Embodying a Compassionate State
Compassion Focused TherapySome of the interventions that we do in Compassion Focused Therapy involve being sensitive to cues in the body and in your environment when you're moving into a threatened mode of being or an overly competitive mode of being, and being able to respond by actually shifting your state, deliberately activating your capacity for compassion and courage and grounding so that you can sort of move between these algorithms in the mind and not just be enslaved by whatever your mind cooks up in response to the environment. So if I'm walking down the street and I have social anxiety and I'm afraid I'm going to look funny, I'm going to look bad, I can pause, notice what's happening in the body, notice how my whole being is organized by that perceived social threat, and realign my state of mind. Not just restructure my thoughts, not just hold my thoughts lightly, but activate an embodied motive to be sensitive to my own suffering and respond with wisdom and strength and commitment. When someone asks me how that works, I'm sort of embarrassed with choices for how we could discuss that.
We could talk about how that works in the body and how the polyvagal complex and our body's soothing system and the dynamics of secure attachment allow us to stabilize, to ground, and to be better able to respond with flexibility. So we could look at it how it works at the level of our biology and our neurophysiology. We could also look at how it works at the level of behavioral dynamics and how when people are responding with greater mindfulness and greater compassion for others and themselves, they're actually more psychologically flexible, so they're better able to move in the direction of their valued aims with decisiveness. And then we could also look at the outcome research. We could talk many, many different ways about how it works.
But there is a great understanding that from the day that you're born until the day that you die, the presence of compassion will affect you positively on every level, from your heart rate variability, to your immune system functioning, to your resistance to certain kind of, physical conditions and diseases, level of depression, in your level of social engagement. It's a very robust factor in how well we are able to be. Sort of, I I look at it as training in our ableness to be. That's how I think about compassion.