These meanings are interrelated because, for a very long time, enlightenment and compassion have been observed to go hand in hand. Think of all of the most spiritually evolved people you can, such as Buddha, Jesus, Saint Francis, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama. We revere them not only because we’re taught to, but also because of the extraordinary compassion they display toward others, especially those who are frequently rejected.
But remember this: Their potential for enlightenment is no different from yours. These luminaries emphasize to us again and again that they are simply tapping into something we can all access. The compassion they show us is something we can all show to each other. They seem to be telling us that enlightenment is within reach, but only if compassion is present.
practice: Awakening Compassion
For this mindfulness practice, visualize the cutest creature you can think of, perhaps a puppy, kitten, baby koala, or baby panda. Visualize your mind as this cute creature. As you practice mindfulness during this exercise, count your breaths. Whenever you notice your thoughts getting out of hand or that you’ve lost count, imagine that this cute creature has run off, away from you. As you begin counting your breaths again, imagine that this creature has come back to rest in your lap. Try to keep it in your lap, focusing on counting each breath.
Notice how different it feels to envision your mind as a cute, helpless creature with good intentions, rather than as a frustrating chatterbox inside your head. Notice that your physical sensations change when you think of a cute animal. You probably find yourself more relaxed, and you may be smiling. Imagine you could have that feeling toward yourself when you think of yourself. This is what mindfulness attempts to lay the foundation for: self-love that isn’t selfish or self-centered, but focused on giving and sharing itself.
What Is Compassion?
Over the years, I’ve found that a lot of people have misconceptions about what compassion is. Therefore, I’d like to clarify this topic so that you and I are operating on the same understanding.
A common misconception is that compassion is the domain of special people—great people to idolize and revere, not ordinary folks like us. The Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Gandhi—those types of people can practice compassion. Other people get angry, lose their patience, or simply can’t be around so much suffering.
This isn’t true. Compassion isn’t a quality that certain people have and others don’t. Nearly everyone can generate compassion, and nearly everyone can benefit from being compassionate. To be clear, having compassion doesn’t mean that you’re incapable of feelings like anger, frustration, or depression from time to time. Even Jesus lost his patience at the merchants in Herod’s temple.
Like many other rewarding aspects of life, compassion doesn’t require pristine, perfect conditions. When you’re experiencing intense emotional pain, you crave soothing. You may be longing for the presence of your deceased loved one, and your pain may be inflamed by knowing that your loved one isn’t coming back and cannot soothe you. You may feel very alone in your pain, as if no one could possibly understand what you’re going through and what you’ve already suffered in your journey with grief.
You are longing for compassion and love, not for pity. Compassion is not pity. Compassion is much more active. Compassion has a connotation of being something experienced together—something that someone gives to you or that you give to someone else. It means being motivated to help someone who is suffering, not just feeling sorry for that person or watching the person’s suffering from afar.
Ultimately, mindfulness helps facilitate an expansion of compassion in our lives. This may sound a bit strange, since we think of compassion as being heart centered, whereas mindfulness sounds more like it’s in the mind. Furthermore, we often assume that the mind and heart are opposites, frequently in conflict with each other. Yet we feel best when they are connected to each other.
Compassion relies on being able to share the open and welcoming awareness of your mindfulness practice with others. You may notice that as your practice of mindfulness deepens, you have an easier time extending this welcoming attitude toward both others and yourself. This is what compassion is all about: being able to move toward a better way of living through your pain, a way of living that can alleviate both your own pain and the pain and suffering of others.
Your grief is not yours alone; it affects everyone around you, no matter how close or distant you are from them. Your grief may have caused you to move away from certain relationships that mattered or toward new relationships that feel more comfortable. Or it may be depriving others of your company, perhaps friends you have yet to make or relationships that could have developed. Your grief doesn’t happen in isolation, no matter how lonely you might feel. Therefore, your healing can also affect those around you in a positive way, no matter how close or distant you are from them.
To feel empowered to live more mindfully and compassionately, don’t expect that you must work on major problems, like poverty or world hunger, in order to feel a sense of satisfaction or accomplishment. Compassion has many different contexts. It can start simply, with how we treat other people that we see regularly, perhaps in stores or restaurants. It can mean letting someone get ahead of you in traffic or helping someone who’s lost. These small acts of kindness may feel a little strange, even silly, but eventually they will help you feel like a kind person who’s connected to others and therefore matters in the world. This can alleviate the feeling that you’re suffering alone.
practice: Engaging in Random Acts of Kindness
Connecting with other people compassionately several times a day just feels good. Each day, try to think of at least three ways you were kind and compassionate in a situation where you otherwise might not have been or didn’t need to be. Write down with whom this happened, where, and what you did that was compassionate.
The person might be someone working in a store or restaurant, someone at work, a friend or family member, or someone in any other situation where you’re around other people, such as on a bus or at church or temple. If you’re seldom physically around other people, think of other ways of interacting, perhaps through social media such as Facebook or Twitter, by e-mail or phone, and so on. Alternatively, if you’re not interacting with other people regularly, you might take this as a message that you need to get out of your home and spend more time doing things around others, if you’re comfortable doing that.
If you can’t think of three ways that you were kind to others, then think of three ways you could have been kinder or more compassionate. Change can’t begin without insight, so with this approach at least you’ll be taking a step toward insight. But remember, this is an exercise about compassion, not guilt. Use this approach to guide your future behavior, not ruminate about the past.
To help you get started, I’ve provided a tracking chart. Fill the chart out for three weeks so you can be sure that you’ve been acting on this intention for a while. The hope is that by tracking your compassionate actions for three weeks, they will become more second nature and you’ll become more mindful of them. This will help perpetuate your compassion. By becoming more aware of your compassionate actions, over time you’ll be more likely to see new situations in which you can apply a more compassionate approach.
This exercise will help you get more familiar with practicing compassion on a daily basis. In addition, it will help you feel like you’re dealing with the world in a more meaningful and positive way, increasing your motivation to practice mindfulness and compassion regularly. It really comes down to the Golden Rule, which can feel so soothing in the midst of emotional pain and turmoil: treat others as you want yourself to be treated.
Three Levels of Mindfulness
Compassion has long been entwined with the practice of mindfulness. In the Buddhist literature, there is an understanding that mindfulness has three levels. The first level is simply awareness of the traffic in the mind—all of the urges and ruminations that you notice when you pract
ice mindfulness. You’re surely more aware by now that meditation doesn’t require an empty mind; this first level is all of the mental chatter that you become aware of when you practice mindfulness. It’s the first step of mindfulness practice, and like the first steps on any long journey, it is often the part that takes the most energy.
The second level is connecting your mind, heart, and body with your behavior. This means having a better understanding of how your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are all interrelated. Hopefully mindfulness practice is helping you become more aware of the consequences of how you spend your time. As a result, you may be beginning to live a bit differently. This second level takes some deliberate effort, but not as much as the first level. In becoming more mindful of yourself, your behaviors naturally change, becoming more wholesome and health promoting. Your pain may still be there, but it isn’t dictating all of your choices or dominating all of your time with the same intensity.
The third level of mindfulness is an intuitive union of mind, heart, and body. This level is the hardest to achieve and may take a while. However, once you reach this level, you don’t need to exert much energy to maintain it. I suspect this is what happens after a few months of dedicated, disciplined mindfulness practice. I also suspect that this is what accounts for all of the neurological changes in those who practice mindfulness, as shown in various brain scan studies. At this level, your actions are almost automatically health promoting and informed by your mindfulness practice even when you aren’t deliberately trying to be mindful. At this level, mindfulness is not only something you practice, but something you are.
I must clarify that even at the third level of mindfulness, you shouldn’t expect your mind to be silent. It will still chatter away, trying to find dark corners filled with intense pain, petty concerns to churn into tension, or daydreams and fantasies that carry you away from mindful awareness. What changes is your attitude toward your mind, toward your heart and body, and toward others.
Paths to Becoming More Compassionate
Mindfulness teaches that compassion sometimes happens when you don’t expect it. I firmly believe that one of the hidden treasures of mindfulness is developing a greater capacity for unconditional love toward yourself. This is where all compassion comes from. After all, how can you be compassionate toward others without first extending compassion toward yourself? Self-love is a vital ingredient for being compassionate.
The second ingredient may sound surprising to you: it is your pain. This may seem counterintuitive. You may assume that compassion is the opposite of your pain, that it requires being free of pain. But this is impossible.
Emotional pain has a self-absorbing quality that limits your awareness of others. You may have little interest in what seem to be petty problems or mundane dilemmas that other people are experiencing. What could possibly measure up to the loss that has caused you so much pain? But as the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1993) has described it, our own open wounds are where our capacity to feel, and to feel for the pain of others, comes from. Compassion relies on your ability to feel emotional pain—first your own and then that of others. Compassion isn’t the opposite of pain, but it can transform you in the midst of your pain.
The prolonged pain of your grief may give you something useful to share with others—not the intensity of the pain, but that closeness that comes only from sharing tears together and, more specifically, that cherishing of relationships that arises after you lose someone who is important to you. Think of the warmth from others you may have experienced in some of your difficult moments and how much better it can feel to have arms around you as you cry, or even just to have the presence of someone else close by when you feel emotionally vulnerable. You can be that soothing presence for yourself and others. This is part of what your pain can teach you about compassion.
Compassion for Your Pain
The wound of your grief is where your pain connects with the pain of others. What I’ve found in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition is an understanding that sometimes pain hurts less when we are open to it. This doesn’t mean wallowing in suffering; it means feeling these dark feelings in the bright light of mindful acceptance. Within the acknowledgment of the pain and all of the limitations that the pain brings, you can begin to feel motivated to practice great compassion, for your own suffering and for everyone else who is suffering like you.
To feel better, we sometimes have to move into the pain in order to be soothed. If you try to get away from pain, you’re still likely to suffer, and even so, you can’t escape. Trying to get away from the pain is more likely to make you feel tense, stressed, and exhausted. I encourage you to see what you can learn by accepting the reality of your pain compassionately. As a reminder, this isn’t about wallowing in your suffering. It’s about seeing what happens once you can contain the pain in a net of compassion.
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche once told a story about walking to a monastery with his attendants (Chödrön 1997). On the way there, they passed a ferocious Tibetan mastiff, chained to a stick and guarding the path. These large dogs, often dreadlocked and unkempt, are a common sight on the Tibetan plateau, striking terror in everyone with their fierce barking and downright monstrous appearance.
As Trungpa Rinpoche and his party passed the dog, it broke free from its chain. Everyone froze in terror. Trungpa Rinpoche, acting in a moment of intuitive spontaneity, instead ran toward the dog. Confused, the dog turned and fled away from the group, never to bother them again.
Years ago, I had a similar experience during one of my runs through suburban Florida. One of the dogs in the neighborhood had gotten loose and started chasing me. I did the same thing—I turned around and ran toward the dog. You know what? It worked. I’ve also found that this can work with painful emotions: approaching them, rather than fleeing, seems to deprive them of their power and often eases the stress and tension that seem to automatically accompany emotional pain.
Compassion therefore often requires courage. It isn’t always easy or the path of least resistance. Compassion is often not even close to being an automatic response. Even though it might sound soft and welcoming, compassion is often the hardest thing to do. Think of what happens when someone irritates you. If you’re in traffic and someone cuts you off or seems to be driving carelessly, your first reaction might not be one of understanding. Most people get angry, maybe even violent. In these situations, compassion doesn’t seem like it’s even in the realm of possibility. As much as we might like for compassion to arise in every moment it can, like mindfulness, it takes quite a bit of discipline, training, and effort.
“Closure” and Unfinished Business
I’m sure you’ve heard about the concept of closure, and there’s a good chance that you’ve read or heard that achieving closure is necessary in your grief. This concept has always baffled me, and it may have confused you too. Exactly what does “closure” mean? Is the idea that, once a loved one dies, we’re supposed to aim for living as if they were never with us? Does closure mean we’re never supposed to feel the pain of the loss again, even when songs come on in the supermarket that remind us of being with someone we’ve lost? Does closure simply mean that we’ve had a chance to say good-bye, even if we weren’t able to at the time of a loved one’s death?
To be honest, in my experience closure comes up more often in the popular media than it does in therapy. We often hear stories about people who are looking for closure by bringing a killer to trial, or reports that finding a missing loved one’s remains will help a family find closure. But from these examples, closure sounds more like the point when grief can truly begin, once the details of a loss are understood or a sense of justice has been attained.
I prefer to think of completing unfinished business rather than achieving closure. Conveying thoughts, feelings, or wishes for your loved one that you weren’t able to extend before your loved one died can definitely help you heal. There tend to be a few recurring types of unfinished business
that people have with deceased loved ones. Ira Byock, MD (2004), a pioneer in hospice care, has written extensively on what he believes is most important in helping with unfinished business. I use his work and insights to help my patients quite often.
According to Dr. Byock, these are some of the more common types of unfinished business:
Needing to express forgiveness
Needing to be forgiven
Expressing gratitude
Expressing love
Saying good-bye
All of these can be dealt with under the umbrella of wishing yourself and your loved one to be well and free from suffering.
I encourage you to think about closure as the point at which you feel like you can connect with the memory of your loved one with a feeling of love, rather than with only pain or distress. There may still be pain, but being able to feel anything other than pain is a liberating step in grief for many people. This often begins once any unfinished business is addressed.
Think of closure as what happens when you can show compassion for yourself in your grief and tap into feelings other than pain in regard to your loved one. I’ve found that the practice of loving-kindness meditation is extremely helpful in allowing this to happen.
Loving-Kindness
In Buddhist meditation, there are two different terms for compassion—metta and karuna. Metta, or loving-kindness, is the wish for others to be well, and karuna is the wish for others to be free of suffering. For the purposes of helping you in your grief, let’s assume that compassion is composed of both in equal parts: for others to be well and free from suffering, just as you wish the same for yourself. As you may have guessed, you have to start with yourself and with the reasons you’re working through this book: to be well and free from suffering to the greatest extent possible.
Mindfulness for Prolonged Grief Page 13