Creating a compassionate heart of resilience can help to sustain us during difficult times. In times of uncertainty or difficulty, we often experience emotional pain. If we lack emotional coping skills, we may become entangled in and overwhelmed by these emotions, which may lead to increased anxiety, stress, anger, and other difficult emotions.
Mindfulness and meditation practice encourages us to turn toward whatever is happening in the present moment with kindness and compassion. Compassion is the ability to recognize our own or another’s suffering and feel a genuine desire to relieve the suffering. If we can create a compassionate heart and meet whatever feelings arise during difficult times with kindness, this can decrease suffering and increase resilience.
There is a difference between allowing a present moment feeling and allowing it to overcome us. With mindfulness practice, we can learn how to allow a feeling without feeling like the wave of feeling knocks us over. With mindfulness, we practice allowing feelings to come and go like waves. We engage our inner witness consciousness to observe the feelings as they rise, swell, crest, and fall like a wave. The energy of the emotion moves through the body with sensations, and in anchoring our attention on the waves of sensations in the body, we allow that energy to keep moving and release.
When we meet whatever arises with kindness, with mindfulness, we observe the tendency to judge it, and we make an effort to instead practice meeting it with acceptance, kindness, and compassion. We acknowledge what is (I am feeling grief). We hold it kindly within the realm of shared humanity (all human beings feel grief in response to loss). We practice meeting ourselves with kindness and compassion (may I be at peace).
Most of us have experience with sending compassion to others, but how many of us are skillful at self-compassion. Developing a compassionate heart involves being kind and compassionate toward ourselves and others. When we develop a compassionate heart, we become more skillful at meeting all of our experience with kindness.
Practicing compassion cultivates resilience that can help us through difficult times in the present and the future.