We held our Monthly Meditation & Communi-Tea practice at Yoga Bliss. One Sunday a month we will offer students more time to go a little deeper and make new friends. We’re drawing inspiration from Karen Armstrong’s “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life”. Ms. Armstrong is a best selling author and TED Prize Winner who created and launched the Charter for Compassion.
During our first meeting we focused on the 1step: learning about compassion. Last month’s 2nd step involved taking a deep hearted look at the world around us and focusing on how we can actualize compassion within our family, workplace and nation. This month’s 3rd step explored extending compassion toward ourselves. Why bother? Karen Armstrong writes that if we cannot love ourselves we cannot love others:
“We have a biological need to be cared for and to care for others. Yet it is not easy to love ourselves. In our target-driven, capitalist . . . societies, we are more inclined to castigate ourselves for our shortcomings and become . . . down by any failure to achieve our objectives and potential. It is a terrible irony that while many . . . are suffering from malnourishment and starvation, in the West an alarming number of women – and . . . men – are affected with eating disorders that spring from a complex amalgam of self-hatred, fear, feelings of failure, inadequacy, helplessness and yearning for control. . . . The Golden Rule requires self-knowledge; it asks that we use our own feelings as a guide to our behavior with others. If we treat ourselves harshly, this is the way we are likely to treat others.”
