Week 5 2020 | Cftgroup

SUMMARY

Thank you for your continued efforts and courage with our work together.

This session explored two things: firstly, that your mind has what we call a consciousness and secondly an awareness. So we can experience many different feelings and desires but what remains is your unique consciousness and awareness. What comes into your consciousness are patterns of emotions and motives thoughts and understanding these patterns and how you can operate on these patterns is part of what this approach is about. There is no real you, only patterns of feeling thoughts and behaviour that are coming into your consciousness and there can be many types of those.

We explored what it means to think about the type of self and then imagine entering into it. So, we could imagine ourselves as an athletic self or skilful gardener and think about the qualities of self we would need to practice and develop that pattern. Developing our compassionate self is no different. It is the way we focus our attention, thinking, our behaviour, and so on to grow our inner compassionate pattern. The idea is that when we focus in on and try to activate that pattern within us it changes our brains and bodies in such a way that makes it easier (but not easy) to cope with life’s difficulties. So as you can imagine, focusing on becoming a compassionate self would be quite different to focusing on becoming an angry or anxious self! What sometimes we haven’t realised is that we can train in these different selves just like you can train to be fit. And we can build compassionate ways of living into our everyday lives as habits of how we pay attention, our posture and breathing, how we think and how we behave. So over the next modules we will be building on this.

Just a few notes for this week –

Personal Practice

In session 5 we explored our compassionate self. This can be tricky, but we looked at how we can do this in many different ways. One of which was to playfully but seriously imagine ourselves taking on the pattern and the role of compassionate self as actors do, to create different characters .
Please find on this page, two exercises that are focused on developing our compassionate self and beginning to apply that in our lives.
As with all exercises they can be challenging but should not be overwhelming. So engage them lightly and in a friendly way because they are designed to be helpful not to be distressing.
If you find distressing pullback into your soothing rhythm breathing and grounding and when ready to try again at your own pace.
The idea is to bring compassion into your everyday life and way of living so see if you can notice times during the week where you have thought of our modules or tried to do some of the strategies suggested in our modules. Try to think how you could start each day by just reminding yourself of the compassionate self you would like to be, begin with a friendly voice with yourself and try to notice throughout the day how you might try to create a sense of the compassionate self.