Dear KOM-ers!
We’re so happy to feature a new book giveaway!
Please enjoy this excerpt from “Compassion Based Living Course” by Choden and Heather Regan-Addis.
There are 2 ways to enter to win a FREE copy:
- Leave a comment below with your email address (so we can contact you)
- Email us at KOMWriting@gmail.com with the Subject: Compassion Based Living Course giveaway entry
The winner will be randomly selected on 2/17/25 and announced on our website and social media. *
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This book is a practice-based approach to compassion meditation training that equips readers with skills to bring compassion directly into their everyday lives. It is part of the secular mindfulness tradition and a unique fusion of Buddhist, evolutionary, and psychological approaches to compassion, including insights from neuroscience. It is based on the authors’ experiences over the last decade of training hundreds of people in compassion meditation, including at the Master’s degree level. It proceeds gradually, building capacity in stages. It starts with mindfulness and proceeds to self-compassion and then compassion for others, with a final chapter focusing on socially engaged compassion.
Excerpt: The Mandala of Compassion: Chapter 9
The principle of mandala is used by many spiritual traditions to depict an experience of wholeness and balance. The basic meaning of ‘mandala’ is centre and periphery. It can be drawn as a circle and it refers an energy system with the centre point in the middle of the circle and the periphery lying on its circumference.
For the purposes of this chapter, we will draw on an understanding of mandala that has emerged within Tibetan Buddhism. Within this spiritual tradition there are many colourful paintings, or tangkas, that depict a meditation deity sitting in the middle of a square palace that is set within a circular mandala. These tangkas are adorned with richly textured colours that symbolise the powerful energies of the psyche that are going through a process of alchemy and transformation. The circumferences of some mandalas are depicted with fiery demons and wrathful energies that represent the conflict and drama that afflict so many of us as we navigate our way through everyday life.
In most cases the palace has four doorways that lead to the centre of the mandala. One interesting perspective is that the doorway to the centre represents one’s dominant emotional affliction. For example, if anger is our main stumbling block in life, then the instruction is to put all our focus on taming anger, and once transformed anger becomes the doorway to the centre. Therefore, anger is both a major obstacle and a big opportunity. It can condemn us to endless rounds on the wheel of cyclic existence or it can become the vehicle for awakening.
The deity sits at the centre of the palace on a throne. It represents our innermost capacity for wisdom and compassion. The panoply of deities in the Tibetan tradition symbolise the multiple manifestations of wisdom and compassion. In essence, however, the deity is our true identity once all our confusion and struggles have been peeled away. When we identify ourselves with the deity and hold the space at the centre of the mandala the world looks completely different. We see richness and abundance everywhere and we feel deeply connected to all of life.
This spiritual depiction of mandala has been adapted for our purpose and viewed in psychological terms. Choden spent some time working with Paul Gilbert and they developed a synthesis of the Tibetan Buddhist principle of mandala and the CFT notion of the compassionate self being the inner authority within the psyche that can hold and manage its conflicting parts such as the angry self, anxious self, sad self and so on. The diagram above is a depiction of the psychologised expression of the mandala principle.
From this perspective, the journey of the compassionate self is the journey to the centre of the mandala – to the centre point of one’s own energy system. And whilst the centre is still and calm, the periphery is stormy and wild. The image used is that of a turning wheel. The centre is still but the perimeter is always moving and turning.
The periphery is where our emotional life is played out. It is where the powerful emotions of anger, desire, jealousy, and greed are to be found. These emotions drive the wheel. From a Buddhist perspective, this is called the wheel of life – the endless cycle of conditioned existence (called samsara) that keeps on turning and generating suffering until we become free of it. From an evolutionary perspective, the periphery contains the powerful drives and emotions that have emerged through the process of natural selection and which impel us towards survival and procreation. Most of the time we find ourselves on the periphery caught up in the drama of our conflicting parts. Just bring to mind how you feel during the course of an average day: how you move from feeling anxious to angry to sad, and how these parts of you are often in conflict with each other. Sadly, many of us spend our whole lives ensnared in confusion and turmoil with only fleeting moments of peace.
But there is another possibility, and this is to find the centre of our personal mandala – to make the inner journey to the still point of stability and peace where we are not tossed and turned by our conflicting emotions. This is the journey of the compassionate self. Our task is to find our way to the centre and to relate to our life experience from this perspective. The implications of this are huge: we begin to live our lives from a very different vantage point within ourselves and we begin to see our own experience and that of others in a very different way.
Guided Practice – Compassionate Self with Mandala
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2c72i4wcj2ogaqknx5nox/Compassionate-Self-and-Mandala.m4a?rlkey=in6vv8r5bb95ibaia3sra3aon&e=1&st=xitmks0p&dl=0
* By entering this contest, you give consent to Kind Over Matter to use your name for promotional purposes on our website and on all social media.
NOTE: You can purchase this book from CollectiveInk or on Amazon.
