This Saturday (October 16th) we will be hosting a one-day meditation retreat on the practice of compassion.
Compassion – One-day Online Meditation Retreat
In this retreat, we’ll clarify what compassion is, how to cultivate it, and its benefits. More specifically, we’ll focus on how to use compassion meditation to help us heal our attachment conditioning and how compassion supports healthy relationships with others.
Moreover, in my view, developing compassion simply helps bring about adult emotional maturation process more quickly.
The technique that we’ll use is Tong Len, a Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist Meditation. Compassion is a universal virtue. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to do this practice.
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This program is suitable for beginners to meditation and healing work.
Meditation Technique
Tong Len is said to include all four four sublime emotions: Loving Kindness, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy, and Equanimity. It also is a training in the practice of generosity, ethics, tolerance, effort, concentration and wisdom, all at once.
Incorporation of the Schemas
More specifically, we’ll direct the compassion towards all those who (including ourselves) experience suffering around the five attachment Schemas described by Jeffrey Young (Schema Therapy).
They are:
- Abandonment and Instability
- Mistrust and Abuse
- Emotional Deprivation
- Defectiveness and Shame
- Social Isolation and Alienation
Relating to the Schemas to our lives
We will use the sentence stems to help us understand how these schemas color our view of ourselves and the world and how we then go about responding to these skewed ways of viewing:
- “When I am seeing the world from this schema I see myself like so……. (fill in the blank) and the world is like so…………(fill in the blank).”
- Seeing myself and the world this way I must respond in the following way…….(fill in the blank)
We will use the compassion practice to bring about emotionally corrective experiences that will generate a new more positive view of self, other, and world thereby healing the negative schema.
Mentalization
In addition to healing these schemas, the guided meditations will help us do perspective taking, helping us understand cause and effect. We’ll understand better how we fit in in the world and with others. We’ll see how the negative conditioning that brought on these schemas are common, and how we are not to blame.
Resistance
Resistance is a normal part of the healing process. We will learn to understand and value our own resistance, developing openness, and compassion towards it; not pushing it away.
Who is this for?
This program is for those of us who…
- Are looking to improve their psychological health, especially those who have tried other healing modalities with disappointing results.
- Have problems with exploration and self development, relationships and emotional regulation
- Want to optimise their psychological health
This program is adequate for beginners in meditation and healing work.