Week 4
Hi beautiful people,
This week, we keep going with cultivating loving kindness and compassion for oneself. The theme of week 4 is being a friend to yourself, embracing your natural aspiration for happiness, and practicing gratitude.
Enjoy the meditations and practices this week and thank you again for all your time and engagement!
Week 4 Homework:
- Formal Practice: Week 4 – Self-Appreciation & Compassionate Resource Meditation
- Daily Life Practices
- Every day in the evening, choose one thing to appreciate about yourself! Share this with someone, like your buddy, and/or write it down in your journal. Allow yourself to sense the gift that you are.
- Then, choose one thing to appreciate about your life! A person/relationship, a pet, something from the natural environment, an event that happened, etc. Share this with someone, like your buddy, and/ or write it down in your journal. Allow yourself to sense the gift that this is in your life.
- Choose one action this week that allows you to live your life aligned with one of your core values. (Feel free to use the Personal Value List)
- When there is a quiet moment in your day, and when you feel like it, ask yourself, “In my deepest heart, what do I really value and want in my life?”
- Continue, when you find yourself caught up in a challenging emotion such as anger, sadness, disappointment or frustration, to see if you can connect these feelings with an underlying need that you are seeking to fulfill (Feel free to use the Needs List.)
3. [Optional] Book Reading: A Fearless Heart by Thupten Jinpa Chapters for Week 4: Chapter 7, Chapter 9, ‘Greater Well-Being’, pages 181 – 195
Supplemental Resources:
VIDEO:
Gratitude- Moving Art – This is a short, inspirational spoken word video about gratitude. Watch it and check in with what’s present for you after you watch it.
Positivity Resonates – CCARE Meng Wu Lecture by Barbara Fredrickson at Stanford
Barbara L. Fredrickson, Ph.D., is Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Director of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab (a.k.a. PEP Lab, PositiveEmotions.org) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is a great video lecture about how positive emotions broaden our awareness, builds resilience, significantly improve people’s well being and their positive contributions to others.
Positivity Ratio – This is the video we watched in class.
ARTICLES:
Why Gratitude is Good – Robert Emmons discusses the many benefits of gratitude. He shares a synopsis of his research in which he’s studied more than one thousand people, from ages eight to 80, and found that people who practice gratitude consistently report a host of benefits. There are multiple great videos in this article as well!
Loving-Kindness Meditation, Build Consequential Personal Resources (2008) Barbara L. Fredrickson – Michael A. Cohn – Kimberly A. Coffey – Jolynn Pek – Sandra M. Finkel
QUOTE/POEMS:
“There can be no self-care without self-compassion, which is compassion turned inward. It is the ability to connect to our feelings, to respond to our suffering with kindness, and to desire that our suffering be ameliorated. Self-compassion prompts us to treat ourselves in ways that alleviate, rather than cause or amplify, our pain and suffering. While many of us understand compassion, mercy, and kindness to be essential in our interactions with others, we don’t always see these as core values for our relationship with ourselves. We neglect our self-care, directly and indirectly contributing to our pain and suffering. We judge ourselves for our own suffering, listening to the voice of our inner critic as it rehearses our shortcomings, our errors, and our deficiencies. But it doesn’t have to be this way!
What if we are supposed to love ourselves? What if we are supposed to be kind and gentle, caring and nurturing, empowering and forgiving of ourselves? If we are unable to do this, ultimately we may be unable to do it for our neighbors. Self-compassion, then, is not indulgence; it is a necessity to live into our truest nature.” – Chanequa Walker-Barnes
“By self-love I mean a healthy delight in your true, imperfect, uniquely wonderful, particular self. I mean an unconditional appreciation for who you are, head to toe, inside and out: quirks, foibles, beauty, and blemishes—all of it. I mean seeing yourself truthfully and loving what you see.
Honestly, the stories playing out in the world can make it difficult to love yourself, and therefore your neighbor. Messages from the culture that you don’t matter, not just because of your race, but because of your gender, sexuality, economic status, or religion, can thwart self-love. Even if you’re born into circumstances that others consider ideal, messages in the culture can signal that you’re not good enough, light enough, thin enough, smart enough, rich enough, famous enough, feminine or masculine enough to measure up to some ideal. The space between those ideals and your realities can make it difficult to embrace your particularities and love them. Learning to love your particularities is not just an individual project; you need your communities—your posse—to see those pieces of you, to accept them, and to love all the parts of you, fiercely.” – Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis
“Radical self- love to me, I always describe it as your inherent sense of enoughness… I say the same thing that decided that there should be daisies and butterflies and the river Nile and sunrises also decided that there should be a [you]… And if we can connect to that, if I can connect to the sense that the most stunning sunset I ever saw is made of the same material reality as my own beingness, how is that not miraculous? How is that not phenomenal?” – Sonya Renee Taylor
“Nuptial Song” by Susana Thénon
I got married
I got married to myself
I said yes
a yes that took years to arrive
years of unspeakable suffering
crying with the rain
locking myself up in my room
because I–the great love of my existence–
was not calling myself up
was not writing to myself
was not visiting myself
and sometimes
when I dared call myself
to say, hello, am I OK?
I would deny myself
I even managed to write my name in a list of bores
I did not really want to join
because they babbled too much
because they’d not leave me alone
because they’d fence me in
because I could not stand them
at the end I did not even pretend
when I needed myself
I intimated to myself
Nicely that I was fed up
and once I stopped calling myself
and stopped calling myself
and so much time went by that I missed myself
so I said
how long has it been since my last call?
ages
must have been ages
and I called myself up and I answered and could not believe it
because even if it seems incredible
I had not healed
I had only shed blood
then I told myself: hello, is that me?
it’s me, I told myself, and added:
such a long time no see
me from myself myself from me
do I want to come home?
yes, I said
and we got together again
peacefully
I felt good together with myself
just like me
I felt good together with myself
and so
from one day to the next
I got married and I got married
and am together
and not even death can separate me.
“Love After Love” by Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.