Healthy Boundaries And The Development Of Compassion

Developing healthy boundaries plays an essential and sometimes critical role in developing compassion. Boundaries are similar to the stake and wires used to help keep young trees rooted and growing straight. Having health boundaries early on in our compassion practice is adamant because if not when we might be faced with complex and new challenges, blocks to the cultivation of compassion might easily arise. Because of this, a lack of healthy boundaries can lead to our compassion being thrown off track before it has any chance of taking hold and spread its roots. On the other hand, if we are trying to develop compassion and we are plagued by boundaries that are held too tightly. This can easily stifle our efforts to cultivate compassion and keep it from reaching maturity. So it is crucial that in the process of developing compassion, we need to become skilful at knowing when to apply boundaries and when to relax or release them.

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Sound and Stillness In Our Practice

We could say that we are immersed in a world of sounds. If you pay attention, almost every minute of your waking life is filled with some form of sound: most prominently the ambient sounds in our natural environment, including music and radio, conversations and messages, and the cacophony of thoughts in your own head. Considering all of this, we have to ask ourselves: How frequently do you get genuine moments of silence in our everyday life? If we reflect, it seems that we have the inclination for filling moments of silence or stillness with noise and distraction and all other activities in between. What is the reason for this? Why do we have this inclination towards filling up moments of silence with some type of activity? Because it seems that silence makes us feel uneasy, and since silence makes us feel uncomfortable, we will automatically try to fill it up. Why? In moments of silence or stillness, we return to ourselves, which is not always an easy thing to do to ...

Discovering the patterns of your mind

When you meditate, sitting quietly, trying to focus, on your meditation anchor you start to notice what takes you away from your point of focus. Generally, this is a thought of some kind or another. Meditation practice is not intended to stop you from thinking but its purpose is to help you discover what and how you are thinking .

Accepting Feelings Fully

Feelings of worthlessness, humiliation, and self-criticism that you may have had at various times in your life and that may even resurface during meditation sessions are manifestations of deep wounds. Children who are neglected or abused by their parents may unintentionally develop the idea that they are terrible or worthless. This can happen as a direct result of being told that, but it can also happen for less obvious reasons. Children are completely reliant on their parents for existence, so the thought that there is something really wrong with their caretakers and that they are injuring them is too frightening for them. As a result, children place responsibility on themselves—someone must be to blame, and it can't be their parents; therefore, it must be them. When self-blame initially surfaced, it was an understandable and adaptive attempt to cope and keep sane. Understanding this and reminding yourself of it with compassion whenever such sentiments occur might help them gra...

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