As we enter the New Year, let's make 2015 a year of exploring the many gifts from skilled researchers and clinicians which can support our resolution to live better. The participants of the Mindfulness-Based Symptom Management, Burnout Resilience and Pain Management programs at the Ottawa Mindfulness Clinic have one wish in common: a desire to find a [...]
Tag: compassion
An Ethical Path to Compassionate Community: The fire in the heart of mindfulness
(This is a transcript of talk given at the inaugural meeting of Mindfulness Ottawa, Ottawa ON 2012 November 21. The preliminary section on "laying down the path by walking" has been excluded.) Let me share here what we have distilled out of 10 years of our path - what Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi calls “one [...]
Mythbuster: What Mindfulness is Not
We're introducing a new series - Mindfulness Mythbusters - to go along with Tangled Thoughts and Frazzled Feelings. Newcomers to the practice of mindfulness have many terrific questions about what is supposed to happen in practice and, in this series, we will try to address some of them - without giving away any secrets of [...]
Compassion or “idiot” compassion?
Don’t Misinterpret!
Pema Chodron
Don’t impose the wrong notion of what harmony is, what compassion is, what patience is, what generosity is. Don’t misinterpret what these things really are. There is compassion and there is idiot compassion; there is patience and there is idiot patience; there is generosity and there is idiot generosity.
For example, trying to smooth everything out to avoid confrontation, not to rock the boat, is not what’s meant by compassion or patience. It’s what is meant by control. Then you are not trying to step into unknown territory, to find yourself more naked with less protection and therefore more in contact with reality. Instead, you use the idiot forms of compassion and so forth just to get ground.
When you open the door and invite in all sentient beings as your guests, you have to drop your agenda. Many different people come in. Just when you…
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Opening to Life – Book Review of Leaves Falling Gently by Susan Bauer-Wu
Leaves Falling Gently -Living fully with serious & life-limiting illness through mindfulness, compassion, & connectedness by Susan Bauer-Wu is a kind and inviting little book that makes facing our chronic or acute life-threatening illness easier to face. Bauer-Wu, an associate professor of nursing at Emory University, researches the effects of chronic stress from debilitating illness [...]
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