The Pursuit of Self: Compassion Focused Therapy

Who we are, our self-concept, is inseparable from the perception and subjective objectification we take of ourselves (self-image); this is, in turn, indivisible from the esteem we hold toward ourselves (self-esteem); which is intimately and intrinsically related to self-awareness and the ability to consciously acknowledge our thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and traits (through self-talk). And, while the concept of “self” is a complex and multifaceted aspect within both Eastern and Western theories of Lifestyle Medicine, which is far beyond the scope of this article, it is suffice to acknowledge that there is, throughout life, a reciprocal relationship between all aspects of the self, the biological, psychological, and sociological influences on self, and well-being.

More simply, it is known that our concept of self – whether it be in the physiological, psychological, or sociological realm – is a learned concept that develops throughout childhood, is highly influenced by genetic and environmental factors, and has an intimate relationship with our social relationships. Correspondingly, as it is intertwined with the implicit and explicit judgment and discrimination placed on us by others and ourselves, often due to cultural ideologies or social discourse of what the self “should be”, self-concept has a preponderant effect on our levels of health and well-being or conversely, illness and disease. We can, and many do, experience physiological and psychological ailments due to the shame and guilt that surrounds the objectifiable self. Such ailments may include disconnected and disintegrated levels of self-image self-esteem, and self-awareness that present themselves as (among other things) depression, anxiety, addiction, and/or disordered eating.

Specifically, in today’s sociocultural climate, pessimism around body shape and food intake can become a formidable way of life that further perpetuates the disenfranchised and disenchanted self – we look to external sources for self-acceptance only to find that there are unrealistic and paradoxical portrayals, not only of “beauty”, so too of what health and well-being “should” look like.

Yet, it is known most explicitly in the Traditional Eastern and now more and more within the Western BioMedical models of health and well-being that compassion has extensive positive impact on many treatments.  Indeed, as it is renowned, at the turn of the century there was a preponderance of discussions and evidence-based studies that began focusing on the innate potential of humanity, rather than on the suffering that is inherent to finite existence. We began to see an expansion of focus on conscientiousness, connection, compassion, and the potential for change:

I took us back to an earlier comment made by the Dali Lama. “This gets back to His Holiness’s point, that we need to have a very sophisticated understanding of the complexities of destructive emotions if we are going to be skillful in finding remedies for them – particularly when it comes to the question of how to educate people to overcome them.. Matthieu [Ricard] laid out a model from Buddhist training, of first making an effort to bring to mind a familiar, a habit, at which point it becomes stable. That seems to suggest a general model for how we might begin to change these processes and help people get more control over destructive emotions.

“That’s something I know we’re very interested in, Your Holiness”, I added, hoping to get us focused on practical applications – ways to help people overcome their destructive emotions.

Mark Greenberg spoke up. “I wanted to make a point and the direct a question to Richie [Richard Davidson]. This is telling us that we’re not just interested in developing reasoning, but we’re also interested in educating the heart. There are two fundamental processes here. Both need to be engendered. The question, then, is, do you think if we, as adults, were to promote loving kindness through training, that this might also affect the recovery period from the negative emotions?”

“Or how strongly you felt them, or how often?” I added.

I knew that Richie would have answered the question in the affirmative, but Matthieu jumped in and took our thoughts in another direction. “In a study of children recovering from trauma following a catastrophe, they found that there was a significant difference in the recovery time of children in Bangladesh who were from Buddhist communities. Children who were raised with Buddhist values recovered significantly faster from the calamity and had much less trauma than children from other cultural backgrounds. It seems due to the way they are educated, with the idea of cultivating gentleness … The study if children in Bangladesh found this compassionate attitude correlates with a better faculty for recovering from stress and trauma.”

The Dali Lama wanted to add something to Matthieu’s story of the monk who meditated on compassion for six months.  “From the Buddhist point of view, the success of his meditation on compassion depended on the purification of negativity and the enhancement of positive qualities, of virtues.  The meditator was not simply repeating ‘compassion’ like a mantra every hour, every second – ‘compassion, compassion, compassion’. That is not the process of familiarisation. The process rather involves directing every conscious thought toward the goal of cultivating compassion so that whatever activity the individual engages in, it is always from that orientation. There is a kind of single-pointed dedication. This is what gave rise to his experience.”

Matthieu elaborated, “Their practices are sometimes quite difficult. In the sutras, it explains how to do that in every single gesture. When getting up, one thinks ‘May I get up to deliver all sentient beings from suffering.’  When coming down the steps, ‘May I go down again to take beings from suffering.’ When opening a door, ‘May the door of liberation be opened for all sentient beings.’ In that way, every instant is filled with the thought of compassion. Compassion is bound to become part of your mind stream.”

“I think Matthieu’s description of the training makes a tremendous amount of sense from a neuroscience perspective,” Richie Davidson said. “We can begin to think about how this kind of training, where every action is associated with the thought of cultivating compassion, actually changes the brain. There’s every reason to believe that a training so profound and systematic can affect our brain in some way. We can begin to specify what brain regions and which connections may be strengthened to facilitate recovering quickly from a trauma of the sort Matthieu describes; there is research that is a model for how to understand the benefits of this type of training. But nothing like this has ever been approached scientifically, simply because the types of intervention we have dealt with in the West are at nursery-school level compared to what Matthieu is describing.”