self-compassion Archives - Mindfulness Association

Anxiety as an Obstacle in Meditation Practice

Heather Regan-Addis — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 15:05:02 +0000

There are different levels of anxiety that might be experienced in meditation practice.

Anxiety might arise in relation to a worry or concern about something happening in our life. Maybe an upcoming house move or a job interview.

It might also arise because we have a strong habit of anxiety, which we have cultivated over many years, so that we become concerned when we don’t have something to be anxious about. Worry thoughts just pop into the mind randomly, we engage them and get caught up in catastrophising thinking loops which feed our anxiety.

We might also experience existential anxiety when our meditation practice is about to generate a significant insight. Such insights can change the way we think about ourselves, what we think we are and how we think the mind works. Or they can change the way we think about the world, what it is and its true nature. We might think, if my perspective changes, who would I be? How would I live in the world? What would the consequences for my life be? I wouldn’t be who I think I am!

I remember once being on retreat when I had an insight about how mean I had been to someone. This contradicted my idea of myself as a kind person and so was very threatening. I remember being very upset and overwhelmed. Not because I had been mean to this person, but because my image of who I thought I was had been challenged. This insight threatened my sense of self.

Transformative insights are very valuable in enabling us to see and come to terms with deeply ingrained habits. They are the basis of deep personal growth which over time reduces our levels of day to day suffering (and that of those around us) and increases our overall happiness. If we can unconditionally accept these old habitual patterns they tend to transform themselves by a process which Krishnamurti called ‘The seeing is the doing’. When we see clearly and in a felt sense way how our habitual patterns cause harm, then they tend to transform themselves. But after such transformation, who would I be?

So, this kind of existential anxiety can be a significant block to our progress of meditation practice. So how do we proceed?

First, we familiarise ourselves with the components that make up anxiety, the thoughts we buy into, how anxiety feels, and any emotions that accompany the anxiety. Then we can hold these components in a wider space and see them for what they really are, habitual happenings within the mind and learn that we don’t have to buy into them and make them real.

Second, we cultivate courage. There is no courage without fear. The deeper the fear the stronger the courage. Compassionate imagery can help us here to cultivate an ally that has absolute courage and strength to support us in facing anxiety when it arises.

If this is something you are interested in exploring, then why not try our Managing Anxiety Course starting in September. You can find more information here.

Boundless Compassion: Mahamudra, Compassion and Messy Humanity

Mindfulness Association — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 10:16:23 +0000

The Springer Mindfulness Journal has published the second article of the Mahamudra and Mindfulness Series, written by Mindfulness Association tutor and Buddhist monk Choden. As with the first article, Choden explores a central tenet of Mahamudra teaching – this time compassion – and how it is central to modern mindfulness practice.

Compassion is fundamental to the work of the Mindfulness Association. This is exemplified in the phrase “compassion is at the heart of everything we do”, and how it infuses all their work, from the free daily meditation guided practice to the MSc Studies in Mindfulness programme at the University of Aberdeen. This article helps us explore the meaning and practice of compassion in a way that allows it to be both grounded in its Buddhist past and relevant in helping us navigate the ups and downs of 21^st century life.

Choden acknowledges that the word “compassion” can carry a lot of baggage, making it seem like something unobtainable, especially as people can see it as “an ascent to holiness and perfection”. He gently and skilfully demystifies compassion, highlighting Rob Nairn’s teaching that compassion practice is not about being above others, pure or perfect, but instead about descending into our messy humanity, making peace with it and developing empathy and compassion for all aspects of ourselves. It is about allowing the mud of the messy humanity to germinate the seeds of compassion that bloom into the lotus flower.

This approach is liberating as it opens up the practice of compassion to all, even those who believe “I am just not a compassionate person”! It provides a boundless emotional context in which we can approach our messiness, our worries, our pains, our fears and our human imperfections with kindness.

Choden goes on to fuse the past and the present in his discussion of the Mandala Principle, its role in Mahamudra practice and how it closely relates to modern practices like “The Wheel of Awareness”. What Choden manages to do is take the traditional and transpose it onto the modern in a way that is natural, understandable and reinforces the importance of lineage, shared tradition and practice to all practitioners, spiritual or secular. The Mandala practice in the article expands on this discussion and makes it experiential, allowing the practitioner to get a taste of this for themselves.

The approach in this article and the series as a whole is a brave one. By focussing on the traditional roots of mindfulness, Choden is giving a voice to an aspect of the practice that has been ignored or quietly pushed aside after the briefest of acknowledgements in much of modern mindfulness writing. Choden is making a clear and coherent case for why the traditional and modern work hand in hand, and why the past can help us understand now. As they say, if you don’t know where you’ve come from, how can you know where you are going?

Read the full article here and look out for further posts as the series of articles are published.

Self-Compassion – Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Fay Adams — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 11:38:29 +0000

It’s like the scent of rain
after a month of drought,
the way it rises up and fills the lungs,
quiets the body
and gentles the mind –

that’s what it’s like
when, after grasping
and spinning and reaching
and clenching at last,
exhausted with my own fear,

I lay my hand on my own heart.
and see through my thoughts,
and practice loving
what is beneath my palm:
This frightened woman

and the life that lives through her.
Not a single promise I will be safe,
but, when I press my open hand
into the beat of my anxious heart
what was dry becomes loamy,

what was cracked becomes rich,
and a faint sweetness
tendrils through me, like incense.
soothing as a lullaby
that opens in the dark.

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Have you ever experienced ‘a faint sweetness that tendrils through you, like incense’? Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer has given us beautiful and, for me anyway, accurate words and images to describe the experience of self-compassion in this poem. Reading it I feel wonder and gratitude for the transformer of the heart. If we learn how, we can give ourselves the soothing of a lullaby in the dark, feel our nervous system shift with the touch of our hand and watch our inner experience metamorphose from ‘cracked’ to ‘loamy’ in real time.
Does this sound a little miraculous? I would say it could perhaps be described as a very humble miracle. I like how Rosemerry uses the word faint. This leads me to consider how a moment of self-compassion will not fix everything, it won’t change a grey, fractious day into a sunny joyful one, but it will sometimes give me an almost intangible sense of easing from the inside out, of receiving ‘the scent of rain after a month of drought’, so that my breath is a touch more free, my eyes a tiny bit more clear and my heart a little more steady and soft.
As I wrote the above I realised that today is close to a grey and fractious day for me. I just stopped and took two minutes to tend to my clenched heart and tense shoulders. As often happens, as I let go of the fight with reality, a sweet sigh spontaneously arrives washing through it all. Maybe it’s all ok. Maybe this will pass. Maybe there is still love, even here. Even if faint.

PS If you’d like to practice self-compassion together with others, consider our Mindfulness Level 2 – Responding with Compassion which has a strong focus on self-compassion in the first and second module before widening out into compassion for others…

Photo by petr sidorov on Unsplash

Misty – Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Kristine Mackenzie-Janson — Mon, 27 May 2024 09:52:07 +0000

And sometimes when I move
at the edge of a greatness—
a lake or a sea or a mountainside—

my insignificance thrills me
and the largest of my sadnesses
dwindle smaller than the space

between grains of sand
and in that moment,
knowing my place,

comes a love so enormous
I can love anyone, anyone,
even myself.

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I love and completely recognise the experience Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer describes here – how the perspective between the greatness of nature and the smallness of me can be both healing and freeing.

But I think there is something to watch out for when making that shift away from my habitual focus on Me and My trouble to what Mary Oliver pointed to when she said ‘Meanwhile, the world goes on‘. There can be a sense of disconnecting or abandoning ourselves in that shift, a kind of detaching to make the difficult stuff more manageable. A very human impulse of course, and actually an attempt at compassion (alleviating suffering) in itself, but if there’s a disconnecting involved, it’s a move away from wholeness and healing and so it will at best be a temporary assuaging.

So instead, can there be a reconnecting with the truth of that greater perspective, that lovingly includes our own stuff? It’s not about denying of our humanness or ‘the largest of my sadnesses’, but seeing what else is true? And there’s a subtle but important difference in the two…

Of course it may not always be easy to access a ‘lake or a sea or a mountainside’ when you need one. Luckily, our imagination can be a powerful ally and we may access that greatness through the porthole of our memory. And the sky is a powerful greatness in itself, even if we can only see a small piece of it in between big buildings…

Let’s practice accessing that love so enormous that we can love anyone, even ourselves!

PS one of the contexts for practising a change of perspective and loving anyone, even ourselves, is in the standalone weekend of Compassionate Imagery For Resilience…

Photo by Khatam Tadayon on Unsplash

Self-Compassion – James Crews

Kristine Mackenzie-Janson — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 23:33:59 +0000

My friend and I snickered the first time
we heard the meditation teacher, a grown man,
call himself honey, with a hand placed
over his heart to illustrate how we too
might become more gentle with ourselves
and our runaway minds. It’s been years
since we sat with legs twisted on cushions,
holding back our laughter, but today
I found myself crouched on the floor again,
not meditating exactly, just agreeing
to be still, saying honey to myself each time
I thought about my husband splayed
on the couch with aching joints and fever
from a tick bite—what if he never gets better?—
or considered the threat of more wildfires,
the possible collapse of the Gulf Stream,
then remembered that in a few more minutes,
I’d have to climb down to the cellar and empty
the bucket I placed beneath a leaky pipe
that can’t be fixed until next week. How long
do any of us really have before the body
begins to break down and empty its mysteries
into the air? Oh honey, I said—for once
without a trace of irony or blush of shame—
the touch of my own hand on my chest
like that of a stranger, oddly comforting
in spite of the facts.

by James Crews

I was moved by the honesty in this poem, and could relate both to the potential cringe-worthiness of the word honey and the hand on heart. Learning to meet myself with gentleness wasn’t a straightforward undertaking, although so very much worth it! And I appreciate how some of us may have even more of a process with this than others, depending on social and cultural conditioning. And it felt like a gift to get a glimpse into the experience of the poet James Crews – who I came across as editor to the lovely anthology The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy.

The other thing I could really relate to in this poem, is how the worrying mind attaches itself to such a range of topics once it gets going, how everything becomes a source of concern. Ranging all the way from the huge and longterm to the very immediate, worry can be everywhere when in one mindstate, and pretty far in the background at another time. And how precious to be able to meet ourselves wherever on that sliding scale we find ourselves, showing up with oddly comforting expressions of sincere care…

PS if you want to learn to be there more for yourself, join our compassion course (hand on heart and ‘honey’ optional!)

Photo by Rich Font on Unsplash