismantle our defenses that prevent us from acknowledging our part in a hurtful interaction.

Mindfulness – a path to forgiveness

When we develop a mindful disposition by observing our inner landscape – our thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations – we can reduce our negative thoughts and increase our ability to forgive. Mindfulness can develop our “disposition to forgive” – it can unearth grievance stories, clarify our part in any interaction, help us to take the other person’s perspective, increase our awareness of negative emotions and related bodily sensations and cultivate compassion. Ultimately mindfulness can help us to develop self-awareness and emotional regulation so that we are not captive to our strong, challenging emotions and can live in the present rather than the hurtful past.

Forgiveness meditation

There are multiple forms of forgiveness meditation. Loving kindness meditation, for example, has been shown to cultivate compassion towards others as well as self-compassion. Sharon Salzberg, experienced mindfulness trainer, offers a three-part forgiveness meditation encompassing:

Seeking forgiveness from someone you have hurt or harmed
Offer forgiveness to those who have hurt or harmed you
Self-forgiveness for the times you have harmed yourself through being judgmental.

Sharon includes an affirmation related to the last point, For all the ways I have hurt or harmed myself, knowingly or unknowingly, I offer forgiveness. Other meditation trainers, such as Mitra Manesh, focus the self-forgiveness on the harm that we have caused to others, rather than to ourself. Mitra, in her forgiveness meditation podcast, places a lot of emphasis on becoming aware of our bodily sensations as we deal with the “heavy energies” involved in holding onto grudges, anger or rage. She also suggests a mantra for seeking forgiveness from others, For all the ways that I have caused you pain and suffering, I ask your forgiveness.

In reflecting on a number of forgiveness meditations, I identified four common principles underpinning the meditation process:

Stay grounded, relaxed and focused
Manage distractions through an anchor such as your breath or sounds
Start small with something that is manageable and recent (limited history or replaying)
Adopt a healing perspective – show loving kindness to others and yourself.

We can develop a mindful disposition in multiple ways , not just through meditation. As we grow in mindfulness we can more readily adopt the perspective of others and understand their hurt. We can own up to and name our own feelings, however negative or challenging. Over time, our disposition to forgive and our capacity to offer forgiveness to others and ourself will grow almost invisibly.

Reflection

Forgiving ourself can be a lifetime pursuit as I have found in trying to forgive myself for my part in my marriage breakup which occurred more than 40 years ago. This is something I am working towards. I find that forgiving others and forgiving ourself are interwoven activities – not discrete, independent steps.

I have also been reflecting on my long-standing anger towards my Father for his alcoholism and its major impact on my childhood and my family. I recently started crafting a poem called Paternal Forgiveness which I will publish soon in this blog. In the poem, I offer forgiveness to my father, seek to forgive myself for my harsh judgments and express my sorrow for the hurt that I had caused him when he was alive. In writing the poem, I have drawn inspiration from Kim Rosen’s book, Saved by a Poem: The Transformative Power of Words. In the book, Kim describes how poetry has helped people to deal with challenging situations, including the need to forgive others and themselves, and provides insight into the transformative elements of a poem.

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By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site and the resources to support the blog.

Managing Fear and Anxiety through Mindfulness Meditation

Diana Winston, Director of the Mindfulness Education Division in UCLA, provides a guided meditation podcast on the use of mindfulness to manage fear and anxiety. She suggests that our fears can be real (e.g. a physical threat) or imagined (e.g. anxiety about some perceived future scenario which may never happen). Fear is focused on perceptions about the present moment whereas anxiety tends to be longer term and related to imagined adverse futures in whatever form they may take.

We can be fearful about the risk of contracting the Coronavirus, COVID19, and experiencing the associated debilitating effects of this pandemic. We might also be putting off our meaningful work because of unfounded rationalisations about what might go wrong. We might have found that a generalised state of anxiety has disabled us and that our fear response has blocked us from our creativity and capacity to perform at a competent level. Our fear response can be manifested behaviourally as fight, flight or freeze.

In the guided meditation, Diana offers a four stage meditation process to address whatever form our fear or anxiety takes. She maintains that a mindfulness approach can not only increase self-awareness and regulation of our emotions but also enable us to restore our centredness and strengthen our wellbeing and the associated ease.

The four-stage approach to managing fear and anxiety through mindfulness meditation

Diana’s four stage approach incorporates becoming physically grounded, exploring what is happening in the moment, accessing the “wisdom mind” and extending loving kindness towards yourself. The processes in each of the four stages can be summarised as follows:

Stage 1 – This involves establishing a sense of physical groundedness by feeling your feet on the floor and experiencing the solidity, physical support and stability beneath you. The associated feelings can be strengthened by picturing the solid earth beneath, no matter how much your are above ground level at the time of the meditation. ‘

Stage 2 – Here you are encouraged to face the fear in its various manifestations – bodily sensations, racing mind and unsettling feelings. The core question is, What does fear feel like? Do you experience increase heart rate, sweating, headache or a “clenched stomach”. What thoughts are generating your fear and/or anxiety and what negative thoughts and worldview are you adopting? What is happening for you emotionally, e.g. crying, withdrawing, being angry and/or aggressive or experiencing inertia?

Stage 3 – Once you achieve a degree of calmness, you can seek to access your “wisdom mind” which deserts you when you are in turmoil. Mindfulness can provide a pathway to wisdom and open the door to our intuition and creativity. Sharon Salzberg maintains that meditation can stimulate our innate wisdom through recognition of agency, appreciating moments of joy and richness, identifying boundaries of control, strengthening our sense of connectedness (replacing a sense of aloneness) and assisting us to deal effectively with difficult thoughts and emotions.

Stage 4 – Here you are encouraged to tap into loving kindness towards yourself – providing understanding, a non-judgmental stance and reassurance. You can extend towards yourself the same thoughtfulness, forgiveness and generosity that you show towards others in need.

Reflection

If we are anxious, we may need to explore a range of regular practices to restore balance in our life. Judson Brewer, in his book Unwinding Anxiety, maintains that mindfulness does not stop anxious thoughts or change them but “changes our relationship to those thoughts and emotions”. He offers a “mindfulness personality quiz” to help you identify your behavioural patterns and provides ways to “train your brain to heal your mind”.

Meditation and other mindfulness practices such as chanting help us to reframe our life and overcome adversity by developing insight and resilience. As we grow in mindfulness, we can deepen our self-awareness, regain control over our thoughts and emotions and build the resilience required to live in these challenging times.

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By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Mindfulness for Sports Performance

In an earlier post, I discussed how playing tennis can develop mindfulness through building the capacity to pay attention in the present moment for the purpose of competing and being able to do so non-judgmentally (suspending self-criticism). The very act of managing making mistakes in tennis helps to develop acceptance of what is and to reduce negative self-evaluation. While tennis can help us to grow in mindfulness, using mindfulness practices on a regular basis develops our tennis performance. Hence, playing tennis and mindfulness are mutually reinforcing. I particularly noticed this mutual influence while watching some of the women’s matches during the US Open.

Being in the zone

Victoria Azarenka (unseeded) beat Elise Mertens (16^th seed) 6-1, 6-0 in the US Open quarter-final round. She achieved this despite not having played in a quarter-final since the 2016 Australian Open (Victoria gave birth to her son Leo in December 2016 and took a 9 month break from tennis during a lengthy custody battle for her son). In her interview following the match with Elise, Victoria described how she saw the ball so large and with a bright yellow colour (she could even read the “US Open” imprint on the ball). She also commented on the fact that the ball seemed to always be where she needed in order to hit the shot she wanted to play (in reality, it is likely that she had moved to be in the right spot to play the ball). In the match, Victoria displayed heightened sensory perception, anticipation, and flexibility of movement.

The interviewer suggested that what Victoria was describing was known as “being in the zone” – an experience reported by many committed sports people such as car racing drivers and cricketers. Mindfulness can develop the capacity to be-in-the zone as it achieves increased integration of body, mind and emotions – an alignment necessary to achieve the “flow” of being-in-the-zone. Mindfulness practices such as yoga and Tai Chi can enhance sports performance and the likelihood of being-the-zone by developing bodily awareness, focused intention, groundedness and balance.

Finding the calm mind

Victoria lost 6-1 in the first set of the semi-final against Serena Williams who was determined to assert her ascendency as early as possible and to keep the rallies short (she had played four tough three-set matches leading up to this match). However, Victoria went on to win the next two sets 6-3, 6-3. When asked on interview how she went on to win after such a devastating start to the match, Victoria commented that Serena had dug her “in a big hole” and she had to “climb her way out”.

She was able to do this because of the work she had been doing “to find the calm mind”. She explained that she had learned to change her mindset from that of victim always seeking to ask why bad things were happening to her. She stated that she recognised that she was responsible for what she did and how she reacted to situations and this had enabled her to “become a better person”. Previously, Victoria had been noted for her on-court emotional outbursts that impeded her performance and progress as a professional tennis player. During Serena’s lengthy injury break at a critical time in the match, Victoria was able to close her eyes and go inside herself and draw on her inner strength.

Mindfulness builds calmness and tranquility even in challenging times, develops self-awareness and helps us overcome negative self-evaluations. It enables us to realise that there is a space between stimulus and response and that we have a choice in how we react to negative stimuli or testing situations. Sharon Salzberg maintains that mindfulness develops wisdom in multiple ways including accepting what is beyond your control, managing your emotions and response and appreciating moments of wellness and joy. Over the course of the US Open matches, Victoria frequently expressed her freedom from expectations and sheer joy at being able to participate in the competition and to play champions of Serena’s calibre.

Body awareness and movement

At the start of the second set in her semi-final, Victoria began energetically bopping up and down. During an interview following the match, she was asked what she was thinking when she “started to bop around at the baseline”. Victoria explained that she was conscious of her need to bring her energy level up and movement was her way of doing that. She was also able to tap into the fact that she started each day with a smile on her face and spent time on self-care to “focus her attention and energy”.

Processes such as body scan meditation can build body awareness, identify energy blocks, and provide a way to release tensions and the aftermath of traumas. Mindful movement through yoga or Tai Chi can serve to build the mind-body connection and activate the body’s energy flow.

Reflection

Christian Straka, former tennis coach for Victoria Azarenka, is also a mindfulness facilitator with UCLA’s Mindfulness Awareness Research Center (MARC). He has created a specialized approach to mindset training by developing methodologies that apply “evidence-based mindfulness techniques in sports”.

Many sportspeople consciously develop mindfulness to enhance their sports performance. As we grow in mindfulness, we can access multiple benefits that facilitate achievement of high-performance levels in sports, as well as in our work and everyday life. As with the pursuit of any competence, these benefits are more extensive and sustainable with regular practice.

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By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Developing Wisdom Through Meditation

In a recent interview for Mindful.org, Sharon Salzberg discussed The Power of Loving Kindness. In the course of the interview, Sharon identified different ways that meditation can develop wisdom – the ability to make insightful judgments and sensible decisions based on our knowledge and experience. Her wide-ranging conversation focused on a number of key insights that can help us to inform our judgements and guide our decision making.

Elements of wisdom developed through meditation

In her interview, Sharon shared several key insights into the way meditation can contribute to the development of wisdom:

Learning to accept what you can’t control – the starting point to develop wisdom is to acknowledge that many things are outside our control and to accept this fact despite our innate need for control. Wasting energy and negative emotion on things outside our control only debilitates us and leaves us open to frustration and depression.
Realising that no matter the situation, you have agency – you can exercise agency (your capacity to act to have control over your inner landscape and over some elements of your external environment). Viktor Frankl, author of Yes to Life in Spite of Everything, demonstrated control over his inner landscape during his internment in a concentration camp. There is always something that you can do externally as well – you just need the space and time to be open to this possibility. Even in this time of the global pandemic, people and organisations are finding creative ways to take action to exercise control over some elements of their life and work. Wisdom recognises that you don’t need to feel entirely powerless. As Sharon points out, “It’s an illusion to think that we are without any agency in our lives, any ability to act”.
Learning to use the gap that is available between stimulus and response – you can become convinced that your conditioned way of responding is the only way for you to react to a negative stimulus. As Viktor Frankl maintains there is a gap between stimulus and response and therein lies your freedom to choose your action (“considered action” rather than reaction). Meditation develops self-awareness, especially in relation to the negative stimuli that activate your fight/flight/freeze responses. Meditation also builds self-regulation so that you can choose your response rather than be conditioned by your past experiences and habituated way of reacting.
There is a unique way for you to help others – you have a combination of life experiences, skills, personal attributes and knowledge/understanding that is different to anyone else. Instead of trying to live up to others’ expectations, you can find a personal way to help through meditation and reflection – you can exercise sound judgment and creative decision making in relation to your potential contribution. Sharon reinforces this when she suggests that you can “pay attention and look and listen for opportunities to help” that are in line with your capabilities and the challenges of the situation you are faced with.
Dealing effectively with difficult emotions – being with these emotions in all their pain and intensity instead of avoiding them and acting in a dysfunctional and hurtful way. Feeling difficult emotions in your body and naming them in a granular way (e.g. anxiety, fear, shame) enables you to tame them and to convert negative energy into constructive action.
Appreciating moments of wellness and joy – it takes awareness in the moment to appreciate your experiences of beauty, joy and love. Gratitude for these experiences enhances their impact on your overall wellbeing. Also, as Sharon maintains in her recent book, loving-kindness meditation is a revolutionary way to happiness.
Developing your sense of connectedness – when you experience wellness or complex emotions or become immersed in nature through meditation and reflection, you heighten your sense of connectedness to everyone else who is experiencing this range of human emotions and to every living thing. Sharon notes that connectedness is the very fabric of life and if you treat yourself as separate, you are “fighting that reality”. Loving-kindness meditation is a very effective way to reinforce and manifest our connectedness to others.

Reflection

It pays to think about, and experience, how meditation develops sound judgement and enables sensible decisions. We so often relate meditation to rest and relaxation and overlook its power to facilitate effective action in a wide range of situations. As we grow in mindfulness through meditation and reflection, our awareness of what is and what’s possible develops, our ability to manage ourselves (thoughts, emotions and actions) increases and our enhanced sense of connectedness becomes an inner source of energy and empowerment.

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By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution, Non-Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Accessing the Power of Meditation and Loving Kindness

Barry Boyce, founding editor of Mindful.org, interviewed Sharon Salzberg, globally recognised meditation teacher, about the impact of meditation and loving kindness (about which Sharon is a world-renowned exponent). In the interview, The Power of Loving-Kindness, Sharon explained how she had studied Eastern philosophy and learned about meditation by travelling to India, not the local meditation centre like you do today. She was surprised that much of the Indian meditation practice that she learned focused on the breath, not the more esoteric approaches she had learned about.

Focusing on the breath

Sharon was at first taken aback by the simplicity of the breath focus. However, she soon realised that while the idea is simple, the execution is difficult because it involves having to deal with racing thoughts that distracted her from her focus on her breath. She found how hard it was to pay attention to her breath when “thoughts came tumbling down like a waterfall”.

At challenging times, when anxiety is high, our mind races away from our focus with some speed and intensity. Bringing attention back to our breathing focus, is difficult to do but builds our “attention muscle”. It enhances our power of concentration and our capacity to be with what is, whether it is the experience of well-being or the pain and suffering of challenging emotions. Pausing to focus on our breath develops clarity and our capacity to lead with conviction.

The role of loving-kindness

There is a tendency is to give up in the face of the difficulty of focusing on our breath. However, persistence really pays and creates the power to access equanimity, ease and creativity. Sometimes, we are tempted to beat up on ourselves by saying, “We are not good at meditation and never will be?”; “It’s such a simple thing, why can’t I do it?” “Other people seem to manage, why can’t I?”

This is where loving kindness has a role. Jon Kabat-Zinn, in his definition of mindfulness, exhorts us to practise paying purposeful attention “non-judgmentally”. It is the negative self-evaluation that creates the greatest barrier to meditation, not the fact that we have lots of distracting thoughts. Thoughts are natural and will vary in content and frequency over time, reflecting what is going on in our life at that time. Jon suggests that we treat thoughts as if they are bubbles floating to the surface in boiling water.

Sharon maintains that “kindness towards ourselves” is essential if we are going to be able to persist with meditation. She argues that paying attention and kindness are inseparable – without self-compassion, you cannot sustain your attention. The power of meditation lies not only in the increasing capacity to concentrate but also in the ability to develop robust self-esteem through loving-kindness. Another dimension of this power is the ability to rest in our breath and bodily sensations in troubling times and times of turbulence in our life. Sharon explores fully the role of loving-kindness in her recent book, Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness.

The power of connection

Through meditation and loving-kindness, we come to realise our connectedness to everyone and our connection with nature. This is foundational to our ability to show compassion towards others. If we can accept ourselves fully – with our flaws, hurtful behaviour and our complex emotions – we are better able to extend compassion and forgiveness to others and accept that they are only human too.

Through our sense of connection, we can tap into the “collective energy” that surrounds us, pursue our life purpose and make a real difference in the world. Meditation becomes a power source, a way of accessing the power within and without – it becomes the conduit for our energy system.

Reflection

Meditation has a calming yet powerful effect. When we are rattled or frazzled, our power of concentration is diminished, our thoughts become dispersed and our energy dissipated. Paying attention to our breath with loving-kindness enables us to access our power source and to bring focused energy to our endeavours, whatever they may be. As we grow in mindfulness through meditation, particularly through loving-kindness meditation, we can enhance our sense of connection to everybody and every living thing, build resilient self-esteem and draw on the power of focus.

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By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution, Non-Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Insights Into Meditation Practice

Tami Simon from Sounds True interviewed world-renowned meditation teacher, Sharon Salzberg, about the nature of meditation. The interview podcast titled, Beginning Anew, provided some valuable insights into meditation practice and its outcomes. By way of illustration of the many applications of meditation, Sharon spoke of her meditation work with the Garrison Institute helping to develop a “culture of wellness” amongst domestic violence health care workers. She also mentioned her meditation work with nurses and international refugee workers who experience vicarious trauma because of the trauma of others that they experience every day and feel isolated because of their inability to talk about the truly disturbing things they encounter. Some of the insights into meditation practice from her interview are summarised below.

Insights into how we can become renewed through meditation practice

Sharon’s interview podcast provided considerable insight into the nature of meditation and its personal impacts – the longer and more consistently we practise meditation, the more profoundly we will experience these impacts:

Seeing possibilities – when we are caught up in our difficult emotions and seemingly trapped, we tend to experience “tunnel vision”. In the face of disruptive change, which is ever-present, we tend to focus on the “endings” rather than the “new beginnings”. We can also become obsessed with projecting an adverse future onto our mind’s screen. We become locked in, unable to see possibilities and the potential for new beginnings – the ability to “begin anew”. Meditation stills the mind and enables us to identify creative options – it releases our creativity in times of change and challenge.
Gaining understanding – Sharon highlights this dimensionof meditationby focusing on the difference between guilt and remorse. Guilt in her words is a form of “lacerating self-hatred” where we beat up on ourselves for our mistakes, deficiencies and harmful behaviour. We convince ourselves that we will never change but will continue to be hurtful towards others. Remorse, on the other hand, is genuine sorrow for causing hurt to others together with the ability for self-forgiveness. Understanding, developed through meditation, releases us from being “mired in the pain and exhaustion of guilt” and enables us to have the energy, motivation and will to change. Sharon describes understanding as “a tremendous tool”.
Changing our perspective – if we focus only on the things that are wrong or missing in our lives, we will miss the things in front of us that generate well-being and possibilities. If we get locked into a pattern of negativity, we will lack the ability to “see clearly” – we will not be in a position to “serve ourselves or others”. Research at the HeartMath® Institute demonstrates that negative emotions creates chaos in our nervous system while positive emotions “can increase the brain’s ability to make good decisions”. Sharon points out that focusing on the negative in any situation disables us while insight gained through meditation can “create change and the context for change”.

Reflection

We can become trapped in a created, negative reality with the perception of no way forward, and become trapped in guilt about our past words and actions. Sharon maintains that as we grow in mindfulness through meditation, we can open our eyes to possibilities, gain a real understanding of the difference between disabling guilt and enabling remorse and develop a perspective on change that enables us to move from negativity to positivity and sound decision making. Sharon’s Insight Meditation Kit, developed with Joseph Goldstein, provides the tools and resources to help us remove hindrances to personal growth and develop the energy for personal change.

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By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution, Non-Commercial–No Derivatives)

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Forgiveness: Forgiving Our Self and Others

Forgiveness is challenging because it is not a one-off event. We are continually hurt by others and hurt them, often unconsciously. It is one thing to forgive others for words and/or actions that are hurtful and another thing to forgive ourselves for the hurt we cause. According to recent research, mindfulness can improve our tendency to forgiveness and our willingness to forgive a past offense, according to

Developing a tendency to forgive others

If we are able to develop a mindful disposition – consciously monitoring our physical, mental and emotional health – we are better able to reduce our negativity and improve our likelihood to forgive. When we feel hurt by someone, we can harbour the negative emotions of anger and resentment – feelings that become compounded by the re-telling of the story of the hurtful action to others. We can become obsessed with our rightfulness in the situation and elaborate on how much we have been wronged, entrenching our feelings of hurt and anger.

Mindfulness can help us to name these negative feelings and learn to tame them. It can give us insight into our own sensitivities and the pattern of our own emotional responses. In a conflict situation, it can also help us to understand the perspective of the other person who has, consciously or unconsciously, hurt us. In the process, it can assist us to develop a tendency to forgive others.

Forgiving our self: a lifelong process

It is one thing to forgive others for the hurt they cause us; it is another task – often more challenging – to forgive our self for the hurt we cause others. For one thing, we tend to be blind to the way we hurt others – we often will not let our recollection of these events reach conscious awareness because they are perceived as damaging to our self-esteem – our sense of our own (superior) worthiness.

There is also the difficulty of dealing with the very strong negative emotions of guilt and shame, once we have surfaced our recollection of our own hurtful words and actions. These emotions are hard to deal with and require a concerted, conscious effort to overcome them – a process involving lifelong learning and reflection.

Sharon Salzberg, author of Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection, offers a forgiveness meditation in her article, Practise Self-Compassion with Forgiveness. The meditation begins with focusing on forgiveness towards others and then our attention is directed to forgiveness of ourselves.

As we grow in mindfulness, we can develop a mindful disposition, an understanding of the perspective and hurt of others and awareness of our ingrained feelings of hurt (and related sensitivities). We can gradually, with concerted effort, develop the tendency to forgive others (for present and past hurts) and, at the same time, slowly develop self-forgiveness for the hurt we have caused others.

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By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Driving with Mindfulness

Often when you are driving you can become agitated, annoyed or frustrated by the traffic holdups caused by others. Sharon Salzberg provides a timely reminder that “you are traffic too“. We focus so much on our own needs in the heavy traffic situation that we lose sight of the needs of others. Sharon puts this down to the “centrality of ourselves” – where the world revolves around our self-centredness, rather than other-centredness.

Diana Watson too in one of her MARC weekly meditation podcasts, provides us with a meditation that enables us to bring mindfulness on the road. She describes one of her own experiences when she was running late to conduct a meditation and found her irritation and agitation rising.

Diana found that she was swamped with thoughts and emotions. The thoughts reflected the negative bias of the brain – “I’m not going to make it on time”, “What will happen if I am late?”, “People may never come again if they are new to the meditation practice! So, our minds can catastrophize any situation and unsettle us as we are driving.

Another source of emotional disturbance occurs if we then engage in self-recrimination or negative self-evaluation – “If only I had planned for traffic delays!”, “Why was I rushing out the door when I know that I need to have a strong presence of mind to conduct this mindfulness session?’

Bringing mindfulness to driving – noticing thoughts and emotions

What Diana found that she ended up doing was to start noticing, not entertaining, thoughts and emotions as they arose, e.g. “I am feeling anxious (or irritated)”, “I keep thinking that I will be late, and this causes me to become agitated”. If we start naming our emotions, we can begin to control them.

She also suggests that we can focus on what is going on in our body as these emotions and precipitating thoughts arise. We can notice the tightness in our chest, the pain in our neck or the onset of a worry headache. If we can notice the thoughts and name the emotions, we can wind back our habituated response and calm ourselves.

Without this calming mindfulness on the road, we can end up taking more risks while driving, act out our anger and frustration through “road rage” or find ourselves making poor decisions about what choices to make to get to our destination. Our growing agitation and impatience can frustrate our attempts to arrive on time.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation practice that grounds us in the present moment, we can more readily deal with situations such as driving in heavy traffic when our needs for timeliness are being frustrated. We can also bring to the situation self-awareness and self-regulation so that we are not captive to our negative thoughts and emotions – we can begin to drive mindfully.

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

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You Are Traffic Too!

In one of her presentations, Sharon Salzberg tells the story of driving a friend somewhere and being held up by a traffic jam. Sharon became increasingly agitated and frustrated by the delay caused by the congestion. Her friend turned to her and said, “Sharon, you are traffic too”.

This is a great illustration of what Sharon describes as the “centrality” of ourselves. We forget that we are part of the problem we are complaining about – that we too are the traffic. By being in the traffic queue, we are contributing to the traffic problem. However, we see the other vehicles as the ones that are holding us up – what right have they got to be there when we are trying to get somewhere else?

We are entirely focused on our needs in the situation and the impact of traffic delays on us. We are unaware and unconcerned about the needs of the other drivers and passengers who are also delayed by what is happening (or not happening) on the road we are on.

Traffic delays create a great opportunity for mindful connection. We could think about frustration of the needs of other people in the traffic queue who are also delayed – rather than obsessing about the frustration of our own needs.

We could think of someone trying to get to see a dying relative for the last time, someone going to the hospital to give birth, someone missing out on an important job interview that they were a “shoe-in” for, someone else going to a specialist’s surgery to find out the results of the diagnosis of a potentially life-changing disease or someone experiencing some impact that is less dramatic.

This process takes us outside of ourselves and our concerns and enables us to become other-centred. It reinforces, too, our interconnectedness – we are all impacted by the traffic delay for different reasons and to different degrees.

If we cannot readily begin to think of the frustrated needs of others in the situation, we can always begin with mindful breathing to slow down our emotional response to the situation and to bring a degree of mindfulness into play.

Having regained some degree of self-control, we can increase our self-awareness and improve our self-management by adopting the complete process of SBNRR (stop, breathe, notice, reflect, respond) that we described previously.

As we grow in mindfulness, we become increasingly aware of the opportunities in everyday life to be mindful. We can more readily notice and act on opportunities to grow in self-awareness and self-management if we have actively developed our level of mindfulness through meditation practice and conversations with ourselves.

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Image source: courtesy of Gellinger on Pixabay

Barriers to Loving Kindness

Sharon Salzberg has trained people, on a global basis, in the art of loving kindness and compassion. She offers ways to undertake loving-kindness meditation in her books, videos and blog posts. For example, in a blog post for mindful.org, she described a practice that helps people connect with kindness in a world where people increasingly feel disconnected.

In discussing mindful connection in a recent presentation, Sharon alluded to potential barriers to loving kindness. The following barriers can be identified from her presentation:

Centrality of ourselves

Sharon describes “centrality” as a serious impediment to loving kindness as the primary focus is on ourselves, our needs, our priorities and our happiness. Jon Kabat-Zinn refers to this barrier as “the story of me” – where I am the producer, the central character and actor in the story about me.

Sharon suggests that we can overcome our tendency to “centrality” when we gain insight into the pain associated with this positioning of ourselves. We can come to this realisation through meditation or reflection on a challenging life event – when we begin to understand that placing ourselves at the centre of everything is the root cause of our loneliness, sense of disconnection, boredom and frustration.

Disconnected worldview

We often hear media reports that state that it was fortunate that the flood, cyclone or bushfire did not strike “here” but passed us by and struck “over there”. This worldview conveys a sense of disconnection – as if what happens “there” has no impact or implication for us “here”.

This worldview is extremely narrow even taking into account our economic, ecological, financial and political interdependence. It does not recognise the interconnection at a human level with families, friends, colleagues and relatives involved. At a deeper level, it fails to recognise our interdependence with nature and the interconnection of all humanity.

Loving kindness and compassion meditation can open us up to recognition of these interdependencies and interconnections. We can also monitor our own words on a daily basis to ensure that we do not unwittingly promote a narrow, distorted worldview.

Beliefs about love

There are many connotations of the word “love” but it has become synonymous with “romantic love”. This leads to the belief that love is a feeling and that to love someone you have to like them or approve of them. If you view love as connection, then love is seen as a capacity to connect -something that can be cultivated. Love, then, is independent of whether you like a person or not.

The belief that compassion is solely an inner state

It is true that compassion is developed through loving-kindness and compassion meditation. However, as Sharon points out it is actually a “movement toward” rather than a “movement within”. The latter can lead to “empathetic distress”. Compassion is the recognition of someone’s suffering and the desire to act to alleviate it in some way, while recognising that in many situations we cannot act directly to affect the pain and suffering of another person.

Compassion in day-to-day life can be expressed through active listening and what Sharon calls “spy consciousness” – where we turn our attention to our own thoughts and motivation in a situation to assess whether we are acting from a compassionate, considerate stance or from one of “centrality”.

Judging ourselves

We all carry a degree of prejudice and unconscious bias but there is nothing to be gained from beating up on ourselves, disliking who we are or belittling ourselves. What is needed is compassion for ourselves and recognition that these deficiencies are a part of the human condition. Sharon argues that self-loathing does not lead to transformation whereas compassion for ourselves is transformative.

As we grow in mindfulness through loving-kindness practices, we begin to recognise at a deeper level that we are connected to everybody else and we start to cultivate love for others that is a true form of connection.

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Image source: Courtesy of brenkee on Pixabay