Coaching practices for Compassion Meditation

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Compassion Meditation, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• Someone I love is suffering and there is nothing I can actually do to fix it, and that helplessness is unbearable
• I open my heart to other people’s suffering and then I drown in it
• Sitting alone with my own mind tends to dredge up self-criticism and uncomfortable stuff, and I come out of meditation feeling more turned-against-myself and isolated than when I started
• My whole instinct is to push pain away and grab at anything that feels good, and I’m tired of how walled-off that makes me
• Whatever I’m feeling, I pile on top of it

Practices that may help

1. Direct tonglen toward a specific suffering person
   Bring a person who is suffering to mind and breathe in their pain; breathe out whatever would give them relief.
   Tonglen: The Tibetan Practice of Taking and Sending
2. Integrate metta with equanimity to avoid compassion fatigue
   Metta extended without equanimity can become distress; grounding goodwill in steady non-attachment makes it sustainable.
   Metta Bhavana: The Practice of Loving-Kindness
3. Metta at the close — sharing merit and goodwill
   End each sitting by radiating goodwill outward, softening any self-critical edge the practice surfaces.
   Vipassana Meditation, Made Practical
4. Tonglen: sending and taking
   Breathe in suffering (yours and others’); breathe out relief and well-being.
   Lojong: Tibetan Mind Training
5. N — Nurture with self-compassion
   Offer the part that is suffering what it most needs — care, acknowledgment, reassurance — as you would a dear friend.
   RAIN Meditation: Tara Brach’s Four-Step Practice
6. Loving-Kindness (Metta) Meditation
   Loving-kindness (metta) meditation cultivates warmth and goodwill by silently repeating phrases of well-wishing — first toward yourself, then widening in circles to loved ones, neutral people, difficult people, and all beings. Research suggests it can increase positive emotion and feelings of social connection; its links to self-compassion are promising but the literature is smaller and more mixed than for mindfulness.
7. Compassion meditation for widening the circle
   Extend deliberate well-wishing to people you find difficult, building non-aversion before you encounter them.
   Ahimsa: Non-Violence as a Daily Practice
8. Shared condition meditation
   Sit briefly with the awareness that right now, thousands of people are feeling exactly what you feel.
   Common Humanity, Made Practical
9. Expand tonglen to include all beings who share this suffering
   Whatever you are suffering, countless others feel it too — breathe in the shared pain, breathe out shared relief.
   Tonglen: The Tibetan Practice of Taking and Sending
10. The self-compassion break
    A three-step phrase you say in a hard moment: this is suffering, suffering is human, may I be kind to myself.
    Self-Compassion, Made Practical

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