“If your compassion does not include yourself it is incomplete.” – Jack Kornfield
People who have difficulties with emotional aggression are generally people who care deeply about the people in their lives. They have the capacity to be very caring and compassionate people. Their emotional aggression is often the result of attempting to express their compassion in maladaptive ways. If you didn’t care about people, would there be any need to get all worked up in the first place? Would there be any need to act in emotionally aggressive ways about people you didn’t care about?
This is because the opposite of “compassion” isn’t anger or conflict. The opposite of compassion is apathy. If you didn’t care, there’d be nothing to be upset about.
Mindfulness-Based Ecotherapy is about learning to channel that passion in compassionate and productive ways rather than in destructive and emotionally aggressive ways. We do this by learning to focus on relationships in a compassionate way.
As Jack Kornfield reminds us, if our compassion does not include ourselves, then our compassion is incomplete. Being compassionate means learning to also be gentle with ourselves by realizing that we are entitled to make mistakes. Mistakes are opportunities for growth and learning. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that if you didn’t make mistakes, you’d never learn anything, because if you never made a mistake, it meant that you already knew what you were doing in the first place.
Compassion with Self and Others
To be compassionate with yourself as well as with others, learn to view mistakes as opportunities for growth rather than as opportunities to beat yourself (or others) up. When you make a mistake, focus on your intention in the situation. If, for example, your intention is to have a compassionate relationship with someone, but you make a mistake that doesn’t reflect that intention, regroup and try again. Return to your intention in the situation, apologize if necessary, correct the mistake if possible, learn from it, and continue in a more compassionate fashion.
The idea behind using Meme Triads is to move from a problem-focused paradigm to a solution-focused paradigm. One of the goals of Mindfulness-Based Ecotherapy is to begin to think in terms of solutions instead of in terms of problems. When we start thinking in terms of solutions, we begin to live with intention. We begin to live with compassion.
The power of intention is one of the skills of mindfulness, so by living deliberately and with intention, we move to a solution-focused paradigm.
Since emotional aggression is the result of maladaptive attempts to be compassionate with others, half of the battle is already won! If we weren’t concerned about the other people in our lives, we wouldn’t care how they felt, or how we felt after interacting with them. So the element of care and concern for others is already present when we act out of emotional aggression.
When we behave in emotionally aggressive ways, we are doing it because we care. It’s just that the way we have chosen to express that care and concern is actually having the opposite effect of the way we intended it. Mindfulness-Based Ecotherapy is a way to learn to express care and concern in positive ways rather than in ways that focus on the negatives.
The ultimate goal of Mindfulness-Based Ecotherapy is take the care and concern we feel for others and to focus on the positive by expressing that love in compassionate, rather than aggressive, ways. When we learn to do so without assumption and without judgment for self or others, we will have taken a giant step forward towards living fully in True Self.