Self-Compassionate Living Newsletter, August 2025
The Tibetan word for meditation means "to become familiar with."
The Sanskrit word for meditation means "to cultivate.
Meditation teaches us how to relate to life directly, so we can truly experience the present moment, free from conceptual overlay.
Pema Chödrön
In the stillness of the quiet, if we listen, we can hear the whisper in the heart giving strength to weakness, courage to fear, hope to despair.
Howard Thurman
“Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself,”
Hermann Hesse
Thank you for subscribing to the Self-Compassionate Living Newsletter! You can create and cultivate self-compassion by learning and practicing it. Engaging with a supportive community usually makes it easier. You signed up to receive this monthly newsletter as part of that effort. I will endeavor to inform and inspire you, and together, we will explore ways to treat ourselves better. Thank you for inviting me to join you on your journey!
This month's newsletter is quite lengthy (feel free to read it in sections) and continues our exploration of self-compassion. I will discuss learning to manage our minds and some practical ways to practice it. My goal is to make it easier to minimize suffering in our lives.
Self-compassion is minimizing suffering.
Mental distortions of reality cause suffering.
Generally, we humans are taught to believe that people or circumstances make us suffer. For example, “You make me so mad!” or “My job makes me miserable.” These two statements accurately describe how experiences feel. However, they are not accurate when considering the objective reality of the circumstances. As strange as it may seem, we are not taught how to distinguish between objective reality (reality as it is) and subjective perception (reality as our brain perceives it).
When people don’t behave as we want them to, our sense of control over them is threatened. When circumstances don’t resolve as we expect, our sense of control is threatened again. In both these examples, the threat triggers our survival brain to initiate survival modes (fight, flight, freeze, grab & hold) to protect itself from thinking negatively about ourselves. This protection often appears as deflecting responsibility for our negative feelings by casting blame onto something outside the brain. (I go into more detail on this subject in my class Creating Self-Compassion.) Thus, in subjective reality, our sense of control over people, situations, and our predictions of our future is threatened. In objective reality, circumstances and people change all the time; it is simply change.
Please note that a sense of control is not real control; it is a feeling of control we want to experience. That sense of control is an example of a mental distortion, where the distortion confuses real control with a perceived sense of control in our brain.
We can minimize mental distortions by training our brains to perceive reality more clearly.
Minimizing Distortions
In my previous career, I owned a recording studio and was hired as a producer/engineer for numerous audio projects. Paragraph 4 of my producer contract was known as the Benevolent Dictator clause. This clause meant that I would listen to all parties involved in the recording (usually the musicians) and then make the final decision by combining (or sometimes overriding) their suggestions. This approach worked well for recording albums.
I learned from my three primary mentors that it was also a good way to manage my mind.
Our brains are made up of many different parts (hundreds, according to neurobiology). Each part has an opinion on the best way to navigate life, survive, and hopefully thrive (or at least feel better). Unfortunately, because the survival parts of our brain have no capacity for logical thinking, they usually choose the most effortless way to feel better, even if feeling better now means we’ll feel worse later.
However, we want to thrive!
Thus, we are most likely to thrive if we listen to every part's suggestions (which feel like emotional commands), rationally sift through them, and combine the parts that move us toward our ultimate goal for our life and each situation.
This is usually not easy because of the emotional pressures we feel that push us to satisfy their particular agenda, even if that agenda doesn’t move us toward thriving. It’s hard to see beyond how one feels in the moment; yet, that is what self-compassion asks us to do.
Those emotional pressures are distorting our focus on our ultimate goals and objective reality. Here are two ways that we can minimize the distortions:
- Giving our subconscious time to process all the data so we can render better decisions for ourselves.
- Learning to see distortions beyond the feelings.
Fortunately, these two methods are skills we can learn and practice.
The Brain Gym: the daily practice space for mind management.
Managing our minds to minimize distortions enables us to see objective reality more accurately and stay focused on life’s ultimate goals. So, let’s start with a description of mind management: Mind management is training our mind to stay present and finding self-compassionate results for the task at hand. We can improve this skill by dedicating a fixed amount of time each day to practicing directing our attention to a sensory activity; this practice helps us train our brain to focus before challenging moments arise.
It's easy to stay focused when our survival or sense of survival is threatened. It is easy to focus on challenges that matter to our physical survival or sense of survival. It is frequently tricky to focus on thriving because thriving often means choosing something more energy-intensive than simply surviving physically or, usually more pertinently, mentally or emotionally.
Thus, we discipline our minds in the Brain Gym for several reasons, and here are four of them.
- We learn to be more aware of thoughts that distort our view of reality and cause us suffering; this is awareness.
- We are learn to acknowledge that thoughts in our brain happen and detach ourselves from those thoughts; this is acceptance.
- We learn to release the pressures those thoughts generate, so we stay focused on our intention to thrive; this is letting go.
- Ultimately, we are intentionally directing (and constantly redirecting) our attention to the areas we want to focus on, so we are creating the life we want to live. In other words, we are intentionally choosing to thrive.
Please note that the Brain Gym is all about managing our brain’s automatic thoughts, allowing us to maintain a clearer view of our ultimate life desires, and cultivating new thoughts that create a life where we thrive, regardless of the circumstances. For more details, please take my class, Creating Self-Compassion. You can find the next class dates on my website here (click the blue link to be taken to the class information page): https://www.self-compassionateliving.com/classes-groups/creating-self-compassion-class.
Mind Management Exercises
When people contact me for coaching, it’s usually because they want to fix some imbalance in their lives. They seem to think that self-compassion is a magic pill that will instantly (or at least within a session or two) fix everything that’s “wrong” (as described by them) with their life. Soon, they learn that as a coach, I don’t have the answers. Instead, I have lots of questions and exercises they can do to gently rewire their brain. The goal is to help them rewire their default way of thinking so that it aligns with their ultimate life goals. This rewiring process is usually slow and requires diligence and intention. The next exercise is very good at helping us learn diligence and intention.
Meditation or Contemplation
Spiritual teachers and philosophers have long taught that meditation is generally the best place to practice working with your mind. I agree with this assessment. Meditation changed my life. Meditation is simply a practice tool in which one chooses a length of time and something to focus on, such as a special word or one’s breath. After we start meditating, our brain becomes agitated with boredom or irritation very quickly, and it tries to relieve the agitation by thinking about something. The exercise is to notice when one has drifted off their focus point, gather their mind, and refocus on the focus point.
Frequently, the difficulty comes because we have intentionally set a length of time to practice, and that time isn’t ending soon enough. Yet, when we stick with our intention, our brain (especially our survival brain) slowly learns that it isn’t in charge of everything; we can have agency over it. Doing this daily, slowly teaches our brain that we are the commander, not it, and, usually slowly, we begin shaping and creating our life instead of reacting to it.
However, meditation isn’t the only way to learn this skill; one can also acquire it through a daily exercise regimen, a period of daily stillness, or even doing the dishes. Anything we choose can work, especially if we don’t always enjoy it. Part of the learning comes from doing a task for your mental/emotional health, even if it isn’t always fun. It is a discipline, not a pleasure activity.
We do the discipline to nurture our minds, so that thoughts and emotional pressures lose some of their power. (Additionally, I found that after practicing for several weeks, meditation became a necessity to maintain my mental/emotional balance; it changed from a task to balance my mind to an exercise to maintain that balance, so I feel more complete and content.) Meditation helps me survive the problems of daily life more easily.
A Self-Compassionate Activity
For me, Meditation is about surviving daily life the way I want. My self-compassionate activities are about thriving, so my life has meaning for me. Unlike the discipline of meditation, self-compassionate activities are about enjoying a task. In addition to meditating every morning, I also read most days at lunch, and I go for a walk four to six times a week. The reading helps me enter into imaginary worlds where I learn and see other points of view or escape into an adventure. Walking is about getting into nature and exercising my body. Nature recharges me, so I spend an hour in it four to six times a week, which, in addition to recharging me, helps me maintain my mental/emotional balance.
Self-compassionate activities can also be hobbies, exercise for health and pleasure, and daily activities that help you recharge. Anything that builds you up and maintains your mental/emotional equilibrium can be a self-compassionate activity. (As a side note, I recommend you spend part of all of the activity without media in the background; I’ll explain more in a future newsletter.)
All of these activities and disciplines in the Brain Gym are self-compassion in action.
RMP
On one trip to New Mexico, my wife and I were driving up Racine Pass when a blizzard quickly blew in, rendering the road incredibly slick and dangerous. I slowed down to three or four miles per hour to navigate the climb as safely as possible. While creeping along in a long line of cars, I thought about self-compassion. It occurred to me that daily life can be similar to a fast-moving blizzard. One minute, one is cruising along feeling perfectly balanced, and then, instantly, our mental/emotional equilibrium is thrown askew by the vicissitudes of daily life.
During these mental ramblings, the letters RMP popped into my mind.
Recognize, Manage, and Prepare.
In daily life, we get so comfortable in our patterns that the slightest misalignment can throw us off, and frequently, we end up suffering unnecessarily.
Practicing in the Brain Gym offers us skills to recognize when we are thrown off balance sooner, or even before the destabilizing event occurs. Then, because we have very little control over events, this practice allows us to stay more easily focused on our authentic goals for the situation, rather than reacting impulsively. Chances are, one of your ultimate goals is to manage the situation self-compassionately so you and, hopefully, others involved suffer the least. After the situation is resolved, you can learn from the situation. Hence, you are better prepared to navigate it self-compassionately the next time something similar happens.
Additionally, with practice, the “M” can also become maintain. You learn to maintain your mental/emotional balance in the majority of disruptive situations, so you and hopefully others suffer minimally or not at all.
The Brain Gym of meditation and Self-Compassionate activities is a dedicated place to practice the skill of managing your mind.
Please consider going to the Brain Gym every day, finding your best centering and balancing activities, and building your life around thriving, not just surviving.
Become Familiar With and Cultivate.
As strange as it may seem, the way our brain reacts to unwanted thoughts in our mind, especially during our mind management exercises and our self-compassionate activities, predicts very well the way our brain will react to unwanted thoughts and situations in daily life. Thus, during our daily practice of mind management, we train our minds to become familiar with their default patterns and then cultivate the ways we want our brains to think when disruptions erupt. As we practice, that practice seeps into our daily lives and actions, and we end up being more of the person we want to be. Again, this is self-compassion in action. (I will continue to explore this paradigm in future newsletters)
Next Month
In next month’s newsletter, I think I’ll discuss the paradigm of being present. Of course, if a better theme shows itself during my coaching sessions and classes, I’ll explore that more relevant theme. If someone has a particular topic you’d like to see discussed, please reply and suggest it.
On a Personal Note
This year has been a remarkable journey for me. I have learned it is becoming more difficult to stay aware of all the little agendas running in my mind. Consequently, the results of those agendas when I act them out, usually unintentionally, tend to make my life, and sometimes my wife’s life, more difficult. It usually looks like a snarkyness when I’m feeling tired or an unintentional selfishness when I’m not present.
My wife gently asks me, “Is that the man I want to be?” Thank God she does. That question reminds me that I’m not the only person in the world and, remarkably, the world doesn’t revolve around me. It’s humbling and uncomfortable. And I feel grateful for it every time. I want to be a kind, loving husband, and compassionate to all, especially my wife, who’s closest to me.
Ironically, I sometimes forget to be compassionate with myself, especially when I’m not present. I take a little dig at myself and, lightly, punish myself for not being the man I want to be. Occasionally, my wife reminds me to exercise compassion for myself.
I thank God for her and this community. Each of you has been a teacher to me. Thank you!
As Ram Dass said, "We are all just walking each other home.”
We are better when we help each other.
Self-Compassion Discussion & Inspiration Group
The next biweekly Self-Compassion Discussion & Inspiration Group is Saturday, August 9th, from 10 AM to 11:30 AM MDT.
After a brief introduction, we’ll do 10 minutes of stillness, and then we’ll discuss whatever comes up from the participants. The last discussion group was remarkable!
I ask for a $10 to $15 donation per session; however, I will not turn anyone away for financial reasons. I have some scholarship money available.
Please join us for the next Self-Compassion Discussion & Inspiration Group meeting on Saturday, August 9th, from 10 AM to 11:30 AM MDT. If you would like to join us, please click this link or register here.
Additionally, I am holding a Creating Self-Compassion class this summer. It will occur six times, meeting once a week from August 28th to Oct 2nd at 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM MDT. Please tell your friends about it. The signup for the class is at this link: Creating Self-Compassion.
In conclusion
By this point, you've probably realized that self-compassionate living is about building a new relationship with your brain, specifically with managing your mind to create your life instead of just reacting to life. Self-compassion begins with mind management, allowing you to live with greater joy, peace, and contentment (JPC) and experience fewer negative emotions. I have learned the information I share in these newsletters from spiritual teachers, philosophers, and psychologists during the last thirty-three years. I share it with you, hoping it will help you practice self-compassion. Please utilize the material that resonates with you and explore and learn about your mind. You can create the life that you want to live.
See you next month, and may the rest of this month be peaceful.
Thank you for inviting me to walk with you.
Blair
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