Loving kindness as an antidote to difficult feelings and shame

I have shared before in my blog some of the practices from Buddhist therapist Tara Brach in my blog before. I am re reading certain certain sections of her book True Refuge : Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart at the moment and they are really resonating with me.

Tara recommends a process of befriending our difficult feelings, most especially anger and shame or feelings of self loathing and investigating them, while antidoting the tendency many of us with narcissist wounding have to re-play hurts over and over again. The word resentment indicates that our childhood wounds or other interpersonal injuries can be sent back inside us over and over and over again in an ongoing repetitive negative feedback loop. When this happens we don’t get a chance to engage with the feelings of powerlessness and grief which underlie them. We get caught up in repetitive conflict with others when triggered. Wecan act out in anger instead of lovingly learning instead to contain and befriend those feelings. When we don’t contain or practice loving kindness we may end up hurting ourselves or others over and over.

After listening to Russell Brand’s take on the fourth step, a searching and fearless moral inventory yesterday I thought how it is a bit much to ask us to be fearless in investigating our insides at first, most especially if we suffer feelings bound in fear or shame. We may feel shame or fear over our anger, hurt, frustration and powerlessness over critical events, even if they did not arise from our own doing. And this is what Tara point out in her book, often our injuries are not personal and our reactions are not our fault but never the less if we want to change them or soften them so they become less destructive in our lives we have to learn respond-ability. Not so much responsibility as the power to respond in a more loving way that does not involve, lashing out, hiding, self justifying or deflecting ‘blame’ onto sources of frustrations outside of ourselves (parents, friends or siblings who were reacting or acting out on us their own ‘stuff’).

I mentioned in the blog yesterday that Russell Brand in the course of doing his fourth step found that resentment over his mother’s cancer was the root of a lot of fear that led to his addiction. What I did not mention in yesterday’s blog is that Russell was actually blamed by a family relative for causing his own mother’s cancer!! Imagine living with that kind of confusion as a child then trying to ‘unpack’ it all in a fourth step? Luckily he came to see this was not true but the shame and guilt being told such as thing did cause him a deeply painful and toxic legacy. Brand came to see his own resentment as the problem and addressed it through the 12 steps. We can do the same with so called ‘defects of character’ we did not cause. In the 6th and 7th steps we seek transformation through a so called ‘higher power’. I see a loving kindness/self forgiveness practice as a more powerful antitode.

Likewise we may have been blamed or blame ourselves for things we did in the past from a place of unconsciousness. This is where Brach recommends a practice of loving kindness whereby we hold our own pain and anger against ourselves and others in a gentle sensitive way, beaming compassion to ourselves. This is not a recipe for excusing inexcusable or inappropriate behaviour, but the point Tara makes that its only in loving our demons in a helpful way that we can allow them to transform and not continue the self rejection that is so often fostered by unforgiving forces in the culture at large.

For all of us, the starting practice of healing is a reconciliation with our own heart. Whether we are unable to forgive ourselves for what seems a major wrongdoing, or we have locked into chronic self judgement, we are at war, cut off from our own tenderness, our own spirit. If we can see past our faults to our human vulnerability, we are on the path of reconciliation. Our self compassion will naturally lead us to caring about other.. to an experience of love and connectedness we never imagined possible.

When it comes to the injuries others cause us we can use this same practice.

Below are some of the affirmations you can use for your own self forgiveness practice. If you struggle with these issues I highly recommend Tara’s book. It is chock full of healing practices and insight to calm the storms within.

May I be filled with loving kindness. May I be held in loving kindness.

May I feel safe and at ease

May I feel protected from inner and outer harm.

May I be happy.

May I accept myself just as I am.

May I touch deep natural peace.

May I know the profound joy of being alive

May I find true refuge within my own being.

May my heart and mind awaken.

May I be free.