Softening A Hardened Heart ...

There is beauty to seeing stone 

turned to moist soil, broken open, receptive

to the seeds of love.

Omid Safi

Hi Everyone!

Last time, we spoke about how our hearts can become hardened through repeated exposure to our own and others' trauma. Today, I'd like to move on to how we can begin to soften our hearts, allowing us to receive more love, nurture and support.

We all have a wall around our hearts. According to Persian tradition, the heart is a walled garden, an inner garden protected by an outer wall. When we have experienced great pain, our own or others', that wall can become a hardened fortress, protecting us but also keeping out the very ones who could be a source of our healing and renewal.

Omid Safi, Director of the Islamic Studies Centre at Duke University, likens this hardened heart to dry land - hard, parched and cracked. To break it open, to till and water it so it is ready to receive a seed of love, (a kind glance, a touch, a word, a compassionate action), takes time, patience, effort and vulnerability.

As Professor Safi says:

The seed of love falls on the heart's soil. Is it a hardened earth, a rock-covered surface, one that will have the seed washed away with the first water? Or is it a soil that has been prepared, tilled, softened up, opened up again and again and again, ready to embrace the seed of love that would surely come?

When we suffer Compassion Fatigue, our hearts' soil hardens and we become less receptive to the seeds of love sown by our colleagues, family and friends. As we recognize and acknowledge that this is the case, we can consciously make an effort to till, water and soften that soil.

Three ways we can soften the soil of our hearts are to practice self compassion, learn heart-centered spiritual practices and consciously allow ourselves to open up and become more vulnerable in our daily relationships.

1.  Self-compassion researcher, Kristin Neff, describes self-compassion as, "acting the same way toward yourself when you are having a difficult time, fail, or notice something you don't like about yourself, as you would toward a friend." She says that instead of just ignoring your pain with a "stiff upper lip" mentality, you stop to tell yourself, "This is really difficult right now. How can I comfort and care for myself in this moment?" You can learn more about practicing self-compassion on her website. 

2.  Heart-centered spiritual practices can be found in most spiritual traditions. The point of these practices is not to resolve our emotions or to figure them out but to simply to allow them to have some space within us without pushing them away. Here is one (slightly abridged) practice written by Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, Benedictine Abbess of the virtual online monastery, Abbey of the Arts.  (It is a simple practice that should only take about 5 or 10 minutes to complete.)

1.  Begin by becoming aware of your body. Notice how your body is feeling simply by being present to sensations you are experiencing, welcoming in both the body's delight and discomfort. 

2.  Connect to your breath, deepening it gently. As you inhale, imagine Love breathing life into you. As you exhale, allow yourself to experience a moment of release and surrender into this time and place, becoming fully present. Take a couple of cycles of breath to simply notice this life-sustaining rhythm which continues moment by moment even when you are unaware of it.

 3.  In your imagination, gently allow your breath to carry your awareness from your head (which is your thinking, analyzing, judging center) down to your heart center (where you experience life from a place of greater integration, feeling, and intuition). Consider placing your hand on your heart to experience a physical connection with your heart center and draw your awareness to this place.

 4.  Breathe into your heart center and begin to notice what you are feeling right now in this moment without judging or trying to change it. Take a few moments to simply be present to whatever you are feeling and making some room within yourself to experience this without pushing it away (this alone can be revolutionary for many of us - to just allow ourselves to have the experience we are having without judgment.)

 5.  Call to mind the spark of Love which the ancient monks and mystics tell us dwells in your heart. Bring the compassion of Love to however you are feeling right now, not trying to change anything, but just gently holding yourself in this space.

 6.  As you experience yourself filling with compassion for your own experience, imagine breathing that compassion out into the world and connecting with other hearts beating across the world in a rhythm of love.

 7.  Gently allow your breath to bring your awareness back to the room and take a moment to name or write what you noticed in this experience.

3.  Becoming more vulnerable to others, the third way we can soften the soil of our hearts, may seem like a risky weakness in our toughness-saturated workplaces. But, as shame and vulnerability researcher, Brene Brown, writes, "Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness."

It takes honesty and courage to open ourselves to speak from our tender places and to receive the healing love of others. While it is important to choose wisely those with whom you will be vulnerable, it is also important to have people in your life with whom you can really be yourself, "warts and all", knowing that you will be accepted and respected. To learn more about intentional  vulnerability, try listening to Brene's TED Talk on The Power of Vulnerability .

There are many more wonderful ways to soften the soil of our hearts but these three are a good start. Let me  leave you, once again, with the words of Omid Safi - There is beauty in stone being turned to moist soil, broken open, receptive to the seeds of love.

May this Valentine's Day bring each of you an opportunity to soften your heart and receive some much needed seeds of love.

  

A Valentine's Gift to Yourself ...

Spread love everywhere you go ...

Let no one ever come to you without

leaving better and happier.

Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa's ideal of spreading love everywhere we go is a noble one and, often, it is a motivation behind our desire to support and care for others. We learn through our pores, via art and literature, our caring relationships with family and friends, our faith traditions, and our professional trainings that our care and compassion can be a rich source of support and healing. We respond to this knowledge by wanting to share our care and compassion with the patients, clients, family and friends who are in need of our support.

But what if, one day, we reach inside to share loving kindness with others and find that our wells are verging on empty? What if there is no longer a well of caring within but, rather, a pool of irritation, exhaustion, reactivity, sorrow, pain, helplessness and discouragement? And what if underlying these painful feelings is a profound embarassment that we can no longer find a caring self within, a sense of shame that makes us isolate rather than reaching out for help? This is the experience of compassion fatigue. 

(During the years I worked in my trauma psychotherapy practice during the day and cared for my husband at home at night, I remember wandering around inside my own head looking for the caring person who used to live there. Where had she gone? What had happened to her? Why couldn't I find her? Would she ever come back?)

If you find yourself resonating with this experience, it's likely that you, too, have become secondarily traumatized by the wounds of the people for whom you care. You have empathized deeply and, as a result, have given more than you had to give. There is little or nothing left. 

The good news is this is not an irreversible situation, though it takes time, intention and effort to turn it around. We have to re-jig our learning to incorporate the wisdom of the Sufi's who say, 

Never give from the depths of your well, only from the overflow.

Once we become aware of our state of physical, emotional and spiritual depletion, we can begin to focus our loving care and attention on ourselves. This will probably feel very uncomfortable at first. All the messages we've ever heard about selfishness and putting others first will come ringing through our ears. However, it is our ethical responsibility to ignore these voices. We must care for ourselves first, and then, when our well is overflowing, we can choose to care for others again.

So, in this Valentine's week, please take the time to step back and assess the level in your well. Then, make a commitment to treating yourself with at least as much love and compassion as you would your best friend. Allow this commitment to fuel the choices that will begin to refill your well and your life.

It's important to begin the refilling process by gifting yourself with things that are small and manageable. Give yourself the gift of a Valentine's massage, take a couple of hours alone to do whatever you please, make a counselling appointment, eat a healthy meal, say no to overtime this week, ask for some respite care, write a love letter to yourself.

When you've done enough small things to build your energy a bit, consider giving yourself one regular and ongoing gift. Decide to go for a walk everyday. Spend 10 minutes meditating each morning and night. Arrange a regular visit with a supportive friend or a trauma therapist. Do something every day to enrich your spiritual life. The possibilities are endless...

If you listen to your body, it will tell you which gift will be most helpful to you right now. The "gift" that makes your body constrict with stress and that adds one more "should" to your to-do list is not the gift to choose, even if you know it would be good for you. The gift that makes your body relax and expand with pleasure is much more likely to be the best one for you this Valentines Day.

So, here's to self-compassion and self-love on Valentines Day 2014. Enjoy!

       

Self-Compassion - A Step Toward Healing Compassion Fatigue ... ...

For 12 days last month, the city of Vancouver was abuzz with talk of compassion. Why? Because Karen Armstrong was in town.

Invited by Simon Fraser University's, Centre for Dialogue, Karen Armstrong,  2008 TED Prize winner and one of the most provocative current thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world, led 12 days of conversation on compassion and living a compassionate life throughout the city.

Karen's visit marked the launch of the Greater Vancouver Compassion Network, part of an international movement to build compassionate communities, inspired, in part, by her Charter for Compassion, a document supported and endorsed by both Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dali Lama.

While not everyone will agree with her "freelance monotheistic" lens, I believe Karen has much to say to those of us who yearn to treat ourselves and others with greater compassion.

In her best selling book, 12 Steps To A Compassionate Life, Karen has written a full chapter on the importance of self-compassion, a quality that I see as an essential part of compassion fatigue healing and resilience. In her words, -

The Golden Rule requires self knowledge; it asks that we use our own feelings as a guide to our behaviour with others. If we treat ourselves harshly, this is the way we are likely to treat other people. So we need to acquire a healthier and more balanced knowledge of our strengths as well as our weaknesses. ... (to) make a list of our good qualities, talents, and achievements. We recognize flaws in our closest friends, but this does not diminish our affection for them. Nor should it affect the way we value ourselves. Before we can make friends with others, we have to make a friend of our own self. Without denying your faults, remember all the people you have helped, the kind things you have done that nobody noticed, and your successes at home and at work. A sense of humour is also important: we should be able to smile wryly but gently at our failings, in the same way as we tease a friend.

Another self-compassion writer and researcher, Kristin Neff, of the University of Texas (Austin), defines self compassion as, "... acting the same way toward yourself when you are having a difficult time, fail, or notice something you don't like about yourself, as you would toward a friend". She describes this experience of self-compassion in a threefold manner -

• first, you notice that you are suffering, 

• second, you feel moved by that suffering in a way that leads to warmth, caring, and the desire to help yourself through understanding and kindness rather than judging yourself harshly, 

• and, third, you recognize that your suffering, failure and imperfection is a part of the shared human experience.

She goes on to say:

Instead of just ignoring your pain with a "stiff upper lip" mentality, you stop to tell yourself, "This is really difficult right now. How can I comfort and care for myself in this moment?"

Instead of judging and criticizing yourself mercilessly for various inadequacies or shortcomings, self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted with personal failings - after all, who ever said you were supposed to be perfect? You may try to change in ways that allow you to be more healthy and happy, but this is done because you care about yourself, not because you are worthless or unacceptable as you are. 

Perhaps most importantly, having compassion for yourself means that you honour and accept your humanness. Things will not always go the way you want them to. You will encounter frustrations, losses will occur, you will make mistakes, bump up against your limitations, fall short of your ideals. This is the human condition, a reality shared by all of us. The more you open your heart to this reality instead of fighting against it constantly, the more you will be able to feel compassion for yourself and all your fellow humans in the experience of life.

On Kristin's website there is a Self-Compassion Inventory that you might like to try. Again, remember to be kind to yourself regardless your findings. Low self-compassion is not a personal flaw but the result of many factors including your genetic background, your parenting, your education, your religious teaching, your culture, and your multigenerational history of trauma and loss.

Once you recognize a low level of self-compassion, (and, thus, an increased risk for compassion fatigue), there is much you can do to increase your kindness toward yourself. Karen Armstrong puts it this way:

But before you are ready to "embrace the whole world", you must focus on yourself. Begin by drawing on the warmth of friendship (maitri) that you know exists potentially in your mind and direct it to yourself. Notice how much peace, happiness, and benevolence you possess already. Make yourself aware of how much you need and long for loving friendship. Next, become conscious of your anger, fear, and anxiety. Look deeply into the seeds of rage within yourself. Bring to mind some of your past suffering. You long to be free of this pain, so try gently to put aside your current irritations, frustrations, and worries and feel compassion (karuna) for your conflicted, struggling self. Then bring your capacity for joy (midita) to the surface and take conscious pleasure in things we all tend to take for granted: good health, family, friends, work, and life's tiny pleasures. Finally, look at yourself with upeksha ("evenmindedness", nonattachment). You are not unique. You have failings, but so does everybody else. You also have talents, and, like every other being on the planet, you deserve compassion, joy, and friendship.

The process Karen describes here could take some time and is probably best done slowly with the companioning of a trusted therapist, coach, spiritual director or clergyperson.  If you would like some exercises to guide your exploration, you will find some on Kristin's website.