Healing with compassion and self-love

Socially solated because of Covid-19, we lack the balancing effect of social back-and-forth with friends and family, We can become unbalanced. We can get really self-critical. We can get angry at others for putting us in this position.

Isolation can be hard, but econnection and self-love restore us. You can strengthen your connections with either of these 2 practices:

Reconnecting to people is what we need.

The Deep Dive Compassion meditation builds on a time-honored practice for reconnecting. that involves re-engaging with the cut-off feelings that set in with trauma such as this one, which has separated us from human contact for so long already. We need to restore our ability to feel for others.

So we have a practice of building up the connection muscle.

First we reconnect with someone easy, then we re-connect with our own positive self-regard, then we re-connect with increasingly difficult people. Just as pushups strengthen muscles in arms and chest, so this re-connecting with our feelings about people builds our readiness to re-connect with them on an emotional basis.

Why practice with thinking about difficult people? It’s like lifting heavier weights in the gym so the lighter ones become even easier. We build more loving-compassion musculature when we lift heavy weights.

Then we can Zoom or FaceTime them and begin again to nurture relationship with those we care about, love, or respect.

As flowers and trees need sun and rain, so our relationships need empathy and positive self-regard.

Here’s how we re-develop these qualities:

We think of someone we love, or admire, someone we have positive feelings for.

We think of good things they have done.

We think of good qualities they have.

We pause and open our hearts to let in all the good feelings towards the person that we can muster.

We imagine that person sitting in a chair in front of us, facing us, relaxed.

Then we open our heart and let all the good feelings for the person flow directly from our heat to their heart.

Then we say these phrases to them, silently:

May you feel happy.

May you feel healthy.

May you feel safe.

May you live with ease.

In saying them we allow our heart to open towards them.

It gets harder, and it gets better

Then we repeat the whole process, but aimed at ourselves. Just substitute “ourself” for “them.”

Then we repeat it for

1. Someone we feel neutral towards,

2. Then one who bothers us a little,

3. Then someone who bothers us a lot.

In this process we are building muscles of compassion, empathy, even of love, as we build heart muscle to feel compassion for more and more difficult people. Finally, we do this exercise for “all people,” encompassing good and bad ones, the All.

I’ve recorded a two guided mindfulness meditations you can listen to. They make the exercise easier, or you can just use them to get a feeling for timing, then practice on your own. Links are at the top of this post.

In the spiritual traditions this is often called a Loving Kindness Meditation, or LKM.