Great interviews on Radio National this morning in Australia focussing on the science behind self compassion with Professor Paul Gilbert who studies compassion practice and anxiety. It spoke about how the threat system is high wired and extremely reactive in many sufferers of trauma, anxiety and depression. In short our fears and protections and expectations of further trauma, damage or threat makes us even harder on ourselves and more likely to anticipate disaster. There is a threat system in our body that can be calmed down when we learn instead to engage in a self compassion practice which sends love into our suffering and acceptance and helps us to contain distressing sensations, feelings or thoughts within the open loving space of unconditional healing presence. Gilbert calls this the soothing system.
With this in mind I have been adapting some of the practices of self compassion covered by Russell Harris in his book The Reality Slap to use in my own life. I got a bit overwhelmed after coming back from therapy this morning as we covered so much ground in the space of the hour and I was so hungry I wolfed down a pastry afterwards, when it was a bit close to lunch time. As a result I am later with lunch today but I am going easy on myself. I started to give myself a bit of an anxiety attack by running fearful thoughts about what I had eaten around in my head. This is when I decided I needed to interrupt the negative internal feedback threat loop and I stopped to practice hand on head hand on heart/gut compassion practice.
This way of calming anxiety and panic is recommended by trauma specialist Peter Levine and it is similar to what Harris speaks of in his book. It involves placing a hand on either your heart and your head or your tummy and your head. In tandem with this instead of reacting from thinking you stay present with yourself in love, listening in and identifying sensations and feelings such as fear or sadness that may be present in your body and just allowing the feelings a place while letting yourself calmly rest with them in an open field of unconditional attention. You no longer push away, react or resist against the symptoms, anxiety or stress.
At the same time you can calmly notice any accompanying thoughts and judgements and touch them lightly letting go. You may want to repeat a word such as calm, acceptance or peace at the same time.
Louise Hay speaks in her book The Power Is Within You of how many of us scare ourselves repeatedly with our thoughts (activating the threat or fear flight fight systems), we can run disaster or ongoing ‘not good enough’ or critical thought monologues round and round. When instead we just focus on a calming breath while witnessing or wishing ourselves soothing and peace we can prevent the threat system from overtaking us completely.
Giving caring and warmth to our stress or pain is similar to a mother holding and providing comfort to a small child that is distressed. Buddhist Monk Thich Kna Hahn recommends that we treat our pain and the pain of others in this way. In his book on Anger which addresses soothing the searing flames that anger can arose Hahn recommends we listen deeply to the hearts of loved ones who may be lashing out or in distress. We can do this on an inward level for ourselves too… What a better way of treating our anxiety, depression or pain…. which often contain repressed life energy or traumatic experiences or imprints that need to be released and responded to.
Presence Process facilitator Michael Brown expresses this kind of presence process as follows :
If we.. choose to run from these surfacing experiences, we defeat the intent of choosing to become aware of them. This is a ‘no pain, no gain’ predicament. Instead of resisting our pain and discomfort, we resist our automatic reflex to suppress or hand this experience over to someone else and explore the experience through choosing to feel it. To do so, we stop beyond masking behaviour that allows us to go on pretending we are “fine” and “okay”. Bravely answering the call of the body to embrace that which his arising as a necessary part of our integrative journey, we overcome our reflex to instinctively run from discomfort, choosing to gaze into it as deeply as possible with unconditional felt perception. As we embrace and willing seek out its centre, we open ourselves to insight.
(to do this) we don’t try to fix, change, heal, understand, transform, visualise or manipulate the discomfort in any way.. (instead of treating reactions and symptoms such as fear, sadness or anger as invading enemies)… we approach then like a mother gently comforting a distraught child with her Unconditional presence. This releases within us energetically integrative capacities instead of the armour and weaponry of war.
War within ourselves cannot realise inner peace. However the integrative capacity inherent within unconditional attention does. (it is our inherent birthright…this approach is not about any kind of quick fix.) It requires gradual perceptual transformation of a lifelong hostility toward what we perceive as pain and discomfort. Whenever we nurture ourselves in this way, we initiate integrative consequences.
In other words, in seeking to face and integrate rather than run from our pain or anxiety, threat and distress symptoms we can learn to calm down and release long buried charges of energy in our systems that date back to the past. Information will come to us if we stay with the process and open ourselves. We will not need to try.. Such information will just naturally arise for integration. In this way we are evoking loving inner parents who can hold us through pain and distress while helping us release and understand stored emotional charges. When we notice self criticism we can return to the breath and tend to ourselves with soothing.
Emerging From The Dark Night 