Just Like Me; Feeling Compassion For Me and All

​Do you ever find it difficult to be compassionate toward yourself and others? I wanted to explore this in the context of overcoming things that hinder me from realising my resolution to be more compassionate.

You may remember, (I only just did!) that this years blogs have been exploring 7 ways to overcome things that hinder us from working at and realising our goals and resolutions. I wanted to review the 4 we have looked at so far and add the 5th on this blog. I thought it may be useful to look at these in the context of being more compassionate to ourselves and others.

So a quick reminder of what we have covered 

1. Resisting the temptation to work on too many things at once and instead choosing one gaol at a time to focus on . Establishing a gratitude practice has been a great place to start. So keeping that going with a new focus on 'compassion for self and others'.
2. Finding ways to remember what our resolutions and goals are. These may include keeping a daily gratitude journal, journaling in general, post it notes, craftivism tea-towels, items of jewellery, and 'thank you's' to yourself and others.
3. Watching self judgement and criticism. Instead of having unrealistic expectations of myself and others I have been doing my best to set achievable goals and rejoice when I achieve them! And accept when I don't and hop back on the horse! I am trying to be mindful of negative self-talk and instead power up that positive, kind encouraging friend voice. This helps to keep me motivated. 
4. Being mindful about 'not going too big'. I have been watching that tendency I have to have unrealistic expectations of myself and others.  Instead I have been trying to remember to set myself achievable gaols and to remember to rejoice when I achieve them. And also rejoice when I remember to accept, trust  and learn from situations when I haven't achieved what I set out to. No POM shop for me at the moment!

So we are up to our 5th tip to prevent our enthusiasm for our best intentions from waining. 
5.  Avoid focusing on outer attainments, or the end result and instead focus on the ongoing feeling you would like to experience.
So instead of focusing on outcomes - things like weight loss, waiting without an outburst, getting this blog done, or even doing kind things, we can choose to focus on the feeling we would like to experience. This helps us with our motivation. Using the above examples, we could focus on ...

• Having healthier eating habits and exercising to feel  good about our bodies and ourselves.
• Working on being more patient and not reacting in provoking situations in order to feel more relaxed and calm.
• Reducing criticism, judgment and negativity toward ourselves and others to feel happier and more compassionate.  
• Writing this blog, not to get it done, but to feel happy about having done my best to share what is useful to me.
• Doing kind things to feel happy and good about being that positive kind force in the world.  
• Keeping a gratitude journal to feel happy about being a grateful, positive person

So lets focus on a feeling we would like to experience rather than on an outcome. I would like to feel more compassionate toward myself and others. So how do I do this? A couple of things that really help me with this include... 


1.  The wish is powerful 
I sometimes find myself in situations where I wish to feel compassion, but I actually don't! Situations like seeing someone lose it in traffic. I am tempted get in there and judge and criticise, but what I would really like to do is feel compassionate for them losing it. This wish to feel differently from how you actually feeling is very powerful in helping us to develop compassion. 

2.  Just Like Me
Pema Chodron has a very helpful practice to reduce judgment and criticism and develop compassion. It involves saying to yourself 'just like me' in situations where judgment comes up.

For example if we see someone losing it in traffic, we can say to ourselves, 'just like me'. This reminds us that we are all alike and have times when our unhelpful habits, like getting angry take hold. Remembering this  helps us develop compassion for them and for ourselves too.

It is important not to use this 'just like me' as another way to bash ourselves up, but rather to use it as an opportunity to remember to drop judgment and to be compassionate toward ourselves and others too. We are all susceptible to unhelpful habits. 

Interestingly we can use this 'just like me' practice when we see great things happening too. For example we may see someone helping someone. We can think 'just like me' and rejoice in their kindness and yours too.  Makes us all feel good!

We will look at the last 2 tips to prevent our enthusiasm for our best intentions from waining next fortnight. 

Gratitude, Kind Regards and Best Wishes, 
Maree xx ​