by Sheila Bayliss
When I first started practising mindfulness, I hit a bit of a roadblock when it came to the part about letting unpleasant feelings be there. Not trying to change things that were unpleasant just felt plain wrong. You see, I was desperate to get rid of my anxiety.
At the time I was plagued by work worries, but I was willing to give this mindfulness thing a go. I’d become aware that my typical response was to push the feeling of worry away by doing something to fix or resolve whatever I was worrying about. Taking action generally made me feel more in control. But I realised that this short-term gain had a longer-term backlash – in that I remained unable to tolerate uncertainty, and so felt like a slave to my constantly-anxious feelings.
I geared myself up for ‘letting things be’, and gave it a go. I lasted about a nano-second before I became completely overwhelmed. The feeling of anxiety (for me at that time) just felt too big and scary. So I put the mindfulness book away and sought comfort in my well-worn strategies for keeping anxious feelings at bay.
Of course, this didn’t really solve anything. I was still stuck in an ongoing battle with worry. Some days I felt like I was ‘winning’, but most of the time I just felt trapped.
About 6 months later, I was fortunate enough to discover a mindfulness course which included kindness, or compassion as it’s also described. I’ll be honest, at the time of the course, I didn’t really ‘get’ what the kindness thing had to do with it.
I do now.
Mindfulness is all about being with our experience in a gentle and accepting way. That’s all very good and well when we’re having a nice time. But being with unpleasant experiences is pretty challenging, unless we can do so with genuine kindness. Over time, cultivating the skill of self-kindness enabled me to let my anxiety be there, without engaging in battle with it. This feels like true emotional freedom.
In the past, I hadn’t even able to get close enough to my anxiety to feel curious about what it really felt like. It was too big a monster. But once I could acknowledge, with self-compassion, just how challenging it was for me to feel anxious – something shifted. I became able to sit with worry for maybe a few seconds at a time. And I learned so much about what this feeling really was – and what it wasn’t.
Over time I came to see that worry wasn’t my enemy. It was just trying to protect me. I was even able – eventually – to befriend my feelings of anxiety, to accept them as just one part of my experience. When they arise now, I hold them with gentleness while they need to be felt, and then they pass away of their own accord. Often, I don’t even need to work out what’s ‘causing’ my worry or anxiety. It’s not always helpful to get drawn into problem-solving mode. It can be much more empowering to realise that I am resilient enough to experience unpleasant feelings and let them pass through, without getting caught in a fight with them.
Cultivating a kind awareness can also be crucial when we first start trying to meditate regularly. Establishing a daily practice can trigger all sorts of self-criticism and judgements for those of us with perfectionist tendencies. After a short while, we start beating ourselves with the ‘not good enough’ stick if we’ve missed a practice here or there.
Or there’s the ‘I’m doing it wrong’ story if we don’t get a particular outcome (like feeling relaxed), or when the very natural mind-wandering happens.
And then or course there’s the way we judge ourselves for not being non-judgemental – ever had that delightful argument with yourself?
Practising meditation is poles apart from most other things we’ve learned in life. So kindness is needed by the bucket-load when (not if) we stumble over the challenges. We need to offer ourselves the same gentle encouragement we’d offer a child learning to walk. Even if this means applauding ourselves when we land on our backsides – chances are that this is where the deepest learning is!
If you recognise some of this, you might be wondering where to start with practising kindness. Here are a few common barriers that can stop you from bringing kindness into your mindfulness practice: noticing them can be a crucial first step.
Barrier 1: It’s all a load of fluffy self-indulgent nonsense
It may help you to know that just like mindfulness, modern science has turned the spotlight on kindness in recent years: research shows that it makes you healthier and happier (to name just 2 of the many benefits).
Barrier 2. It’s selfish to direct kindness towards myself
Again, research shows that people who practice self-kindness are actually more compassionate towards other people.
Barrier 3: It should be easy to do – so why do I find it so hard?
Kindness might sound simple. But offering it to ourselves and others can challenge all sorts of deeply-held beliefs, such as:
‘I don’t need kindness – I’m the strong one’
‘I don’t deserve kindness, things aren’t that bad, I should pull myself together’
‘Being kind to others means they can take advantage of me’
When beliefs like these surface, it’s always an opportunity to bring mindful awareness to the stories we tell ourselves. When being kind feels hard, we can bring kindness to that very challenge as a starting point. It’s not easy. It takes practice. Kindness is an ongoing practice.
If you’d like to build your own capacity for kindness, it can really help to start with yourself. Traditional compassion meditations start with the self and then broaden out to include others. Once we’ve learned to connect with and accept ourselves – just as we are – it becomes easier to accept that others are just human too, and to offer them genuine warmth.
So finding a kindness meditation might be a good way to get started, especially if you can find a course or class with an experienced teacher that includes these. Or you could read the excellent books on Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer.
I’ve recently heard mindfulness described as ‘heartfulness’ (by Jon Kabat-Zinn) and ‘kindfulness’ (by Ed Halliwell) – and I can’t think of any better way to describe what kind awareness feels like. As you begin or continue this journey, I’d like to wish you well. May you have ease of being, just as you are.
Latest posts by Sheila Bayliss (see all)
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Great piece! Mindfulness and compassion are a big part of how I work as a therapist and Sheila’s so right, you can’t observe yourself doing the things that you’ve always done and that you may find difficult about yourself without self-compassion. Change only comes with patience and kindness towards the self and the erasure of compassion from mindfulness risks changing the meaning of the practice. I’ve written a longer piece about this for my website this month – https://meiriontodd.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/a-therapists-introduction-to-buddhism-putting-mindfulness-back-in-context-3/
Yes, that’s exactly how I see it! I’m glad you liked the piece, thank you for the comment. It’s always so heartening to hear from therapists who are bringing mindfulness and self-compassion into their work.
Sheila
I found this article to be really helpful (…to the extent that this is the first time I have ever posted a comment on anything!). One point in particular was a revalation to me – the fact that “worry wasn’t my enemy…it was just trying to protect me” – that was a real ‘light on’ point for me.
I have re read the article a few times, and I’m just struggling with one point, which might not be that important anyway. It’s where you talk about when you realised …”just how challenging it was for you to feel anxious, something shifted”. Are you able to clarify the point for me? I’m not sure how it is challenging to feel anxious, and what shifted?
Thank you for your lovely comment, I’m glad you found it helpful. Very good question you’ve asked.
What I meant was that in the past, when I caught myself feeling anxious, I’d dismiss it as me being silly or weak. What shifted was when I recognised it as a moment of suffering. I realised that no matter what the cause, experiencing anxious feelings was deeply unpleasant for me, and I remember thinking ‘oh right – this is really hard for me right now’.
That acknowledgement of my suffering – instead of trying to brush it off or minimise it’s impact – opened the door for me to respond to my distress with compassion. It’s a bit like having a crying child sit on your knee for a cuddle.
I hope that gives a little more insight into how I started to redefine my relationship with anxiety.