Carrie Ingoglia

When I started learning about the Buddha’s teachings, I got stuck on the idea of non-attachment in Buddhism. I was especially struck by two ideas central to the Buddhist teachings on attachment, both of which I initially resisted:

1. That suffering is inevitable. I remember thinking, “I like my life. Do I have to suffer?”
2. To relieve suffering, we must not be attached to things, people, and ideas. My resistance to this idea was immediate, and sounded like, “How can I be a good friend or family member if I’m not attached to my loved ones?” And “How can I go through life without being attached to anything?”

Over time, I’ve come to find some peace with non-attachment in Buddhism, and here’s why.

Buddhism and Non-Attachment: How Attachment Relates to Suffering

Buddhism views attachment as a pivotal cause of suffering.

Buddhism views attachment as a pivotal cause of suffering, often using the Sanskrit term “duḥkha” (Pāli dukkha), which can refer to physical pain or emotional turmoil, both of which are part of the human condition. Suffering comes from our innate yearning for permanence, satisfaction, and control in a world characterized by impermanence and constant flux. 

Suffering comes from our yearning for permanence, satisfaction, and control in a world characterized by impermanence and constant flux.

According to Buddhism, attachment and suffering go hand-in-hand. When we like something, we want it to remain. When we don’t like it, we want it to go away. Either way, we’re often comparing the real present moment to an imagined one that we prefer or that we’re attached to.

These attachments stem from our deeply ingrained tendency to cling to experiences that bring pleasure while avoiding those that evoke discomfort. But because our internal and external environments are always changing, this attachment perpetuates suffering, binding us to a relentless cycle of craving, aversion, and ignorance.

Is there a way to love people, dislike pain, and still practice non-attachment in Buddhism?

Is there a way to love people, dislike pain, and still practice non-attachment in Buddhism?

Buddhism and Attachment: Suffering and The Five Skandhas

Our attachment to phenomena sets in motion a chain of interconnected causes and effects, ultimately culminating in suffering. This chain is described in the foundational Buddhist teaching of the five skandhas (Sanskrit, “heaps” or “aggregates”).

The teaching of the five skandhas describes how attachment leads to suffering.

The cycle starts with ignorance (avidyā), referring specifically to our fundamental misconception of reality, particularly its fluctuating and impermanent nature. That ignorance leads to ideas or mental formations (saṃskāra), shaped by our past experiences, desires, and beliefs—meaning, this thing has happened in the past, so we think it will always happen in the same way. These formations shape our awareness of the world around us and, in fact, our consciousness (vijñāna).

Our experience of form (rūpa), sensory contact with the material world; sensation (vedanā), internal feelings received from forms; perception (saṃjñā), perception of the qualities of forms; mental formations (saṃskāra), mentally arising volitions and dispositions; and consciousness (vijñāna), the mental recognition of the other four factors, together make up our sense of self and identity. These are the five skandhas.

It can be helpful to think about a practical example. If I have a job as a web programmer, I go to work every day to do web programming. This job pays me money so I can help take care of family. This job, its work and title, become part of my experience and my self-identity. I am a web programmer. I am someone who makes money and helps take care of my family. 

So what happens if I’m laid off from my job? Not only are there the practical questions of income and health insurance, but also the existential ones: Who am I, if I’m not a web programmer? Who am I, if I am not making money to provide for my family?

This attachment to self-identity may be the trickiest of all. It leads to craving (Sanskrit tṛ́ṣṇā, Pāli taṇhā), the fervent desire for pleasurable experiences, and the aversion to unpleasant ones. Craving leads to clinging (Sanskrit and Pāli upādāna), as we grasp onto people, possessions, and experiences in pursuit of enduring happiness and security. This clinging ultimately leads to more suffering, since everything inside and outside us is always changing.

Liberation from Attachment in Buddhism: The Path to Freedom

Despite the seemingly insurmountable cycle of suffering, Buddhism offers a pathway to liberation from attachment and its ensuing suffering. At its core lies the Four Noble Truths, serving as the cornerstone of Buddhist doctrine.

Buddhism offers a pathway to liberation from attachment and its ensuing suffering, through the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path.

The first Noble Truth acknowledges the ubiquity of suffering (Sanskrit duḥkha) in human existence. The second Noble Truth identifies craving (tṛ́ṣṇā) and attachment (upādāna) as the root cause of suffering. The third Noble Truth heralds the cessation of suffering, attainable through the transcendence of attachment and craving. Finally, the fourth Noble Truth prescribes the Eightfold Path, a pragmatic roadmap to liberation from suffering.

The Eightfold Path comprises eight interrelated factors that foster wisdom (Sanskrit prajñā), ethical conduct (śīla), and mental discipline (samādhi). These factors encompass Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.

By traversing the Eightfold Path, individuals gradually loosen their attachment to desires and nurture a deeper comprehension of reality’s true nature. This allows us to cultivate wisdom and insight, empowering one to extricate themselves from the cycle of suffering and attain liberation, or Nirvana.

In the World: Buddhism and Non-Attachment in the Context of Job and Family

Nirvana is great and everything, but it can feel distant, esoteric, and impractical when it comes to daily life. Now, let’s address the question: “Can I still be attached to my job and family?”

Buddhism doesn’t prescribe a blanket renunciation of worldly responsibilities or relationships. Instead, it advocates for a balanced approach rooted in mindfulness, wisdom, and compassion.

Buddhism doesn’t prescribe a blanket renunciation of worldly responsibilities or relationships. Instead, it advocates for a balanced approach rooted in mindfulness, wisdom, and compassion. While it’s natural to develop attachments to one’s job and family, the key lies in fostering a healthy relationship with these aspects of life. 

Being attached to one’s job can lead to stress, burnout, and a sense of identity tied solely to professional achievements. Similarly, excessive attachment to family can breed codependency, suffocating individual growth and autonomy. 

We know that everything in life is changing and evolving. Excess attachment can only add to suffering when these things inevitably change—when there are layoffs at work, changes in the family structure, and so on.

Working with Attachment through Buddhist Practice: A Personal Example

We can now try to answer another practical question raised earlier: “Is there a way to love people, dislike pain, and still practice non-attachment in Buddhism?”

In short, yes. And it’s all about staying present with what is.

A few weeks ago, I had a flare-up of plantar fasciitis and was in quite a bit of pain. I had a hike planned in a few days that I’d now need to cancel and a host of other regular activities that were going to be challenging. I spent a whole day and night being angry and disappointed. But as I began to care for my foot and take measures to recover, I realized that although this was annoying and uncomfortable, ultimately it was not the end of the world. I started moving slower. Removing things from my to-do list. And eventually, I felt better—emotionally and physically.

What was happening when I was angry? I was attached to the idea of a pain-free day. I was attached to the plans I’d made. What happened when I started to recover was an ability to recognize I had to let go of those expectations and simply live with reality. Once I accepted I wasn’t going to be able to do everything I’d expected to do, things got a little bit easier. 

Buddhism encourages cultivating mindful awareness of our attachments and their impact on our well-being.

Buddhism encourages cultivating mindful awareness of these attachments and their impact on our well-being. Rather than clinging to roles or expectations, strive for a balanced perspective, recognizing the impermanent nature of all things, including relationships and career paths—and our sense of self.

In my case, this meant recognizing my pain level in the moment and also becoming aware that the frustration and disappointment I felt was keeping me from being present in any part of my daily reality.

Practicing non-attachment in Buddhism can be as small (and as big) as just that—accepting the present moment and letting go of the need for control over outcomes. It’s being in reality, not attached to a vision we have of what it should be. 

By engaging in mindful communication and genuine connection with loved ones, approaching work with effort, but also with detachment from outcomes, that is how we can practice every day.

By integrating Buddhist principles into our daily lives, we can navigate the complexities of attachment to job and family with greater equanimity, fostering harmony, and well-being in all aspects of our lives.

Buddhism and Non-Attachment: Summing Up

Non-attachment in Buddhism is not about leaving behind our lives as householders. Instead, prescribing a more balanced approach—a middle path, if you will. 

Buddhism offers profound insights into the nature of attachment and its impact on human suffering. By unraveling the intricacies of attachment and following the Eightfold Path, individuals can gradually liberate ourselves from the cycle of suffering and attain true happiness and fulfillment. While attachment to job and family is natural, applying Buddhist principles can help cultivate a balanced perspective, fostering greater peace, contentment, and harmony in our lives. As the Buddha famously declared, “Attachment leads to suffering; let go of attachment, and suffering ceases.”

About the Author

Carrie Ingoglia is a meditation practitioner, ayurvedic yoga teacher, and mother to twins. Also an award-winning writer and Creative Director, she lives on Long Island with her family.

Frederick Meyer

Self-love—to feel, honor, and appreciate our own goodness—is among the most beautiful and powerful things there is. We are always worthy of self-love, but because of the difficulties of life, we may struggle to find it. Fortunately, meditation can help.

In this article, we will explore self-love meditation. We will first share simple meditation teachings on being kind and caring toward ourselves. Then, based on those teachings, we will share a detailed guided meditation for self-love that you can use to immerse yourself directly, as well as four self-love meditation videos for further exploration. Let’s get started!

Self-Love Meditation: Learn to Love Yourself

This article introduces self-love meditation. If you would like to dive deep into the topic, please view our full online course Learn to Love Yourself, with senior teacher Sabine Rolf. It’s a detailed exploration of self-love meditation, and how meditative mind and warmth toward ourselves can support one another through our lives.

Explore Self-Love and Meditation in Learn to Love Yourself

Learn to Love Yourself, with senior teacher Sabine Rolf, will help you cultivate self-compassion and self-acceptance through mindfulness and loving-kindness practices. Learn to embrace yourself with kindness and care.

Learn More

Self-Love Meditation: Simple Teachings to Support Our Practice

In my experience, many meditation practitioners, even if we’ve been practicing for years, don’t always feel strong and stable self-love. We may be very good at being present with our feelings, at caring for others, and so on—but when it comes to how we actually feel about ourselves, moment-to-moment, we may not always experience a lot of warmth.

This is a huge shame, because we are worthy of true self-love. It’s also the case that if we don’t feel real, genuine, simple kindness and care toward ourselves, that will make other parts of our meditation path very challenging.

Many longtime meditators struggle to feel strong and stable self-love, which can be under-emphasized on our complex paths.

On our meditation paths, it can be easy to move quickly from self-love to related topics, like wishing for the benefit of all beings through contemplating the Four Immeasurables, and taking on the suffering of others through Tonglen (sending and taking) practice. I feel that it can sometimes result that we do not fully connect with the warmth of self-love itself, before moving on to more “advanced” topics that should have self-love as a foundation.

Relatedly, many of us carry various kinds of personal, family, and cultural trauma that makes it very difficult to love ourselves. This means that we need to be more creative and committed to work with and begin to process this trauma and find true self-love, and moving on quickly to other topics might risk leaving this work incomplete.

Because under-emphasizing self-love is such a risk in our complex meditation paths, I feel that it is good if we practice self-love meditation using the most fundamental teachings we can find: the ones that teach us to love ourselves directly, before we take on additional ideas, practices, or projects in areas like compassion, universal altruism, and so on.

We can practice self-love meditation using the simplest teachings we can find, before taking on additional ideas, practices, or projects.

Below are some of these simple teachings, teachings I’ve found helpful for discovering self-love directly. At the bottom of this article is a detailed guided meditation for self-love, which will help you put these teachings into practice in your direct experience.

Maitri: Self-Acceptance

Maitri, a widely used teaching across many Buddhist traditions, is a Sanskrit term that is often translated into English as “loving-kindness.” (Metta, another widely used term in Buddhism, is the Pali version of the same word.)

Pema Chödrön defines maitri as “unconditional friendship with oneself,” and says that this warmth for ourselves is the basis of, a necessary ingredient for, true compassion for others.

“Maitri is unconditional acceptance of oneself, unconditional friendship with oneself. It is the basis of compassion.”

Pema Chödrön

Because maitri is so widely taught across Buddhism, you will see it presented many ways. However, I feel that Pema Chödrön’s presentation of maitri is a wonderful place to start: working with accepting ourselves, as we are, with kindness and friendship.

This is a big process for all of us, and it certainly won’t click all at once. However, I feel it can be very helpful to notice the overall attitude: not “I’ll love myself once I’m better” or “for these reasons,” but rather “I love myself unconditionally.” Even beginning to contemplate that perspective of unconditional self-love can help begin to orient our minds in that direction.

Tsewa: Tender-Heartedness

Some of the most direct teachings I’ve encountered on self-love are from Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, and they’re about a Tibetan term not commonly discussed in Western Buddhism: the Tibetan word tsewa, which Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche calls “the innate tenderness of our own heart.”

We may feel that we just don’t deserve love. In this state, it’s very hard to open up to receiving warmth from anybody.

This is when we have to remember that no one is undeserving. Everyone has the same precious tsewa [tender heart].

There is nothing fake about what lies at the core of all our hearts. We may have a lot of negative habits and shameful thoughts, but they are not our true colors.

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

I’ve seen the power of Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche’s own tenderness firsthand. I once attended a public talk he gave in Boston, in a large classroom at Harvard Divinity School. About an hour into his talk, he began discussing our shared wish to be happy. He mentioned that he had recently sat by a river, and had watched a small water skipper skim along the surface. He said, “I saw that every movement the water skipper made was from a desire to be happy.”

As he continued speaking, I noticed a strange feeling: Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche seemed to be sending out waves of compassion. The environment felt soaked in love and tenderness, which pulsed in slow waves, like the air on a warm, breezy day. The waves felt like they were radiating from him, as he sat below us at the front of the room, the way heat radiates from an open stove.

The tsewa quality of tender-heartedness is wonderful to feel in ourselves, and, as Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche says, it means that none of us are undeserving.

Love

In Buddhism, we often make distinctions between terms like “loving-kindness,” “compassion,” “sympathetic joy,” and so on. However, love—the simple feeling of powerful warmth and affection—is very much a part of the path of meditation, and if we’re looking to deepen our experience of self-love, then love is a great starting place.

To begin with, we can notice that we do feel love, whatever that love might be for. Even if we dislike many things, and feel like we dislike ourselves, we certainly love something. This is the source of one of my very favorite quotes:

“Everybody loves something, even if it’s only tortillas.”

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

In my own practice, noticing the love I have for so many things—plums, lilac bushes, the feel of cashmere sweaters, hot showers, and many other things—helps me feel love for myself.

This isn’t an act of logic. Instead, it’s like what happens when I see that a dog really, genuinely loves its family: that makes me love the dog. Similarly, noticing the love I have in my heart—for anything, it doesn’t really matter what—makes me appreciate myself, love myself.

Basic Goodness

In Shambhala, our core teaching is basic goodness. As a Shambhala community member says:

“In Shambhala, we recognize and believe that everyone possesses innate goodness.”

Shambhala Member, Florida, USA

We have many teachings on basic goodness itself within our community, but probably the simplest is: “I am basically good.”

If we’re having trouble with self-love, we may not feel we are good. Instead, we might say something lukewarm like, “I am often well-intentioned.” It can be very tempting to make “good” complex, to fit our more negative experience of ourselves.

To work with that tendency, I find it helpful to emphasize the meaning of “good” as, very simply, good: worthy, worthwhile, as-we-should-be. In Shambhala, we discover that this simple quality of good is our most basic nature. We are basically, fundamentally good.

Even though the term “basic goodness” comes from Shambhala specifically, the spiritual truth of basic goodness is not only within our community. For example, in the Nyingma tradition—generally considered the home of the most profound teachings in Tibetan Buddhism—the primordial Buddha is named, simply, “All-Good” (Samantabhadra in Sanskrit, Küntu Zangpo in Tibetan). This means that, in that tradition, “All-Good” is the deepest personification of our true nature.

A great way to begin to feel basic goodness is as a sense of belonging. As Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche says: “You have a perfect right to be in this universe, to be this way. You don’t have to apologize for being born on this earth.” Feeling this belonging—that we are right to exist in this way, that we belong on this earth as we are—can help us begin to open to our simple, living goodness.

Meditation for Self-Love: Guided Meditation

With the teachings above as support, below is a simple, step-by-step guided meditation practice for self-love.

Throughout the steps below, please listen to yourself. If the practice feels good or helpful, please do it for as long as you’d like, as often as you’d like. However, if the practice feels weird, unsafe, or unsettling for any reason, please discontinue the session. You can always make a relationship with a meditation instructor. Additionally, we all struggle with trauma to varying degrees, so if you feel that this may be an obstacle, consider finding a holistic therapist.

1. Setting and Posture

Find a quiet and comfortable place to sit or lie down. Whatever posture you are in, try to have a straight back, with your spine straight but not tense. You can have your eyes open or closed, whichever best supports your practice.

2. Breath and Relaxation

Take a few deep breaths from your stomach (this is sometimes called “diaphragmatic breathing”). If you notice tension anywhere in your body, you can “breathe into” that tension, allowing it to relax as your body breathes. Notice your body and mind begin to settle and relax, and keep breathing deeply until you feel somewhat more settled. (If that’s not happening after a minute or two, that’s fine—move to the next step.)

3. Self-Love Phrases

Based on which of the teachings above connects most easily with you, try bringing into mind one of the following simple phrases:

• “I wish happiness for myself.” As you say this phrase, actually do wish for yourself to be happy, now and in the future. You can imagine yourself finding the happiness you wish for, and notice any emotions or bodily sensations that this brings up.
• “I am worthy of love and happiness.” As you say this phrase, consider that you love, that you have hopes and dreams, that you feel joy and sorrow. As a living, loving, aware, feeling being, you have a perfect right to be on this earth, just as you are.
• “I am basically good.” As you say this phrase, consider yourself to be, simply, good: worthy, worthwhile, as-you-should-be.

You can rotate through these phrases if you like, but in general you might want to stay with, and feel, phrases that most resonate with you, rather than “pondering” or “considering” phrases that don’t resonate as much.

4. Feel Bodily Resonance

As you stay with the phrase or phrases you’ve chosen, feel anything—any senses or emotions—that this brings up in your body. This might be pleasant or unpleasant, whole-body or very closely located, highly emotional or just a simple physical sensation. Simply allow whatever you’re experiencing, without analyzing it too much or trying to fix or improve it.

Our sensations are always changing, so allow this natural flow while staying with the phrase or phrases that connect with you most, and see what happens over a few minutes.

(To repeat a note just for safety: if what you are experiencing feels unsafe or more than mildly uncomfortable, feel free to pause the session. You can try another time, or connect with a meditation instructor or other support person.)

5. Share Self-Love Throughout Your Body

If, after a bit of time, you are feeling some resonance of self-love in your body, such as a feeling of warmth or tenderness, you can share that feeling with (or “move it throughout”) your body. This can help feelings of self-love more fully suffuse our experience, and it can also help us release any tension or resistance in different parts of our body as we attend to them one by one.

This isn’t a difficult or a forced process. It’s more like allowing a glow or warmth, which is initially located mostly in one place, to slowly radiate or spread into each part of your body, as you notice those body parts in sequence.

So if the phrase “I am basically good” is bringing a feeling of warmth in your heart area, you can allow that same warmth to expand slowly, progressively, body part by body part: outward into your shoulders, arms, hands, and fingers; upward into your throat, jaw, face, and head; and downward into your stomach, pelvic floor, seat, thighs, knees, lower legs, ankles, feet, and toes.

Once the sense is full-body, you can simply rest with it.

6. Rest and Conclude

When you’re ready to conclude the session, you can let go of the phrase, and simply notice how your body feels for a few slow breaths. Lastly, you can relax even this noticing, and rest simply for a short while. Then, whenever you’re ready, you can conclude the session.

A Note on Embodiment and Self-Love Meditation

The bodily focus in the practice above might sound strange if you’ve never tried this kind of self-love meditation before, but working with energies and feelings in your body can be very powerful meditation practice. It can help us experience self-love in a very immediate way, as a direct feeling rather than as an idea.

Working with bodily sensation can help us experience self-love directly, as a feeling rather than as an idea.

Self-Love Meditation: 4 Guided Videos

The video below (which I like, except that I wish it had a “Music Off” option—oh well) is a similar guided meditation that instructs you to send love and appreciation into different areas of your body. You may find it a helpful support if you are new to the embodied and energetic side of meditation.

Here’s a good story on beginning to find self-love by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche:

In addition, here are two beautiful videos from the late Vietnamese meditation master Thich Nhat Hanh:

“The capacity to love others depends on the capacity of loving ourselves.” If you’re willing to go deep in a longer video, this in-depth guided meditation may be the best place to start:

Lastly, here is Thich Nhat Hanh answering questions on how to find self-love:

Discover Self-Love through Meditation

I hope this is a wonderful jumping-off point. Please share your experiences in the comments below! Different things will work for different people, so I’d love to hear what connects for you as you explore your best meditation for self-love.

If you want go deeper in self-love meditation, see our course Learn to Love Yourself. Joining community can be extremely helpful for this and all explorations in meditation. Have a look to see what Shambhala centres are near you, and, as always, look widely to find what connects with you most. Thank you!

Explore Self-Love and Meditation in Learn to Love Yourself

Learn to Love Yourself, with senior teacher Sabine Rolf, will help you cultivate self-compassion and self-acceptance through mindfulness and loving-kindness practices. Learn to embrace yourself with kindness and care.

Learn More

About the Author

Frederick Meyer is a lifelong Shambhala and Buddhist practitioner, and is the director of Writers.com. He lives in New Orleans with his wife, Clara, their daughter, Anna, and their dog, Lucy.

John_Seex

The terms “empathy” and “compassion” are often used interchangeably, but from a Buddhist perspective ultimately they are very different. In this article, we’ll explore compassion and empathy, the place and value of each, and the core differences between compassion vs. empathy.

Let’s start by looking at empathy and compassion individually, and then we’ll explore their differences.

Empathy vs. Compassion: What Empathy Is

The Oxford English Dictionary describes empathy as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” To this definition, Carl Rogers, the founder of person-centered therapy, adds: “as if it was your own, but without losing your own perspective.”

Empathy is about sharing the emotion or pain of the other.

So empathy is about sharing the emotion or pain of the other. Because we can empathise, we care about the other. When we receive empathy we are not alone, as if the walls of our separateness have been breached.

The Value of Empathy

In many ways, empathy is the basis of love and connection between people: that we can feel as if we are the other, and therefore we do not want them to suffer and we wish them well.

“When a person realizes he has been deeply heard, his eyes moisten. I think in some real sense he is weeping for joy. It is as though he were saying, ‘Thank God, somebody heard me. Someone knows what it’s like to be me.'”

Carl Rogers

So empathy is a gift we give to the other.

Empathy vs. Compassion: What Compassion Is

Tanya Singer, who researches the neuroscience of compassion, discusses two aspects to compassion: an emotional response to the other, and a broader understanding of reality and life.

Compassion has two aspects: an emotional response to the other, and a broader understanding of reality and life.

These two aspects of compassion are akin to relative and ultimate bodhicitta in Mahayana Buddhism. Bodhicitta literally means awakened heart, the mind of enlightenment. Relative bodhicitta is the warmth that we can feel toward the other; ultimate bodhicitta is awakened mind, ultimate reality.

Relative compassion—relative bodhicitta, the emotional response to the other—is synonymous with empathy. Absolute compassion, however, is different, and we experience it quite differently, as the example below illustrates.

Relative compassion, the emotional response to the other, is synonymous with empathy. Absolute compassion, however, is different.

Empathy vs. Compassion: An Illustration

In Tanya Singer’s work with Mathieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk, he was asked to tune into the suffering of others whilst having a brain scan. He chose to think about and feel the suffering of Romanian orphans whom he had seen on a TV programme recently. He was easily able to imagine them, but when asked how the experience was, he said, “The empathic sharing of their pain very quickly became intolerable to me, and I felt emotionally exhausted.”

He was then asked if he wanted to continue empathising, or to bring compassion to this experience. He immediately chose to focus on compassion. Although the images of the suffering children were still as vivid as before, they no longer induced distress: “Instead, I felt a natural and boundless love for these children and the courage to approach and console them. In addition, the distance between the children and myself had completely disappeared.” Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche called this nondual warmth “radiation without a radiator.”

When Matthieu Ricard focused on empathy, he was actively trying to feel into the other’s distress, to care, and thus he began to feel overwhelmed by their distress. When he extended compassion to the suffering of the orphans, he was bringing a sense of warmth to the situation, and he could rest in that warmth forever.

Compassion vs. Empathy: The Difference Between Empathy and Compassion

Summing up, here’s how to understand compassion vs. empathy:

1. Empathy is feeling what the other is feeling as if you are in their shoes: it is an emotional response in one person to another.
2. Compassion has two aspects: relative and absolute.
3. Relative compassion, our caring emotional responses to others, is synonymous with empathy.
4. Absolute compassion is different from empathy because there is no separateness between the person feeling compassion and the person suffering.

This ultimate or truest expression of compassion is where compassion and empathy become distinct.

The difference between empathy and compassion from a Buddhist perspective is that there is no separateness between the person feeling compassion and the person suffering.

Empathy is a feeling; compassion is a perspective. Compassion is realizing that the other’s pain is the same as your pain. When we truly enter into this, we dissolve the dualistic barrier between ourselves and others, and between our conscious mind and our feeling. In true compassion, one’s relationship to the other’s suffering is not centred on oneself, how it affects us.

Empathy is a feeling; compassion is a perspective.

Empathy vs. Compassion: Summing Up

Empathy and compassion, or relative and absolute bodhicitta, are both crucial parts of the Buddhist path, and of the basic goodness of our minds. One is not “better than” the other: instead, the absolute, nondual warmth of compassion is the ground for our caring emotional responses to others.

If you would like to deepen yourself in empathy and compassion, a great place to start is practicing self-love. As Pema Chödrön says, “The reason we are not there for others is because we are not there for ourselves,” and self-love practice can help with this.

Thank you for reading!

About the Author

John Seex has been teaching in Shambhala for about 20 years and has taught Running with the Mind in Meditation retreats, month long retreats (dathuns), Shambhala Levels 1-5, and foundational Buddhist courses about the Four Immeasurables, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, and the Nine Stages of Resting the Mind, among others. He is a psychotherapist, supervisor and psychotherapy tutor and is fascinated by the relationship between thinking and feeling and the everyday experience of egolessness.

Kathy Mitchell-Garton

The benefits of meditation are widely touted these days. You may have tried it out yourself, or had it recommended to you by a friend, a healthcare professional, or even a podcast. But what’s the best way to start–and more importantly, maintain–a meditation practice in your daily life?

In this article, we’ll look at the practical and motivational aspects to consider when starting to meditate. Many of these are similar to considerations in developing any good habit. In addition, we’ll touch on some of the obstacles that are specific to meditation and how to work with them. 

Meditation is a simple practice, but once you start you’ll find there are many, many layers to it. The scope of this article is to get you started in developing a home practice. I’ve also linked to some resources so you continue exploring this vast topic.

How to Meditate Daily: First, Learn to Meditate

While it’s outside the scope of this article to teach you how to meditate, many good resources are available for learning to meditate. This article has numerous text and video resources to get you started. You can also review our list of the best books for new meditators.

Learning from a reputable teacher in person (or live online) is a good way to start, as it gives you the chance to try it out and also ask questions about what comes up for you.

Many Shambhala centers offer introductory “Learn to Meditate” classes and open houses that include meditation instruction. Meditation centers in other traditions also offer similar sessions. Attending an in-person class gives you the opportunity to meet other meditators and can help you to build support for your ongoing practice.

Ready, Set, Meditate!: Starting Your Practice

Let’s look at some practical ways you can make incorporating meditation into your daily life easier.

1. Make a Space

Identify a place in your home where you plan to meditate.

Identify a place in your home where you plan to meditate. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but it does help if it’s out of the way, a place you can sit quietly without interruptions. The corner of a bedroom or home office can work well.

You don’t have to sit on the floor, though if that’s comfortable for you, go for it. A chair that allows you to maintain an upright posture is perfectly acceptable. 

If you live with other people, let them know where you’ll be meditating and ask not to be interrupted while you’re doing it. A room with a door you can close is great.

Pets can be a challenge, especially ones that want to be with you. All. The. Time. You may have to experiment with spaces to find one that will work. Fortunately, most animals are routine-oriented, so they will learn about their human’s ‘time out’. My cats now ignore me while I’m meditating and sleep on my meditation cushion later in the day!

Some people like to make their meditation space special by lighting a candle or incense or setting up a small shrine (see this article on making a home shrine). It isn’t necessary, though, so don’t make not having the ‘perfect’ space an obstacle to meditating. Your space will probably evolve as you continue to meditate, anyway, so let it evolve naturally.

2. Set a Time

Routine is helpful in establishing new habits, so begin by setting a time of day to meditate.

Routine is helpful in establishing new habits, so begin by setting a time of day to meditate. I like to meditate in the morning right after I get up (and make tea and brush the cats). Mornings may be busy for you, so perhaps setting time aside when you get home from work would be better.

If you like plans and schedules, you can set a specific time. For instance, 8:00 am, breakfast; 8:15, meditate; 8:30, leave for work. My inclination and schedule is looser, so my routine (such as it is!) has an order but not a specific time. There are no rules, so what works for you, well, works for you. Follow your natural tendencies, and please, be gentle with yourself as you figure out your new routine.

How Long to Meditate

In general, it’s best to start out with relatively short sessions, something that feels manageable in your schedule and your meditation experience. Ten minutes a day is doable for many people. Even five minutes will get you started. Whatever amount you choose, resolve to stick with it for each session.

Maybe you love to meditate and decide to sit for an hour a day. That’s great… and may not be sustainable. Choose a length of time that feels realistic to maintain for a month or so, and see how it goes.

A pro tip from meditation teacher Susan Piver: “Don’t say to yourself: ‘I’m going to meditate every single day for the rest of my life.’ This is a big mistake–first, because you’re not, and second, because it’s just too much pressure.” That is, don’t set yourself up to fail. This isn’t a race!

You’ll gain more benefit by sitting for shorter periods more often.

You’ll gain more benefit by sitting for shorter periods more often. Ten minutes most days a week will make more difference in your life over time than sitting one hour-long session on Saturday. Consistency is important.

Timing your Session

I like to use a timer when I’m meditating alone, so I’m not continually checking the clock. The timer on your phone or watch or an alarm clock works great. Many meditation apps have timers as well, with nice-sounding gongs and bells to start and end your session.

You may not be able to meditate every day. That’s OK! Remember to be gentle with yourself. Three or four times a week might be the perfect place to start. 

What if you miss a day you planned to meditate? No problem. Really. Not a problem. Do not beat yourself up. Feeling bad about missing a meditation session is worse than just missing the meditation session and moving on.

A Word About Apps

Mindfulness/meditation apps can help motivate you. I use an app for my home practice because I like the gongs it offers and because it keeps track of how many sessions I’ve done overall and in a row.

It turns out, these many years after elementary school, I am still motivated by gold stars. I have been known to meditate simply to avoid ruining my streak. Hey, whatever gets you to the cushion! Now, after many years of meditating, the practice is simply a part of my life and essential to my wellbeing. But in the early years, having the motivation of an award was worth it for me.

Apps also offer ways to connect with other meditators as well as classes, guided meditations, music, yoga, and more. So much, in fact, it can be overwhelming. If you find you’re spending your meditation time scrolling through classes or listening to one guided meditation after another, it might be time to go back to a basic timer. 

How to Meditate Daily: Maintaining your Meditation Practice

Once you’ve learned how to meditate and figured out when and where you’re going to do it, you simply start, right? Like Nike says, just do it.

Yes. And.

It can feel a little strange. We’re not used to sitting quietly, by ourselves, basically doing nothing. Just breathing. In our Western culture, we’re encouraged to get things done, improve ourselves, or make things better for others. You might be wondering, “what will my family and friends think if I just sit and do nothing for 10 minutes a day?” Or maybe, “is this doing any good? Maybe I should do something more ‘useful.’ Why am I doing this, anyway?”

Understanding your motivation and intention can go a long way to helping you maintain and deepen your practice.

These are excellent questions. It’s important to investigate your motivations for meditating. Understanding your motivation and intention can go a long way to helping you maintain and deepen your practice.

Examining your Motivation

Many people come to meditation because they’ve heard it’s a good way to manage stress, to develop calm and equanimity, to become happier, or to deal with difficult thoughts and situations. All those things can be outcomes of meditating, along with many other delightful insights. 

However, meditation is not a self-help tool. It’s not a life hack. The purpose of meditation is not to fix you or make you a better person. In fact, according to Buddhist and Shambhala teachings, you (as well as everyone else) are already fundamentally wholesome and good. There’s nothing to fix.

There may be confusion to dispel, however, and this is where meditation is helpful. Essential, in fact.

The main purpose of meditation is to give us the time and space to make friends with ourselves.

The main purpose of meditation is to give us the time and space to make friends with ourselves. To really get to know ourselves, warts and all, as they say. Without judgment.

As when making friends with other people, it helps to be open and gentle. Friendly. Curious about who this person is. Learning about their quirks and tendencies in an open, kind way. 

Gentleness is key.  

When I was starting to meditate–and struggling to get to the cushion–my husband, a long-time meditator, said to me that the meditation cushion was the friendliest place he knew. Like home.

Yeah, right, I thought.

My experience of meditating was more along the lines of noticing how my thoughts pinged and raced around in my head.  And then getting hit with waves of big emotions–sadness over past or imagined losses, anger at myself for not doing something right or well enough, frustration at not finding any calm, or when I did feel calm, spacing out or falling asleep. I was sure no one else had those problems.

No wonder I didn’t want to meditate! I was not being nice to myself. Quite the opposite.

But over the years, as I’ve worked to shift my view away from trying to meditate the “right” way toward a gentle, open curiosity about myself, I’ve found that my husband was right. Meditating is like coming home. Sometimes my mind is grouchy, sometimes busy, sometimes dull, sometimes peaceful. It’s all OK.

And it’s all very ordinary. As Chögyam Trungpa says, “meditation is extremely down to earth, irritatingly down to earth.” He goes on:

“It can also be demanding. If you stick with it, you will understand things about yourself and others, and you will gain clarity. If you practice regularly and follow this discipline, your experiences won’t necessarily be dramatic, but you will have a sense of discovering yourself.”

Get Support

I have a friend who hosts a daily meditation session on Zoom. Every weekday at 7:30 am she opens her Zoom room, rings the gong, and she and whichever of her meditation cohort joins her meditates for 25 minutes. 

Support from others can be a key motivating force for your meditation practice.

Having support like this can be a key motivating force for many people. Finding a meditation accountability buddy who you text each day might be your style. Or try joining a challenge offered by a mindfulness app to meditate every day for a month. Or start your own Zoom meditation group.

Many local Shambhala Centers host weekly in-person and hybrid meditation sessions. Sitting with other people can be a powerful reinforcement of your motivation for sitting and keep you going through the week. Not only will you have the chance to sit longer than you might at home, but sitting with others who seem* to be meditating so peacefully is a strong incentive to stay on the cushion.

*They aren’t any more peaceful than you are.

Meditation centers also provide the opportunity to meet and get to know other meditators. My local center hosts a CommuniTEA session after Sunday meditation, a chance to chat, snack, ask questions, and laugh about the crazy things our minds get up to on the cushion. This is where we develop our spiritual community, known as sangha in Buddhist terms, an essential part of the Buddhist and Shambhala path.

Shambhala Centers also offer the chance to meet one-on-one with a meditation instructor–an experienced meditator who has studied how to assist other meditators in their practice. An “MI,” as they’re known in Shambhala parlance, can help with everything from how to deal with your aching back, to working with racing thoughts while you’re meditating, to what to do with big emotions that come up on the cushion. Check with your local center to arrange a meeting with an MI.

Having an experienced meditator to meet with and ask questions can help in so many ways.

Having an experienced meditator to meet with and ask questions of can help in so many ways, especially when you’re starting out. They can also recommend resources for study and to help you as you become more experienced.

How to Start Meditating Daily: Summing Up

Above all, be gentle and kind with yourself. Meditation is challenging, wonderful, exasperating, grounding, and many other things. Keep at it. You can do it.

About the Author

Kathy Mitchell-Garton is a textile artist in Lakewood, Colorado. In her work she explores the intersection of landscape, environment, history, and family using found textiles, photographic images, thread and beads. In addition to her art making, she has worked in non-profit administration and libraries. She holds an MFA from Naropa University and an MLS from Indiana University. She has been involved with Shambhala for over 20 years.

John_Light

How does meditation affect the amygdala? Much has been written about meditation and the amygdala, but almost all of it was written from the perspective of 20th century understanding of the brain. The advent of the 21st century has been accompanied by a new understanding of how the brain works and how emotions are caused, experienced, and expressed.

The neuroscience of emotion was completely rewritten by Lisa Feldman Barrett starting 20 years ago, and its implications are only slowly filtering out to other fields. In this article, we will explore the effect of meditation on the amygdala and on emotions.

The Old View of the Amygdala

Before the great imaging advances of the 21st century, figuring out what the soft bits in the brain do was not just difficult; it was often misleading. The primary method of finding out what any part of the brain does was for (typically) a psychiatrist to treat someone with a brain lesion. The lesion might be obvious, like a physical trauma to the skull, or it might be subtle, identified by x-rays or postmortem analysis.

The psychiatric literature is full of studies of various types of lesions, symptoms, and behaviors. One of the most apparent correlations was that injury to the amygdala often resulted in either abnormally heightened or abnormally lessened fear responses in patients. Connecting these important changes in behavior to such lesions resulted in the amygdala being assigned the designation as “the fear center” of the brain. This reputation as “the fear center” is undeserved.

The amygdala’s reputation as the “fear center” is undeserved.

In the 1980s and 1990s, as we developed rudimentary methods of measuring the size of the amygdala, many studies were performed trying to find:

• What variations exist in the size of the amygdala between individuals?
• What variations in amygdala size affect behavior and health?
• Specifically, what is the correlation of amygdala size and fear responses and behaviors?

These include studies that correlated amygdala size with fear.

Notable among the studies were tests on the amygdalae of meditators and the effects of meditating. The amygdalae of meditators were generally smaller, and the effect of extensive meditation tended to reduce amygdala size. The amygdala seemed to be connected with fear, so “smaller is better,” as the thinking went.

The New View of the Amygdala

The advent of fMRI just before the turn of the century changed much of what we know about how the brain works. fMRI stands for functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. MRI had existed since 1971, but during the 90s it was extended (fMRI) to image blood flow, which allowed the operation of brain regions to be inferred and changes measured in living beings.

The short story of what we learned from fMRI is that the amygdala works with the other parts of the limbic system, the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, to direct the brain in a whole new way than had been previously understood.

Among the roles the amygdala has is as the first responder when we are surprised. This is similar to the old view of the amygdala’s role, but it encompasses all kinds of surprise, primarily found by the thalamus, but also by other parts of the sensory cortex and all of the autonomic nervous system. I’ll say more about what surprise is in this context later.

Many of the amygdala’s roles involve constructing a model of the world our body inhabits and how our body might need to respond to that world.

The amygdala isn’t the enemy. It is an important ally in our ongoing struggle to survive in a sometimes hostile world.

Meditation and the Amygdala: How Emotions Work

You can read about this new understanding of how emotions work in Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Her view has been completely adopted by the neuroscience community. She is the Distinguished Professor of psychology at Northeastern University and is on the neurology faculty at Harvard Medical School. Her TED talk is a classic.

The explanation is complex, as it must be do cover emotions, but I will give a short version.

What we colloquially call emotions are really two things: affect and emotional behavior.  

1. Affect is all the bodily functions that are managed by the autonomic nervous system: heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure, hormone levels, sweating, mucous, crying, bladder, the digestive system, and dozens of other subsystems.
2. Emotional Behavior is how we behave in response to affect. It is often what we think of as emotion, because it is what others see.

Dr. Barrett’s first finding is that affect results from our DNA; we are built to have affective responses to various stimuli, and all of us have just about the same ones. Her second finding is that emotional behavior is learned. It’s a consequence of DNA; it’s also a consequence of how we learned to cope with the world as we grew up. So emotions have an inherent and a learned component.

Emotions are both inherent and learned.

We Constantly Predict What Will Happen in our Lives

Dr. Barrett’s work is based on a new understanding of how the brain works, often referred to as predictive processing. This new understanding has been pioneered by Karl Friston, who is also the most influential contributor to fMRI technology, allowing him to become the most cited neuroscientist of all time.

This new way of thinking about the brain recognizes that it is separated from the world by a skull and dozens to hundreds of milliseconds of delay in sensory and motor processing, yet we have to survive in a world that is happening in real time.

The predictive brain deals with those delays by predicting what will happen and believing that those predictions are real. The limbic system does the predicting, and one of the primary contributors to the predictions is the amygdala. We act on the predictions, not the sensory input.

Like any good scientist, the brain tests whether input from our senses matches the predictions. When the predictions match reality, we are operating in real time. When they don’t, we are surprised.

This testing for reality is done in the thalamus, and when the thalamus finds a missed prediction, it reports surprise to the amygdala. Much of what the amygdala does in the face of surprise is hard wired, including most notably starting the release of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline to prepare the body to respond.

Much of what the amygdala does in the face of surprise is hard wired, including starting the release of stress hormones.

What Understanding Emotions Means for the Amygdala

So far the new view of the brain attributed two functions to the amygdala: predicting what will happen in the world and responding with affective behaviors to surprises when the senses find its predictions are wrong.

The third function of the amygdala is to recall and act on memories to generate survival behaviors in response to the surprise. It can draw on three types of memories.

1. Some memories it holds within itself. Such a memory can be acted on immediately, but the behavior will be simple and reflexive.
2. Some memories it holds in common with the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. Such memories are slower and less reflexive, but they may not be appropriate.
3. Some memories are held primarily in the hippocampus and its adjoining cerebral cortex areas. These memories we can often choose and decide upon.

These three functions of the amygdala put it right in the middle of our emotional life. The amygdala is the center of our emotions.

The amygdala is the center of our emotions.

The Three Types of Memories: Understanding Emotional Behavior

One of the most important implications of Dr. Feldman’s work is that our emotional behavior is learned. That means it can be unlearned and relearned, but neither is easy. Various therapies have been found to modify memories of the third type.

The bad news is that the first two types of memory in the list above are very hard to modify. They involve direct neural connections, not different from how reflexes work. Studies have found that the second type of memory can involve myelinated neural connections between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex. Myelinated connections are faster to make lightning reactions, and they are harder to modify.

The good news is that most of our emotional behaviors are mediated by the hippocampus, where normal learning can result in relearning and change in our behaviors.

That leaves the first two types of behavioral memory. The brain only makes such memories in the case of severe early trauma and neglect. They form as last ditch attempts to survive an unsurvivable world.

Meditation and the Amygdala: Neuroplasticity

Neuroplasticity is a fancy word for relearning. It is used because it steps beyond the relearning that comes from rereading a book. It often involves unlearning and then relearning. Sometimes the unlearning comes from trauma, as when trauma or blood vessel breakage kills neurons, but there are other types of unlearning.

The first step in neuroplasticity is understanding that the brain and mind can change.

The first step in neuroplasticity is the understanding that the brain and mind can change. Anything that is based on memory can change, and Dr. Barrett’s gift to us is an understanding that our emotional behavior is one of those things. Many people go through life thinking they will forever be ruled by behaviors they never wanted.

Meditation can aid neuroplasticity. It can help us work with all three types of memory.

The challenge is how can we change our memories so that we can behave more successfully in today’s world. Most of our emotional memories were formed when they provided survival value in difficult periods, usually during childhood. We seldom know how they formed, much less how they can be reformed.

Meditation can help us reform memories. Its primary contribution is to help us let go of memories that are no longer serving us. It can help us deal with all three types of memory, although the first two are the hardest and will take the longest.

How Meditation Works with Memories

Neuroscience has found that when a memory is recalled, it is vulnerable to change. The catch is that intentionally recalling or interacting with a memory can reinforce it, making it more likely to be recalled and harder to let go of.

Meditation is a learned skill of gently allowing thoughts, which are memories, to arise in a cradle of loving kindness.

Note the keywords “skill”, “gently”, “allowing”, “loving”, and “kindness”. Meditation is an opportunity to make our memories vulnerable. We practice it so it becomes a skill. We practice being gentle with ourselves and our thoughts. We allow whatever arises. And we love what arises and treat it with kindness.

Meditation is a recipe for changing our minds. Once a memory is vulnerable in the light of the sun, it becomes a bit weaker. Repetition can continue the thought’s weakening. Any form of self aggression can rein in that progress.

Many people are frustrated by how long it can take to weaken our thoughts and memories. I can only suggest that the time be compared to how long we spent learning them when we were younger.

Meditation and the Amygdala: Mediating Emotions with Meditation

How can we tell we are making progress with our emotions? Sometimes we get feedback from those around us: family, friends, sangha members, co-workers, etc. When that is not available or not appropriate, we can look inside ourselves.

Ask yourself if you are being gentle with your thoughts. While that is part of the instruction for meditation, it is also a measure of progress. If you can’t be gentle with your thoughts, you are unlikely to be gentle with others, and if you are being gentle with your thoughts, the gentleness can’t help being seen in your emotional behavior.

The Amygdala and Meditation: How Important is the Amygdala to our Emotions?

From the viewpoint of our mind, the amygdala just a small piece of the puzzle.

From the viewpoint of neuroscience, the amygdala is very important. From the viewpoint of our mind, it is just a small piece of the puzzle. While calming or even shrinking the amygdala may be useful, gathering the courage and resolve to meditate is a much bigger issue in our overall mental health.

About the Author

I retired in 2016 from a 50 year career in system software engineering. My work included research on virtual environments, knowledge processing, information visualization, and ubiquitous computing. In 1997 I was introduced to the mysteries of the brain hemispheres, and I have been studying them ever since. I discovered meditation in 2006 and have been exploring and teaching it ever since. I am currently writing a book about the brain hemispheres which I believe can break logjams in information visualization, artificial intelligence, and education. I also write on Medium and Quora.

Frederick Meyer

In recent years, Chenrezig—the Tibetan name for the Buddhist deity Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion—has become an important part of my spiritual practice. I have a strong affinity for sound, and much of my learning about Chenrezig has been in the form of sound and meaning: what “Chenrezig” itself means and how it relates to Avalokiteshvara’s other names, what the Sanskrit and Tibetan versions of the word compassion actually mean, and the meaning of the famous Chenrezig mantra OM MANI PADME HUM.

In this article, I want to share both what I’ve learned about Chenrezig himself, as well as my own process of exploration. I feel the process I’ve followed shows how association and meaning can unfold along the Buddhist path, especially the parts of the path that are rich in energy and iconography.

Throughout this article, I’ll be describing what I learned about Chenrezig in my explorations , as well as weaving in Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s teachings on the same topic. I only discovered Trungpa Rinpoche’s teachings on Chenrezig within the past month, so it’s been very interesting to compare my own independent learning with his teaching, and I hope to illustrate that dynamic as well.

Chenrezig: First Connections

I had heard of Chenrezig growing up, but I didn’t connect strongly to Chenrezig until around three years ago, when my father, a longtime Buddhist practitioner, began practicing Four-Armed Chenrezig sadhana practice with a Tibetan Lama living in Hawaii. At his suggestion, I began joining for the weekly sadhana practice.

The lama often played a YouTube video (with the sound off) during the visualization part of the sadhana. The video includes a thangka of Chenrezig that I really like—something about the eyes and facial expression, and the vibrant colors. I found that looking at it gave me a certain feeling, and I began to carry that with me.

Because of his enthusiasm for the practice, I gifted my father a Chenrezig thangka for one of his birthdays, and then later bought one for myself. When my thangka arrived (about a year and a half ago now), I found that the energy of my own interest in and connection with Chenrezig heightened significantly.

From there, I began exploring Chenrezig in earnest, and that’s where I began to learn in depth about Chenrezig’s name, the meaning of compassion, and the meaning of the Chenrezig mantra.

Chenrezig: What the Name Means

The Tibetan name Chenrezig means “continuously looking,” and has been translated as:

• “One who looks with unwavering eye”
• “Unblinking Eyes”
• “One who always looks upon all beings (with the eye of compassion)”

Trungpa Rinpoche translates Chenrezig as: “He Who Sees All Sentient Beings.”

Chenrezig is the Tibetan version of the Sanskrit name Avalokiteshvara, which means “lord who gazes upon the world.” The idea of this name (in both Sanskrit and Tibetan) is that the loving gaze of compassion—the gaze of Chenrezig, compassion itself—forever holds all beings.

Avalokitasvara: The Female Compassion Deity

What I find most interesting about Chenrezig’s name is that there is another form of the Sanskrit name Avalokiteshvara. Wikipedia does a wonderful job summarizing the history, and it felt like a major revelation to me when I read it. The other name is Avalokitasvara: “Who hears the cries of the world.”

The Sanskrit name Avalokiteshvara has an earlier form: Avalokitasvara, which means not “who gazes upon the world” but “who hears the cries of the world.”

Western scholars originally thought this name had been made up, in error, by Chinese translators from Sanskrit, who named the deity Guanshiyin, “[The One Who] Perceives the Sounds of the World,” or “who perceives the world’s lamentations.” Shortened to Guanyin (and later rendered in Japan as Konan), this is the contemporary Chinese name for Avalokiteshvara, who is represented as a female compassion deity.

Scholars later realized that Avalokitasvara is actually a correct—and older—name of the deity, which was later developed into Avalokiteshvara (adding the sense of “lord” and changing “hear” to “see”). Guanshiyin, “Who Hears the Cries of the World,” wasn’t a mistranslation at all.

As I mentioned, I have a strong affinity for sound, and learning this alternate name of Chenrezig had a profound effect on me. One who gazes (lovingly) upon the world sounds, to me, nice but a little distant—but “hearing the world’s cries” carries a strong feeling I can immediately connect with.

In fact, many of my most immediate and piercing experiences of compassion have been sound-based. As an example, I have a small dog, and this morning when I picked her up, she yelped loudly (I don’t know why, and she wasn’t hurt). I was immediately pierced by a feeling that was so immediate I didn’t have a name for it. I feel it was a strong hit of compassion—the powerful, immediate, primordial feeling that is true compassion, not the refined notion of charity and concern for others that we might often think of.

Chenrezig and Quanyin: Different Representations of Compassion

So Quanyin/Konan inherit the earlier meaning of Avalokitasvara—“hearing the cries of the world”—and represent the deity as feminine; And Chenrezig inherits the later meaning—“lord who gazes lovingly upon the world”—and represents the deity as masculine.

I find that Chenrezig’s various names identify distinct elements or feelings of compassion.

What this leads to, in my experience, is a deity whose various names identify multiple distinct elements or feelings of compassion. These multiple meanings and representations have helped me understand Chenrezig, and compassion itself, more deeply.

This feels indicative of deity practices in Tibetan Buddhism—and especially of Chenrezig specifically, whose adaptability and multiplicity of manifestation seems, to me, to be a particular quality of that deity. Another way of saying this is that compassion itself is multifaceted.

Trungpa Rinpoche discusses this as follows:

“In the Chinese Buddhist tradition Avalokiteshvara appears in feminine form and in Tibetan tradition in masculine form. Nevertheless this is one and the same Avalokiteshvara. Let me make clear that there is a mandala of Avalokiteshvara; it contains a whole mandala. This is why differences appear between the feminine and masculine principles…

Compassion is not just one kind of compassion, it has many different aspects, different dimensions.”

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa – Volume One

Chenrezig and Compassion: The Meaning of Nyingje

Another journey of sound and meaning I’ve been on is the meaning of compassion itself—what Chenrezig is the deity of.

The Tibetan word for compassion, nyingje, has a beautiful meaning: “noble heart.”

Compassion is karuna in Sanskrit, and nyingje in Tibetan. Nyingje has a very beautiful direct meaning: “Noble Heart,” from nying (heart) and je (noble).

The many meanings of “compassion” in the West are sometimes quite different from nyingje itself, as His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama indicates:

“[Nyingje] has a wealth of meaning that is difficult to convey succinctly, though the ideas it conveys are universally understood. It connotes love, affection, kindness, gentleness, generosity of spirit, and warm-heartedness. It is also used as a term of both sympathy and of endearment. On the other hand, it does not imply ‘pity’ as the word compassion may. On the contrary nyingje denotes a feeling of connection with others, reflecting its origin in empathy.

…It is both the source and the result of patience, tolerance, forgiveness, and all good qualities.”

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

Trungpa Rinpoche reinforces this meaning without mentioning nyingje by name (preferring to teach the Sanskrit name, karuna): “Compassion… does not mean being compassionate to a person, or being sympathetic, or collecting charity—one has to go beyond this. Now compassion in this sense, or karuna, is known in Tibet as the noble heart, that is to say the magnetic or the moving quality of enlightenment.”

My own compassion practice seems over time to move in line with these progressive meanings of compassion itself, from the shallowest—pity, charitable giving—to the deepest: noble heart, the quality of enlightened mind that moves on behalf of beings. Here as elsewhere, I have found simply exploring word definitions an extremely helpful vehicle in discovering compassion.

The Chenrezig Mantra: The Meaning of OM MANI PADME HUM

A last sound and meaning journey I’ve been on has to do with the famous six-syllable Chenrezig mantra: OM MANI PADME HUM.

This mantra may be one of Tibetan culture’s most recognizable elements. For example, around ten years ago, I attended a weekend teaching with His Holiness the Seventeenth Karmapa, and before each day of teaching was not silent meditation, but rather OM MANI PADME HUM, set to music, on repeat until the Karmapa arrived. I was also taught, as a young child growing up Buddhist, to repeat the six-syllable mantra if I had to take a dead insect outside—presumably as an echo of a more widely held Tibetan practice.

Exploring the Chenrezig Mantra’s Six Syllables

But what does the six-syllable mantra OM MANI PADME HUM mean? Mani means “jewel” in Sanskrit, and Padma means “lotus,” which are clear. OM and HUM are both seed syllables, whose meaning is a bit more esoteric—I have personally always thought of OM as “sacred everything,” and HUM as associated with power and clearing psychological obstacles, but please see below for more authoritative translations.

The challenge is that there are just nouns and seed syllables in the mantra (not verbs, subjects and objects, and so on). So the intended meaning isn’t as set in stone as with a sentence like “I’m headed to the bank,” and this leads to a rich variety of interpretations.

Chenrezig Mantra: Different Interpretations

Again, I found Wikipedia very helpful in summing up Western scholarship on this topic, and it moves in a number of different directions:

• A sense of sacredness: “In the lotus made of jewels.” To me, this is related to the divine, sacred quality of compassion: it’s like an enormous lotus flower that is also a jewel. It’s a bit like how strawberry lemonade tastes like both together, and is its own very good thing.
• Addressing a deity: Manipadma (“jewel-lotus,” possibly an epithet for male Avalokiteshvara) or Manipadmi (“lotus-jewel,” possibly either a female manifestation or consort of Avalokiteshvara). To me, this makes the connection between the mantra and the deity him-/herself.
• An erotic interpretation: “O, she with the jewel in her lotus.” This reading might seem like a stretch or off-the-wall, but I will mention that, in my exploration of Chenrezig, I have been personally surprised by the erotic power of compassion and compassion practice. There is an element of blissful connection that reminds me of sexual energy, or that might be sexual energy in its purest, most basic form.

Looking into these different interpretations, I don’t find them conflicting or eye-rolling. Rather, I find they reinforce and deepen my sense of compassion itself. The six-syllable mantra seems, to me, to carry all these meanings, and more—just like water is clear, flowing, heavy, and more.

Trungpa Rinpoche translates each syllable of the Chenrezig mantra as follows:

OM—the auspicious beginning (a “germ” syllable)
MANI—the jewel
PADME—the lotus
HUM—receiving the power, holding (a “germ” syllable)

He then gives the external meaning of the mantra as “Hail to the jewel in the lotus, so be it.” (He also, unconventionally, adds the Sanskrit HRIH as a seventh syllable.) He continues, “In fact, the words carry a plurality of meanings corresponding to different levels of awareness,” which makes me feel comfortable continuing to explore my own plural understanding that has developed over time.

Discovering Chenrezig in Sound: Closing Reflections

In general, when I began exploring Chenrezig, I sometimes felt surprise at the lack of emphasis on this deity within Shambhala, especially given his prominence in Tibetan Buddhism generally.

More recently, I’ve found that Trungpa Rinpoche’s teachings on Avalokiteshvara are extremely profound and helpful: they expand on and clarify the independent exploration I’ve been doing, like looking at a map of the park I’ve been exploring.

It also recently emerged that Trungpa Rinpoche wrote an Avalokiteshvara sadhana while in Tibet, so there’s yet more to explore there. I’m sure if I had the sadhana I would find it quite illuminating.

For me, meeting and discovering Chenrezig has been a learning process, comprising all the elements above and more. I have a long way to go: as you can tell, I haven’t said much about Chenrezig’s visual iconography itself (such as the wish-fulfilling jewel he holds in his four-armed form), as I am often slower to connect with these visual elements. But I’m quite grateful for what I’ve learned of compassion just from exploring centuries of sound and meaning—that’s how I often learn best, and what’s there is exceedingly rich.

Thank you for reading!

About the Author

Frederick Meyer is a lifelong Shambhala and Buddhist practitioner, and is the director of Writers.com. He lives in New Orleans with his wife, Clara, their daughter, Anna, and their dog, Lucy.

Sean McCann

Mindful parenting is a rich and multifaceted topic. How can mindfulness inform our parenting? And how does parenting affect our mindfulness and meditation practice? In this article, we’ll look at three related questions:

1. How mindfulness and meditation can support us as parents.
2. Mindfulness practices we can offer both ourselves and our children to support healthy and positive parenting.
3. How parenthood is likely to affect our own meditation and spiritual practice.

In addition to sharing resources on mindful parenting, I spoke to a number of parents about their own experience. I asked them a few initial questions, including: How does mindfulness affect your parenting? and How or why does being a parent motivate you to meditate? You’ll hear what those parents shared about the many facets of mindful parenting throughout this article.

Mindful Parenting: How Mindfulness and Meditation Can Support Us as Parents

Quite often, what our children need most is for us, as parents, to be positive, open, and present. There is a saying in the world of Chinese medicine, “To benefit the child, nourish the mother.” This is a poetic explanation of a specific approach to treating illness, but it is based on a simple truth: a child’s health and development are largely dependent upon the health and stability of their parent(s).

A child’s health and development are largely dependent upon the health and stability of their parent(s).

The important question here is, How do we accomplish this? Numerous practices can help us, from deep breathing, physical exercise, and meditation, to seeking counseling, scheduling regular acupuncture or massage sessions, and more. All these can support us in enjoying the benefits of mindfulness parenting below.

Mindful Parenting Benefit: Clarity in Decision-Making

Many decisions we make as parents are not easy. Economics, social pressure, ubiquitous technology, environmental factors, and more often require us to make difficult decisions. 

Meditation and mindfulness practice can help us to be clear about how and why we are making a decision. That way, even if the situation is not ideal, we know we made our choice from a good place, and we can release the anxiety or blame we may otherwise feel around it.

Mindfulness practice can help us be clear about how and why we are making a decision, and release the anxiety or blame we may otherwise feel around it.

Sometimes, this means making difficult decisions that require us to be particularly clear in order to bring our family through a tough time. Meditation and mindfulness practices can help us recognize unsafe situations and have the clarity to act decisively and appropriately. 

This may be something as simple as seeing a child playing in a place that is unsafe and helping them move to a safer location; it may also mean recognizing that a relationship or long term living situation is unhealthy for the family and making the choices to get into a healthier or safer situation as soon as possible. Sometimes, it is just recognizing that we need to ask for help.  

If you are experiencing a crisis or are in an unsafe situation and need help, there are a number of websites and hotlines that can help. A list of these resources are available here.

Mindful Parenting Benefit: Staying Sane in Difficult Situations

One parent I spoke to shared their experience parenting through divorce. This parent said that divorce can make it much more difficult to model the positive behaviors we want our children to learn, because of both emotional turmoil and physical distance.

In difficult situations like this, mindfulness practices serve to help keep us sane, which is an important distinction from utilizing mindfulness practices to achieve higher consciousness.

In difficult situations, mindfulness practices can help keep us sane.

The parent shared how difficult it was for them to continue meditating and practicing qigong—which they had done for many years—during the process of their divorce. It was too painful to have all of the negative thoughts arise in the midst of the silence provided by those practices.

The parent mentioned the saying, “The mind is a self-purifying mountain stream,” meaning that if allowed to run its course, the mind will become calm and thoughts will cease—and noted that this saying assumes that the sources of pollution at the stream’s source are curtailed. That wasn’t the case for this parent during the divorce’s painful aftermath.

Finding Different Ways to Incorporate Mindfulness

If we are embroiled in conflict, court cases, custody battles, etc., then finding ways to relieve the deluge of negative thoughts is key–and sitting still might not be the best way for every person to achieve that.

Finding ways to relieve the deluge of negative thoughts is key–and sitting still might not be the best way for every person to achieve that.

In this case, this individual turned to cultivating presence of mind in daily activities like cleaning the kitchen, working on a car, caring for tools and kitchen implements, and focusing on work. 

Instead of reciting mantras, they practiced the mindfulness of financial responsibility; instead of qigong, they started playing basketball. In this way, they could model positivity in the midst of adversity to the best of their ability, and also achieve some internal calm without being bombarded by thoughts related to their difficult situation.

It is easy to judge others based on abstract ideas; but if it were easy to cultivate higher consciousness, deep wisdom, and profound compassion, then we wouldn’t have monasteries dedicated to creating conditions conducive to enlightenment. 

Mindful Parenting Benefit: Accepting Failure

We all have certain standards and ideals we aspire to as parents, calm parenting being a common one. The reality is that nobody is completely successful at living up to those standards: we all lose our cool sometimes. Mindfulness can help us recognize and be present in the moments when we fall short. 

Mindfulness can help us recognize and be present in the moments when we fall short.

Willingness to be honest with oneself, to see things as they are, is a central focus of Buddhist meditation. Allowing ourselves time to do this can open up space to apologize, explain, and make up when we recognize we have fallen short of this goal. This is important to model for children.

Being honest and gentle with ourselves allows us to admit and apologize when we behave in ways that are hurtful, rather than compounding the harm by blaming others or seeking to justifying the behavior.

Myla and Jon Kabat Zinn wrote a wonderful book called Everyday Blessings on these topics. The authors remind us that being honest and gentle with oneself allows us to admit and apologize for our actions when we behave in ways that are hurtful, rather than compounding the harm by justifying the behavior or blaming the child, our partner, or someone else.

The authors present many useful and intriguing ideas, including relating a child’s sovereignty to the concept of Buddha nature. A lovely summary and review of the book can be found here: Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, by Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn. 

Mindful Parenting: How to Use Mindfulness Practices to Support Healthy and Positive Parenting

Meditation is perhaps the best-known mindfulness practice, but let’s be honest: not everyone is interested in meditation, and that’s okay. Still, each of us has to find our own way to solve the problem of decompressing, relieving stress, and so on, ideally in a healthy way. Some options include archery, yoga, taiji, qigong, martial arts, art, crafts, reading, caring for and spending time with animals, nature walks, birding, and fishing.

Not everyone is interested in meditation, and that’s okay. There are many other ways to bring mindfulness into our lives.

These can be done alone for the purpose of relaxing and bringing the mind to the present moment. We can also engage children in these activities which, by their nature, encourage silence, focus, awareness, equanimity, stillness, and respect. 

When we take time to reflect on how our children react to our psycho-emotional states, it becomes clear that regularly making space for mindfulness can go a long way toward creating a more happy and harmonious life for our children and ourselves.

Regularly making space for mindfulness can go a long way toward creating a more happy and harmonious life for our children and ourselves.

A Case Study in Mindful Parenting

One parent I spoke with reported that he and his wife, both family psychologists, practice mindfulness with their kids to help them recognize how they are feeling, what their needs are, and how to communicate those feelings and needs effectively. 

One parent reports that he and his wife practice mindfulness with their kids to help them recognize how they are feeling, what their needs are, and how to communicate those feelings and needs effectively. 

Emotional regulation is a big focus for them. It’s about recognizing physical sensations and how to interpret them. Taking space is something each person, parents and children alike, is encouraged to do when needed. This allows time to understand, process, and return when ready to communicate.

Their children, ages 2, 4, and 6, are at the early stages of learning these practices, but since it is practiced as a family, it has become part of the family culture of how things are done in their household. 

When mindfulness is practiced as a family, it becomes part of the family culture. 

By modeling things like taking space, apologizing, and making up, they are allowing their children (and themselves) to experience big emotions and work through them in a loving and supportive environment. In their view, the house is like a big sandbox in which the children work out how to deal with big feelings so that they don’t come out in a negative way in other places, like school.

These early efforts at encouraging self-regulation seem to be paying off–sometimes their children will even put themselves to bed early when they are tired! 

Perhaps most importantly, this is helping them as parents work through their own traumas and difficulties so that they do not pass them on to their children. He says that it’s not necessarily about pushing down our feelings or responses, but recognizing the unhealthy ones and working to “smother” them with more healthy ways of responding, so over time the positive wins out more and more.

Meditating as a Parent

Thankfully, beginning a meditation practice can be both simple and enjoyable. One of my favorite practices that I stumbled upon while writing this article is a nighttime meditation focused on connecting with one’s sleeping child or children. I recommend simply sitting with and observing your children after they have fallen asleep as a way of recognizing their love, beauty, and innocence.

I recommend simply sitting with and observing your children after they have fallen asleep as a way of recognizing their love, beauty, and innocence. 

A Nighttime Meditation for Compassionate Parenting – Left Brain Buddha

Here are some more simple and effective tools for anyone beginning their journey with mindfulness practices,  looking for a fresh perspective, or interested in sharing meditation or mindfulness practices with their children:

Meditation for Parents: A Guide for Beginners

Mindfulness & Meditation Exercises for Children & Parents

Encouraging Your Children to Meditate

Practicing meditation ourselves makes it easier to encourage our children to meditate.

Practicing meditation ourselves makes it much easier to teach our children to meditate (or at least feel the benefit of periods of calm silence). The benefits are evident when you see the change that can come over a child over the course of a few minutes of such a practice. It can change the course of a day (or more).

In addition, there is evidence that meditation has positive effects on attention span, ability to focus, and the development of self-regulation skills. Who wouldn’t want those things for their children, let alone themselves? 

The following links provide activities and meditations to do with children. Sitting Still Like A Frog is a particularly rich resource.

Sitting Still Like a Frog – Shambhala Pubs

5-Minute Mindful Meditation for Children

2-Minute Mindful Meditation for Children

Practicing Self-Compassion

All of this requires that we learn to be gentle with ourselves, as well as our children. As many readers have likely experienced themselves, being compassionate with ourselves is often much more difficult than being compassionate with our children. It’s very important: giving ourselves love and compassion allows one to be much more open and less reactive to others.

Being compassionate with ourselves is often much more difficult than being compassionate with our children.

The effects of practicing self compassion are so profound that Stanford Health and the Harvard Business Review have even published articles on the subject. It turns out that being kind to oneself can improve many aspects of one’s life, from health and relationships to career and finances.

If this is a topic that interests you, I encourage you to try Tara Brach’s guided meditation, “The RAIN of Self Compassion,” and to read our full article on meditation for self-love.

Mindful Parenting: How Becoming a Parent Can Affect Our Meditation Practice

I asked parents at various stages of raising children—from recently becoming new parents to having all adult “children” who long ago moved out on their own—how parenting had affected their mindfulness and meditation practice. Many people automatically thought, “How can a parent find time to meditate?” Or, as one person said, “My initial response was not really a thought… I just laughed.”

Others had specific reflections on how becoming a parent changed their meditation practice, with the largest group reporting that they used various mindfulness practices but did not meditate specifically.

Most parents I spoke to reported that they used various mindfulness practices, but did not meditate specifically.

Interestingly, the goals these parents shared for their practice were strikingly similar, regardless of differences in tradition or approach: to be more centered, calm, compassionate, gentle, and present–and less reactive, angry, frustrated, distracted, and confused. 

We’ll explore some ideas that came up in these conversations, and I’ll share some resources that I or others have found helpful.

Personal Experience

As I began investigating this topic, a theme seemed to be that having children might make meditating more difficult. This surprised me, because my own experience has actually been the opposite. From the time my daughter was born, her presence during meditation (or even just meditating as her father, on my own) has brought purpose, depth, and lightness to the practice. 

From the time my daughter was born, her presence during meditation has brought purpose, depth, and lightness to my practice.

Like most parents, I have periods of frustration, outbursts of anger, and times when I am overwhelmed, exhausted, and otherwise less than my best. 

It is precisely for these reasons that I find meditation (and other mindfulness practices like yoga, taijiquan, and qigong) to be so helpful, even necessary, to my parenting journey. Perhaps most importantly, such practices allow me to admit to myself and my family when my own traumas or difficulties lead me to project my frustrations on those I love.

Perhaps most importantly, meditation and mindfulness practices allow me to admit to myself and my family when my own difficulties lead me to project my frustrations on those I love.

Can Parenthood Change Our Reasons for Meditating?

One father I spoke with took his first deep dive into meditation (long before becoming a father) through specific teachings and techniques for relinquishing attachment to the material world–an enticing goal at the time. Once he became a parent, however, he found that he could not continue these practices while being the engaged father he wanted to be. 

One father I spoke with first began meditating through teachings and techniques on relinquishing attachment–and shifted his focus significantly upon becoming a parent.

Eventually, his reasons to meditate became (and continue to be) that he wants to wake up happy and have the ability to be in the moment he is in; to be in control of his emotions, not caught up in what is going on outside. His practice changed accordingly, and he says he can clearly see the positive impact this has had on his children.

We can’t fake it. Kids sense hypocrisy and feel love. They emulate our behavior more than they learn from what we tell them, so as it turns out, we actually have to work on living the dharma, not just lecturing about it.

Having a meditation practice that supports engaged, compassionate, thoughtful parenting allows our children to see for themselves the positive benefits of meditation and mindfulness practices, whether or not they consciously recognize the cause for the difference.

Parenting gives very concrete reasons to meditate, and meditation provides immediate feedback on its effects on our parenting.

Parenting gives very concrete reasons to meditate–and meditation provides immediate feedback on its effects on our parenting. The experience of this parent illustrates this beautifully. Because he was paying attention, he could feel that the type of meditation he was doing was not helpful for his ability to parent in a way that he felt was healthiest for himself and his family. He adapted his focus, redefined his purpose, and was able to cultivate a beneficial practice.

Nonattachment and Engagement

The parent’s story above highlights an interesting question: what does the Buddhist teaching of “nonattachment” look like when one has children?

Nonattachment and engagement are not mutually exclusive. Entire Buddhist traditions make balancing the two a central focus–the Shambhala tradition certainly takes this approach. Still, it is important to understand how to use any tool properly, and different practices produce different psycho-emotional states. Some practices are much more useful when the goal is engaging the world, and others are more useful when we are practicing what various traditions refer to as nonattachment, relinquishing the world, returning to the void, and so on. 

Some practices are more useful when the goal is engaging the world, and others are more useful for practicing nonattachment.

An in-depth discussion of these differences is beyond the scope of this article, but it is important to consider the general idea when preparing to begin any type of meditation practice. Those interested in a more detailed discussion of different approaches to internal cultivation may appreciate an article I wrote on this subject: Taijiquan and Qigong: Exploring Concepts and Uses.

Mindful Parenting: Being vs. Doing

One parent I spoke with shared that before becoming a parent they had plenty of ways to distract themselves. There wasn’t as much pressure, so they didn’t really need a regular “practice.”

After becoming a parent, they realized how easy it was to get wrapped up in all of the doing required as a parent. They realized that years could go by just being caught up in all of the doing, and they needed to find a way to just be.

One parent I spoke with needed to find a way to just be, and found that reading fulfilled this need.

This parent found their way in reading. It allowed them to stop the cycle of doing while remaining physically present with their children. An article titled “Can Reading Make You Happier?” in The New Yorker is full of examples, many evidence-based and some anecdotal, of the ways in which reading benefits mental health. According to the article, “Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm.”

Conclusion

Parenting is a beautiful, complex, challenging, and rewarding journey. Meditation and mindfulness practices can help us to move through the difficult parts with more patience, understanding, and compassion; they can also make it easier to be fully present during the many precious and fleeting moments that come with raising children. I hope that this article has provided you with some useful ideas and resources to aid you in your journey.

If you wish to continue to explore mindful parenting, here are two additional links containing a wealth of useful information and resources on the topics of mindful parenting and self care for parents.

Mindful Parenting | Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Child Development | Stanford Medicine

Self-Compassion for Parents | Greater Good

About the Author

Sean McCann is a practitioner of Chinese medicine, taijiquan and qigong instructor, and writer. He lives near the border of Humboldt and Trinity Counties in the mountains of Northern California with his wife, Trang, and daughter, Ixora. His passions include the study and practice of internal martial arts, archery, gardening, and spending time in the great outdoors. His personal website is www.MindfulMountainMedicine.com, and he is on Instagram @Mindful_Mountain_Medicine.

Kathleen Walls

Much of the suffering in our lives is rooted in fear. Fortunately, Buddhism and meditation offer excellent supports for working with fear—and with anxiety, the worry about uncertain threats that many of us carry in contemporary life.

Fear is pervasive, especially in this world of polarization, aggression, and lack of available resources. Fear is also inevitable. It is a natural part of being a human. How we relate to the feelings that accompany fear will determine how distressed we are when it arises.

Fear is a natural part of being human. How we relate to fear determines how distressed we are when it arises.

Let’s take a closer look at fear and anxiety, specifically examining what they are, how they impact us, and how Buddhism and meditation can help guide us in working with these difficult emotions.

Buddhism on Fear: What is Fear?

Fear is part of every human being’s standard operating system. It is protective in nature, using prediction to help us stay safe and survive. We are equipped with the internal mechanisms of fear as a means of alerting us to danger.

Fear is a means of alerting us to danger.

Fear arises as information is transmitted to us through our senses, for example hearing footsteps behind us, or seeing something on the ground that resembles a snake. The presence of a threat triggers a response in the brain, a call to action, inviting us to protect ourselves. Often we respond automatically, without thinking. This is the threat response.

We might become aware of our system’s threat response through physiological cues (goosebumps, changes in breathing). When the threat response is activated, we may get a dose of adrenaline and cortisol and the system is poised to fight, flee or freeze. 

So far, though, what we are experiencing is merely information. Our system is letting us know that a threat may be present.

“The presence of fear means only that fear is present, and nothing more.” 

Suzanne Segal

But our threat response itself is not fear. Fear requires conceptual mind. When we notice the physiological harbingers of threat, such as increased heart rate, we might check our surroundings to make sure the threat is real. 

If the threat is real, we create the emotion of fear by thinking, specifically by remembering what we have learned is to be regarded as dangerous or not. If, for example, we notice that the “snake” on the ground is truly a poisonous snake, we feel fear. But if we determine that it is only a stick, we decide that fear is not warranted. 

Buddhism on Fear: Understanding Anxiety

When we conceptualize what we are experiencing, in addition to feeling fear in relation to the threat, we may begin to fear our own threat response, and that fear may manifest as a sense of inadequacy, a belief that we can’t manage our life’s challenges. Fear can then become anxiety.

Fear is the anticipation of whether and when a present threat will cause harm. Anxiety is the anticipation of an uncertain threat that is not present and may not occur.

The scientist Joseph LeDoux, in his book Anxious, states that fear is the anticipation of whether and when a present threat will cause harm. Anxiety, on the other hand, is the anticipation of an uncertain threat that is not present and may not occur.

For example, walking through the woods with the expectation of seeing a dangerous snake can cause hyper-vigilance to threat, or the feeling of anxiety. Here and elsewhere, anxiety is about anticipation of an uncertain threat. We’ve all had the experience of “worrying” about something that has not and may never occur.

“He who fears he shall suffer already suffers what he fears.”

Michel de Montaigne

Throughout our lives, we learn to avoid things that have the potential to cause harm, and we learn which situations are safe. Since this learning takes place across a life span, some of the things we learn to avoid as threatening are no longer present, or actually threatening. 

For example, if we witnessed our parents fighting when we were very young, we may learn that conflict is dangerous. As a young person, witnessing our caregivers dysregulated and screaming at each other may present an existential threat. We take that information with us throughout our lives, so that now, as adults, we may still experience a threat response to conflict, even though we are no longer reliant on caregivers to provide basic needs. We are often unaware that this connection is being made, and so it continues to occur.

Anxiety results from anticipatory, often unconscious fear of threats that may no longer be present.

It is this anticipatory, often unconscious fear of threats that are no longer present or actually threatening that causes anxiety, and therefore suffering. 

Buddhism on Fear and Anxiety

So what does Buddhism teach us about fear and anxiety? 

Buddhism on Fear: Safety and Avoidance

Underlying all is our need for safety and security. If we don’t feel safe, we become protective. This important fact of being human can also cause suffering, because as we try to protect and feel safe, we may begin to avoid parts of ourselves. We avoid feeling. We shut ourselves away in the cocoon, so we don’t risk feeling discomfort.

When we avoid uncomfortable emotions such as fear, we make ourselves small.

When we avoid uncomfortable emotions such as fear, we make ourselves small. We shrink rather than expand. We close our heart rather than risk the pain of keeping it open. We don’t like something, so we want to make it go away. We erect a wall, or worse, become critical of ourselves when we feel discomfort or respond with anxiety and fear.

Buddhism on Fear: Warriorship

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche invites us through his teachings to be a warrior. Being a “warrior” in the Shambhala tradition means being brave enough to stay with discomfort, to allow our emotional experiences, however painful. To keep your heart open, rather than trying to protect.

“‘Warrior’ here is a translation of the Tibetan word pawo. Pa means ‘brave,’ and wo makes it ‘a person who is brave.’”

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

So how can we practice warriorship relative to fear? If we turn toward fear instead of avoiding it and fully allow ourselves to experience the sensations, thoughts and behaviors that arise as a result, we can work with it, rather than fight against it.

Instead of avoiding fear, we can turn toward it: lean into it, welcome it, and allow ourselves to fully experience it.

But what does it mean to “turn toward fear”? We are designed, after all, to avoid discomfort and pain. This built-in survival mechanism has allowed the species to thrive, and it feels counterintuitive to lean into it, to welcome it. Yet, leaning into it is the only way to become familiar with it, so that we can use the information that it is offering. Becoming aware of the ways in which we automatically protect ourselves is a necessary step in making changes to our habitual responses.

Buddhism on Fear: Fearlessness

Fearlessness does not mean suppressing or banishing fear. It means not being afraid of fear.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche talks about fearlessness, about “conquering fear.” This does not mean suppressing, eliminating or banishing fear: it means not being afraid of fear, which is what causes our tendency to aggress against it. By not avoiding the reality of how we are responding to life, we become aligned with our own genuine heart of sadness.

“The only way to ease our fear and be truly happy is to acknowledge our fear and look deeply at its source. Instead of trying to escape from our fear, we can invite it up to our awareness and look at it clearly and deeply.”

Thích Nhất Hạnh, Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm

Meditation for Fear: How Meditation Helps Fear and Anxiety

Meditation is a way of slowing down, allowing space, and becoming familiar with ourselves.

Meditation is a way of slowing down, allowing space, and becoming familiar with ourselves. By allowing everything to arise, we can meet each experience as it is, the raw feelings, thoughts, how we work to make sense of our pain and protect ourselves. By making room for all of it, we can see our responses without judgment, as what we have learned, rather than identifying with them as who we are.

That separation allows us to look at the ways in which we protect ourselves in a gentle, non judgmental way, and we can see that our responses are habitual in nature, a result of our conditioning. Not our fault. And we know that what is learned is not solid, but can be unlearned (see my piece on habits).

When we slow down and allow the discomfort to be present, we can begin to notice thoughts and beliefs that are arising which may contribute to our suffering. Our thoughts play a large role in how we relate to the feelings of fear. The question then becomes, how are our thoughts and beliefs contributing to our suffering? 

“Nothing can harm you as much as your own thoughts unguarded.”

Buddha

Meditation for Fear: Making Friends with Ourselves

Working with fear requires gentleness. According to Pema Chödrön, we need to develop an unconditional friendship with ourselves.

“Developing unconditional friendship means taking the very scary step of getting to know yourself. It means being willing to look at yourself clearly and to stay with yourself when you want to shut down. It means keeping your heart open when you feel that what you see in yourself is just too embarrassing, too painful, too unpleasant, too hateful.”

Pema Chödrön

If we are able to welcome every aspect of ourselves, we disarm the so-called aggressors such as fear and anxiety. Like the Buddha on the eve of enlightenment, we can calmly acknowledge their presence, welcoming them in for tea. 

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!…

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Rumi

Meditation for Fear: Working with Learned Responses

When we can examine our thoughts and beliefs, and begin to see that what we have learned in our life has become the basis of our emotional experience, we can ask ourselves whether what we have learned is relevant now. Is a threat actually present, or are we remembering a feeling from a situation we may have experienced in the past, which is no longer threatening? In other words, are we engaging in “what if’s”?

By practicing letting go of thoughts that keep us stuck in the past or future, we can meet fearful feelings with kindness and curiosity.

This tendency is natural, as we are designed to use our past experiences to predict future harm. Through meditation, though, we can train ourselves to stay present with what is arising in this moment. By practicing letting go of thoughts that keep us stuck in the past, or propel us into a future which might not materialize, we can meet the fearful feelings with kindness and curiosity.

Meditation for Fear: Guided Meditation Script for Fear and Anxiety

Here is a guided meditation for fear that you can practice yourself:

Set a timer for as long as you would like to practice this meditation. You can start with 5 minutes if that feels comfortable, or if you have an established meditation practice, you can choose a longer time.

Take a moment to become comfortable in your meditation posture, sitting upright and relaxed. If you need instruction on posture, you can find more information here.

Tune into your breathing, allowing it to be exactly as it is right now.

See if you can locate the feeling of fear in your body. Take your time and let it be there, just noticing it. Keep your attention on the part of your physical body that feels fear. Place your hand wherever it is. This feeling will be your anchor throughout your meditation.

Notice any thoughts that arise while you are feeling, thank them for coming, and then turn your attention back to the feeling. You don’t have to get rid of the thoughts, just let them be there. Shift your attention from the thoughts back to the feeling. You might notice your thoughts are coming at you fast and loud. That is not a problem. 

Just notice them and continue to shift your attention to your feeling body.

You may notice how your thoughts may have changed the feeling. Again, you don’t need to do anything with this, just observe. You are safe in this moment. 

As you focus on the feeling, say to yourself, “I am aware that my body is feeling threatened” and continue to allow the feelings to be there. 

Continue to practice until your timer indicates that you are done.

Thank you for reading!

About the Author

Kathleen Walls is a Vermont psychotherapist, and a long time Shambhala practitioner helping folks work through the challenges of being human.

Kathleen Walls

Meditation can be a welcomed tool for coping with grief, which is one of the more difficult human experiences. Meditation practice in general can help us stay present with challenging emotions, and meditation specifically tailored for grief can help us endure the pain associated with it without avoiding it, which can often lead to suffering.

Let’s take a closer look at grief, what it is, and how meditation can help. 

Meditation for Grief: What is Grief?

Grief is our system’s response to loss.

Grief is our system’s response to loss. Grief can be personal, as with the loss of a loved one or the pain of having to let go of expectations. It can also be collective, as when we grieve for the suffering related to global conflict, racism, climate change or the divisiveness we face as a society.

When our nervous system perceives loss, it is sometimes interpreted as a threat to survival. This triggers the brain to activate the body’s stress response, causing physiological symptoms such as a hollow feeling in the stomach, heaviness in the chest or throat, oversensitivity to noise, difficulty breathing, a lack of energy, or an increase or decrease in appetite. Of course everyone experiences grief in their own way, so you may or may not share these symptoms. 

Grief is an intense stress response felt in the body.

In short, grief is an intense stress response felt in the body. It has even been associated with an increased risk of physiological conditions such as heart disease, memory problems and digestive issues. The distress associated with grief can come in waves, perhaps triggered by a thought or a sensation we perceive from the environment.

“Grief is like waves coming in from the ocean. At times the waves are small and barely noticeable. But when you least expect it, a huge wave pulls your feet right out from under you. No two people ever see these waves exactly in the same way and no one reacts in the same way to each incoming wave.”

Alan Wolfelt

Again, every individual experiences grief in their own unique way, and there is no one way to grieve, nor is there any timeline. That might seem like bad news to those of us who require concrete steps and definitive action plans, but it is actually good news. It means you get to experience whatever you are experiencing in your own way, at your own pace. This is where meditation can aid us in our journey. 

Meditation for Grief: How Can Meditation Practice Help?

Loss is painful. The Dharma (Buddhist teachings) teaches us that pain is inevitable, a natural part of the human condition, and that trying to avoid it can cause suffering. By not allowing ourselves to feel what we are feeling, we add layers of stress to an already stressed body. When we fight against what is happening, we can prolong our pain.

When we fight against what is happening, we can prolong our pain.

Loss can often mean feeling a lack of control over our environment. We want to hold on to people we love or things as we want them to be. The Dharma teaches us, though, that nothing is permanent. That when we try to solidify anything, ideas, feelings, things, we deny the fundamental truth of impermanence, and we suffer. Meditation can help us accept impermanence as we let go of whatever arises.

Emotions that arise in the course of grief, such as anger, fear, and sadness, are painful experiences, but they are not solid. They are energy moving through us. Emotions have a life cycle and will arise, gain intensity, and then dissipate if we don’t suppress them or feed them with thoughts.

Meditation can help us meet the experience of difficult emotions directly.

We are not our emotions, but we often fear being swallowed by them. Meditation can help us meet the experience of difficult emotions directly. By sitting in meditation (the Tibetan word for meditation is “gom” or “becoming familiar with”) we can learn to observe them, to become familiar with them, and to meet them with kindness, rather than aggression. By observing and allowing them to arise, we can learn not to fear them, however uncomfortable they may be. 

“That mind of fearfulness should be put in the cradle of loving kindness.”

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

When we fear our emotional experience and try to fight against it, or to deny or avoid it, we are not being kind to ourselves. By allowing ourselves to stay with the difficult emotions we can befriend them instead. We can be gentle with them, and therefore, to ourselves.

Meditation for Grief: 3 Core Concepts

Peter Levine, PhD, founder of Somatic Experiencing Therapy, offers three suggestions for working with grief. These are important to keep in mind as you work with grief through meditation and otherwise, as it can often be overwhelming.

Before beginning meditation, allow yourself to become familiar with the following concepts. 

1. Pendulation

Pendulation means touching into painful feelings, then pulling out when you need to take a break and ground.

This basically refers to the process of touching into the painful feelings, and pulling out when you need to take a break and ground. Consider the image of a pendulum. There is a regulation that happens when it swings back and forth. When you swing toward the grief, you are allowing yourself to intentionally touch those tender parts, and when your system has had enough, you swing out the other way and take comfort, calming the system.

Not only can it be difficult to feel painful emotions, but we may also at times experience joyful emotions which can be disconcerting when we are grieving. But if we withhold judgment, and simply feel the joy as it arises, we will see that this emotional shifting is our body’s natural way of processing. It is not helpful to dive in and stay mired in painful emotions until your grief is processed. Our nervous system is not designed to withhold overload for long periods of time. 

Begin with short intervals. Start with ten minutes maximum in the feelings. Set a timer if you need external regulation.

2. Resourcing

Let people that you trust know that you are going through the grieving process and ask if they would be willing to support you in your journey. This doesn’t mean letting others try to make it better, or to fix your pain. It means asking if they would be willing to simply be with you in your grief from time to time. 

“The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed—to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is.”

Parker J. Palmer

Having the support of a trusted friend can regulate the nervous system’s response to the pain. 

3. Titration

Titration means adding a little more time to your processing each time.

Titration in this case means adding a little more time to your processing each time. Titration means allowing the pendulum to swing a little slower, allowing the system to endure a little more feeling, thereby increasing your system’s tolerance and resilience to the distress.

Increase your time in processing as you feel appropriate. You will know when you are pushing your growth edge when it feels uncomfortable but not overwhelming. If it becomes overwhelming, step out and distract with something comfortable and familiar. A series on Netflix. A walk in nature. 

Remember to be gentle with yourself. You should only be feeling whatever you are feeling. In other words, there are no “shoulds” here. 

Meditation for Grief: Two Guided Meditations

Meditation will not reverse the loss, but it can help you change your relationship to the feelings of grief. Here are two meditations you can try to help you release and process the grief.

“Even though the feeling hasn’t necessarily changed, our relationship to the feeling changes over time.”

Mary-Frances O’Connor

1. First Guided Meditation for Grief

Find a place where you feel comfortable. It’s best to use a space you don’t use for sleep. It is also most beneficial if you can be upright, either sitting with your feet on the ground, or in a lotus position, if that is comfortable for you. Start with a short period of time, for example 10 minutes. Set a timer so you don’t have to be aware of the time. 

Take a moment to check in with yourself. What are you physically and/or emotionally feeling at the moment? Don’t try to change anything. Just let wherever is arising to be there. Become aware of your present experience and see if you can name it. The phrase “I am aware of” can be helpful. 

Can you find where this emotion or feeling lives in your body? Once you find it, connect to the direct physical sensation that is occurring at this very moment. If stories begin to pop into your head, thank them for trying to help make sense of the feelings and return to those feelings as they are happening in real time. 

Place your hand over the place in your body where you are feeling the emotion or physical sensation. Let it know that you are right there with it. And send it some healing compassion. Stay with the feeling and continue to be curious, being aware when thoughts and stories come in. 

Move now to the other places in your body where you are not feeling these feelings. What can you notice? Are they bracing, tense? If so, see if you can let those paces relax, letting them know that you are with the painful sensations. 

Return to the emotion or feeling and stay with it without the stories. Focus and attend to the feeling. Continue to offer compassion to this feeling as it is in this moment.

2. Second Guided Meditation for Grief

This meditation comes from Jack Kornfield’s teachings on grief, which you can access here: https://jackkornfield.com/meditation-grief/ Below is the full grief meditation script.

To meditate on grief, let yourself sit, alone or with a comforting friend. Take the time to create an atmosphere of support. Sense a field of strength and support wherever you can, of your loved ones, of your spiritual teachers, of Mother Earth who has seen it all. When you are ready, begin by tuning in to your breath. Feel your breathing in the area of your chest. This can help you become present to what is within you. Take one hand and hold it gently on your heart as if you were holding a vulnerable human being. You are.

As you continue to breathe, bring to mind the loss or pain you are grieving. Let the story, the images, the feelings come naturally. Hold them gently. Take your time. Let the feelings come layer by layer, a little at a time.

Keep breathing softly, compassionately. Let whatever feelings are there, pain and tears, anger and love, fear and sorrow, come as they will. Touch them gently. Let them unravel out of your body and mind. Make space for any images that arise. Allow the whole story. Breathe and hold it all with tenderness and compassion. Kindness for it all, for you and for others.

The grief we carry is part of the grief of the world. Hold it gently. Let it be honored. You do not have to keep it in anymore. You can let it go into the heart of compassion; you can weep.

Meditation for Grief: Practice Kindness and Care

Attending to your grief with loving kindness can change your relationship with it. While you cannot change what has happened, you can change your experience of it. Remember that you are not your grief; you are not your pain.

About the Author

Kathleen Walls is a Vermont psychotherapist, and a long time Shambhala practitioner helping folks work through the challenges of being human.

John_Seex

The immediate image that many people may have of Buddhism is of monks in robes: people living in a rarified environment, far away from the busyness and chaos of our everyday lives. Yet in the Dhammapada, a collection of sayings from the Buddha, he says that every action is preceded by a thought. In this sense, Buddhism or a Buddhist perspective is in every moment of our everyday life.

The essence of Buddhism is the practice of meditation, mindfulness/awareness: to watch one’s mind and notice what arises, without having to act on it.

The essence of Buddhism is the practice of meditation, mindfulness/awareness: to watch one’s mind and see what arises and notice this without having to act on it. Bringing attention to every detail of our life and every movement of our mind is an act of loving kindness to ourselves and to others. We spend most of our time trying to manage the external situation, what others are doing, but when we practice, we are turning our attention back towards ourselves.

We can do this on the cushion when we practice meditation, and we can do this in everyday life, by cultivating our awareness of our thoughts, feelings and actions as we go about our daily lives. This is what the Buddha meant when he said, “If the world is covered in thorns and you do not want to hurt your feet, you can either cover the world in leather or put on a pair of shoes.” We can either attempt to control others, everything that is happening in our world, or we can put on a pair of shoes by learning to work with what arises in our mind: our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.

1. Buddhism in Everyday Life: Awareness of Our Thoughts

Thought is so habitual that we don’t even notice that we are thinking, or, indeed, projecting our thoughts onto others or the situation. We are lost in the film. It is like looking through a pair of tinted sunglasses: everything is coloured by the lenses. Everything is coloured by the filter of thought through which we see things. If we are down and it is raining we might feel depressed; if we are a gardener, we might be delighted.

This reminds me of a story one of my early meditation instructors, Werner Wunsche, told me: “It’s raining. Joe is depressed. Peter is happy. Joe and Peter work hard all week. Joe works for his boss who he feels pushed around by but he can stand this because every Saturday they play golf together and Joe always wins. Every Saturday Peter visits his elderly Aunt and takes her out for a brief walk which he doesn’t enjoy and it’s a four hour round trip. No-one else visits her so he feels obliged and he has an eye on the inheritance he might get from her. Because it’s raining he has an excuse, they can’t go walking and he doesn’t like driving in the rain, so he has four hours for himself to do what he wants to do. So Peter is happy and Joe is depressed and all that is happening is it’s raining.”

The rain doesn’t make us depressed; it is the meaning we give to the rain, what we layer on top of that event, that causes our emotions. What we think creates our reality. When we experience thought, we can either be aware of this or be on automatic pilot and be driven by this. By noticing our thoughts and learning the familiar patterns of how we think we can start to understand how we configure our world, how we make sense of it. We can get to know the projector.

When we understand that our way of interpreting things shapes what we experience, then we have some control over our minds.

This is like the movie Groundhog Day, whose main character gets the chance to live the same day over and over again and to try different ways of responding to the same situation. However, what is precious about life is that we can’t relive everyday. When we understand that our thoughts, our way of seeing, shapes what we experience, then we have some control over our minds. We have a clutch, the ability to disengage the wheels from the engine, a pause, a break between our thinking and our action. Rather than be on automatic pilot, we can be aware. We have a choice; we are not driven, we are driving.

When we are driven, we have no flexibility, no choice. Our experience is driven by the underlying thoughts that we hang onto, often thoughts of right or wrong. This is illustrated by a Buddhist story: Two monks were going for a walk when they came across a woman standing by a river. The water was fast and quite deep, and she was afraid to cross. One of the monks offered to pick her up and carry her over. He carried her over and put her down on the other side and she thanked him for his help. After several minutes, one monk says to the other, “We are not supposed to touch women or carry them. You are breaking your vows.” The other monk replies, “I am not carrying the woman. I put her down 10 minutes ago. It is you who are still carrying her.”

The one monk is holding onto his thought that carrying a woman is wrong. The other monk knows that to help someone is not wrong and is not breaking his vows, and can let go of both the action and the thought. Often we hold onto our thoughts as solid truths, and remain stuck with them rather than being able to let go and open to the next moment, to the flow of experience.

2. Buddhism in Everday Life: Being with Our Feelings

Feeling is what gives our life meaning: it’s how we orientate ourselves in relation to others. Feelings are also what drives our behaviour and where our life can feel out of control. An example is when we feel road rage. A driver has cut across us and we feel frightened; they could have crashed into us and we feel rage, the desire to protect ourselves which is often expressed as anger at the other person. The anger attempts to push away the hurt so that we can feel better.

This happens between two people, between two groups, and between two countries. When we are hurt by others and lash out and attack back, even in subtle ways, we create a cycle of violence. Someone has to break the chain by being able to feel the pain, the hurt that someone has caused, and understand that this comes from their own hurt, their pain.

As Shantideva said, 

“Although it is their sticks that hurt me, I am angry at the ones who wield them, striking me. But they in turn are driven by their hatred; Therefore with their hatred I should take offence.” 

Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva

Thus, when we deeply understand where people’s behaviours come from, we feel compassion or understanding for what caused their behaviour. We understand it arose from their confusion or their attempt to try and be safe.

The value of the anger is it tells us that we are hurt, we are vulnerable. The ability to feel our hurt, to relax with our vulnerability is perhaps the most important quality to cultivate in order to create a kinder world. At some point we have to face the truth that we feel hurt, we feel vulnerable. When we are able to do this, to relax into our vulnerability we no longer need to defend ourselves and being with our vulnerability becomes a strength rather than a weakness.

“Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage.”

Brené Brown

We often see everything that happens as being for us or against us: it’s personal, permanent and pervasive, as if deep down if something goes well its a sign that we are a good person or special or lovable and more often when things go bad it confirms our feeling that we are bad or wrong or stupid in some way. As Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche said, “Success is not a reward and failure is not a punishment.”

There is a famous Zen story of a samurai warrior who went to visit a monk named Hakuin. When he arrived at the monk’s village and found him sitting in meditation he shouted, “I want a word with you. If you are so wise, tell me all you know about heaven and hell.” The monk said, “Why should I tell a stupid man like you?” The warrior was furious and drew his sword shouting, “I’ll cut your head off for insulting me.” Without flinching the monk said “That is hell.” The warrior instantly realised he had been caught in the grip of anger and relaxed. A smile came to his face. The monk said, “That is heaven.”

Heaven and Hell are not so much external situations but internal feelings, states of mind. Two cars can be stuck in a traffic jam and one driver could be furious and irritated and another could be quietly listening to the radio. It depends on the context, the situation we are in, and the personal meaning we bring to this.

How to soothe ourselves? 

Feelings arise in the body. In order to soothe ourselves, to relax our body, we need to bring attention to the upset or pain.

Thus, in order to live well, to be at peace with ourselves and others we need to practice soothing ourselves, learning to hold and comfort ourselves when we feel hurt, distressed, lonely, and so on. Feelings arise in the body. They are responses from our nervous system, our animal body. In order to soothe ourselves, to relax our body, we need to bring attention to the upset or pain. This is how the whole mindfulness movement started: when people found that when they attended to the pain directly rather than struggled against it they were less distressed; they felt less pain.

The practice of meditation—either on the cushion or in daily life—is precisely this: practicing sycnhronising our body and mind, our feeling and our attention. When we can place our attention on our moment-by-moment experience, our bodily experience, our feelings, our thoughts, the movement of our mind, we relax; there is no fear. Even if we feel anxious or afraid, when we feel into this, place our mind on the physical sensation that we are experiencing in our body in that moment, the body and mind relaxes. I know this is not easy: our habitual patterns are deeply ingrained. This is why it is called a practice, a path. We are learning to drive, moment by moment.

3. Buddhism in Everday Life: Noticing Our Actions

As the Buddha says, although we often don’t notice it our actions are driven by our thoughts: underlying thoughts create feelings that drive our behavior, what we do. So because it’s hard to notice the underlying thoughts often the best we can do is to reflect on what we did: “How come I got angry when So-and-So said that?” We have to rewind and notice the sequence of moments that made up our experience. This is another way that we care for ourselves: we take ourselves seriously and we notice how others impact us, how they trigger our wounds, and we then attend to those wounds.

Another way we care for ourselves is to take ourselves seriously and notice how others impact us, how they trigger our wounds. We then attend to those wounds.

In the Buddha’s time, there was a famous murderer called Angulimala who was terrorizing local villages. He had a necklace of fingers around his neck, taken from the people he had killed. He was driven by trying to control others to make everyone afraid of him so that he would never have to be hurt. The monks were too scared to go out and beg for food. The Buddha was not worried and walked into the nearby village to beg for food. He heard a man starting to run from behind him. It was Angulimala. Angulimala shouted, “Why aren’t you running? I am going to kill you.” The Buddha said, “I have stopped running a long time ago. You are the one who is still running: running from your mind.”

In order to work with how we behave we need to notice the underlying thoughts or feelings that are driving our behavior: the emotional impulse or motivation behind why we say something or do something in any particular moment.

Bringing Buddhism into Everyday Practice

Buddhism is in everyday life, it is in every moment. We do not need to pump ourselves up that we are better than others or put ourselves down for being less than others. All we have to do is walk the path, noticing our thoughts, feelings and actions and what brings us joy and what brings us distress.

If you would like to more deeply explore bringing Buddhist practice into your everyday life, please see Meditation in Everyday Life and Contentment in Everyday Life, two courses you can take at your own pace through Shambhala Online:

Thank you for reading!

About the Author

John Seex has been teaching in Shambhala for about 20 years and has taught Running with the Mind in Meditation retreats, month long retreats (dathuns), Shambhala Levels 1-5, and foundational Buddhist courses about the Four Immeasurables, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, and the Nine Stages of Resting the Mind, among others. He is a psychotherapist, supervisor and psychotherapy tutor and is fascinated by the relationship between thinking and feeling and the everyday experience of egolessness.