4 Practices To Becoming A "Better Human" & Living A More Wholehearted Life
I invite you to take a moment to think of who you might identify as a “better human.” What characteristics do they have? What is their outlook on life? What makes them a “better human” to you?
Now think about when you have felt like the “best” version of yourself? What were you thinking? What were the circumstances of your life? Who did you surround yourself with? How did you feel in your body? Your mind? Your heart?
Write it down and save it for later.
Definitions Matter
When I began to think about what makes us “better humans” I realized I needed to come up with a clear definition of what a “better human” entails.
As someone who questions the status quo, and is known to redefine words for greater meaning and alignment to our evolution, I came up with my own definition of a “better human.”
It is based off of my own personal experiences, professional study and the applications of transformative healing. I find it to be an ever evolving definition, and when you read it you may understand why that is.
My definition of a better human is…
“…a person who leans into a growth mindset, meaning someone who actively partakes in their life in both their internal and external reactions and responses with self reflection, personal accountability and with the aim to embody their highest good with compassionate curiosity and a willingness to learn, repair and live in right relationship. Becoming a better human wholeheartedly understands that embracing change is the essence of becoming one’s best Self.”
I have faith that my own definition of a “better human” will change.
For purposes of this article though, let’s stick with this one (for now, anyway).
But First, 4 Things to Know About the 4 Practices
They are not a new idea. Actually, they are very old and very wise — they are an on-going practice.
They interweave with one another and often have a symbiotic butterfly effect.
They are rooted in Buddhist philosophy, offering application and inner meditative practices to cultivate them.
Anyone can practice them without any association to a religious or spiritual philosophy or doctrine.
Chances are you are already aware of them, and probably have high regard to a few of them, if not all.
In addition, you may be surprised how much is jammed packed into these four practices I am about to share with you.
Ok. So what are they?
The Four Practices Are…
Loving Kindness
Compassion
Empathetic Joy
Equanimity
They are known as the Brahmaviharas (pronounced “bra-ma-vee-har-ahs”), or the four immeasurables, the four infinite states of mind or four virtues.
They are more important than you may realize because they remind us that we are all in constant relationship with one another. That my actions or inactions impact you.
That your actions or inactions impact me.
The four practices present us with an ethic of reciprocity. In a way, they can be a blueprint on how to live with personal accountability and in right relationship to all sentient beings.
To understand this better, I will share an overview of each and how to cultivate them, starting with loving-kindness.
Loving-kindness
Loving-kindness known as Mairti in Sanskrit and Metta in Pali, is a practice of generating within ourselves an emotional, mental, physical and spiritual kindness.
This is harder than most think.
For example, just notice how you respond to mistakes you have made. Is it in loving-kindness? What about when others make mistakes, loving-kindness? What about traffic, loving-kindness? You are running late, you stub your toe, drop your bag, spill on your shirt and have run out of gas, kindness? How about a first date, you say something vulnerable and the other person shuts down, loving-kindness towards yourself, towards the other person? What about when you lose your temper with your child or your co-worker, loving-kindness? Or you fail a test or lose the promotion, loving-kindness?
Our thoughts can be medicine or poison.
How we think matters.
Even if no one else hears it, we do — our bodies do.
Our Souls do.
The practice of generating loving-kindness is not about niceties or acting out "being nice." It is about the genuine honest goodness of kindness and love from an open heart. Saying one thing that comes off as kind, but not feeling it, is not kind.
That is playing nice — acting a part to belong or fit in.
Nice is a dangerous zone.
Kind is an authentic action.
Learn to know the difference and your whole self awareness will shift.
Your relationships too.
How To Practice Loving-kindness
The practice of loving kindness begins with oneself.
In his book, “The Four Immeasurables: Practices To Open The Heart,” B. Alan Wallace says that,
“Loving-kindness entails a heartfelt yearning that the person, or sentient being, whom we bring to mind might be well and happy. Just that: be well and happy. May this person’s desires and yearnings be fulfilled. May this person find happiness.”
We aren’t always feeling or thinking this way though, are we?
A great place to start cultivating more loving-kindness is by becoming aware of your reactions, and acknowledging any patterns and thoughts that are harmful towards yourself or others.
Those negative thoughts just don’t magically appear when you become aware of them.
They have an origin point that has a past narrative and a vibrational experience stored in your body. Gaining clarity in safe places (with a skilled practitioner), can allow you to unwind from the negative patterns, to restructure your thinking mind, and align to a more genuine and open heart.
Learn to cultivate loving-kindness in your thoughts and actions to yourself and to others and your life will become more peaceful and wholesome.
I am not saying the road won’t be bumpy.
It will.
That is why we also need compassion. In fact, the practice of loving-kindness supports the practice of compassion and vice-versa.
Compassion
Compassion literally means “to suffer together.”
You probably weren't expecting that, eh?
Among emotion researchers, compassion is defined as the feeling that arises when you are confronted with another's suffering and feel motivated to relieve that suffering.
From the Buddhist perceptive, compassion, Karuna in Sanskrit, translates to kindness. Meaning, if I have a sense of kindness towards myself, I don’t want others to suffer.
In the practice of compassion there is an implication of caring tremendously about the suffering of others, as if it were your own. In English, it can best be described as “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.” However, compassion is not the same as empathy or altruism, even though the concepts are related.
This gets a little tricky when it may not feel possible to have compassion because each of our experiences, and how we process them, is unique.
And in some situations, we will never know the felt experience of what someone else is moving through or went through. But that doesn’t mean we cannot grow wider pockets of compassion. There is a nuance and practice to expanding the reservoir of compassion.
How do we cultivate compassion when we don’t understand someone’s suffering or experience?
Wallace shares that,
“Just as loving-kindness is the heart that longs for the well-being of oneself and others, the nature of compassion is simply the heartfelt yearning: 'May we all be free of suffering and the sources of suffering.’
Compassion is knowing that the suffering doesn’t have to be this way.
Compassion recognizes that the suffering isn’t permanent, bringing forth the vision that suffering does not have to be attached to your existence.
You can be free.
We can all be free.
In the book “Wake Up To Your Life” by Ken McLeon, he shares that “compassion especially applies in situations when no good solution exists.”
Compassion is the action of seeing the suffering, and learning how to hold the suffering with tenderness, and not losing ourselves in it.
Wallace breaks it down in simpler terms stating that loving-kindness focuses on the possibility and positive while compassion addresses the negative side.
In this sense, compassion is the practice of turning towards the suffering for healing. The interwoven fabric of loving-kindness and compassion work together to support the understanding of how to sit with the suffering, or see clearly the negative pattern or thought process so it may alchemize.
This could also be known as compassionate validation.
We may not always understand someone else’s feelings or experience, but that does not mean we cannot learn how to cultivate a general openness towards their well being, and an open heart to our shared humanity.
How To Practice Compassion
We cannot force ourselves to have compassion towards ourselves or others when it is genuinely not there.
What we can do is look at the places when the antagonist of compassion arises within us — we can look at the part of us that is cruel towards ourselves or towards others.
We can look at how we react to our own suffering and to the suffering of the world.
Curating compassion, like loving-kindness, starts with oneself.
In Depth Hypnosis, we resource a safe space within from connecting to a compassionate part of you, your inner wisdom, to reconnect and deepen your relationship to your higher Self.
This part of you supports the integration of compassion to hold the harmful and suffering parts of you or others for healing.
Gaining clarity on the negative thoughts, patterns and hurtful mindset, with a more embodied understanding of compassion, becomes a beacon for transformation.Without bringing awareness with compassion to the suffering, the charge or pattern continues to etch itself into our consciousness. This is a nervous system safety mechanism that actually pulls us further from an open heart and loving-kindness.
McLeod states,
“Compassion practice is difficult, and you will almost certainly shed tears in the process. Tears mean that you are taking the practice to heart.”
He goes on to speak to our own impulses that block and hinder the practice of compassion for ourselves and for others.
“When the impulse to help comes from your own discomfort, you are reacting, not responding, to the pain of the person. You tend to override the needs or wishes of the person in pain, take control, and become something of a tyrant. If you are unable to do anything, you collapse into helplessness, withdraw from the situation physically and emotionally, and see yourself as a victim of the other person’s misfortune and pain.
The practice of compassion doesn’t allow for any of these exits.”
I have found that much of the practice of compassion is about accepting the pain of our lives as it is and not trying to get away from it, run from it or mutate it into something else.
From a place of truly acknowledging the pattern or pain, we can gain agency to make change.
We need a held space to learn how to do this — to know how to feel safe to feel our pain.
We can begin to learn how to feel the depth of grief that is woven into the pain of our healing, and we can enter into our hearts. In fact, the further away we are from our heart, the more disconnected we are, and the deeper the negative patterns become. The distance grows, and our focus is farther away from knowing and experiencing emphathetic joy for ourselves and for others.
This brings us to the next practice.
Empathetic Joy (Mudita)
There is a saying that “comparison is the thief of joy.”
I used to teach about this in my yoga workshops and classes. My intention to teaching it then still remains today — to bring to light and clear the hidden nuggets of cruelty within.
For example,
Think of someone in your life whom you feel competitive.
Now, imagine that this person is happy with the joy that comes from what they are doing. Imagine they are doing it really well and succeeding at it.
Notice within yourself, does judgement or criticism arise?
Notice if you want to mimic them or be like them, noting what they say and do and take it on as your own? Do you adopt the same likes and dislikes in the hopes to enjoy the same type of joy or fulfillment as them?
Do you push against their happiness and success, want to go a different way, your own way to show everyone you can make it too?
Notice if you place this person on a pedestal or idolize them as if you could never be where they are.
Notice if you worship them or have a desire to be in their life so somehow you are better or more worthwhile as a person.
Notice if envy or jealously arises; comparison. “They made it, but I did not.”
Do you feel the world is unfair?
Notice your reactions.
All these reactions separate us from being with the other person in their joy and happiness, and inevitably it also disconnects us from our own innate joy. The Antidote?
The direct antidote for jealousy is empathetic joy.
We need to learn what within ourselves is causing an impasse for curating a genuine happiness for another, or for ourselves.
By looking at your shadow or painful “dark” parts with loving-kindness and compassion you can learn to cleanse your mind and return to the healing medicine of your heart, deepening compassionate curiosity and truly celebrating life.
You can also practice by looking at the wholesome goodness that is in your life and rejoicing in it. For some people this is hard to do, which opens up an opportunity to understand where you may be knowingly or unknowingly stealing your own inner joy.
In the upcoming Summer Sessions of Sacred Journey, we will unpack our relationship to empathetic joy with education, meditative journeys and ample reflection time to integrate the work and practices. The inquiry above was just a small snippet into what we will explore in this season of Sacred Journey.
Final Thoughts On Empathetic Joy
Unraveling the blocks to empathetic joy is in the observations of your reactions to the success and happiness of others, and the way you are in relationship to joy.
McLeon shares, “you can learn about the expectations you have about who and what you ‘should’ be” from this practice. As we hold ourselves in the tenderness of loving-kindness we can begin to see more clearly from a compassionate heart where we are and where we are not aligned to our highest Self and inner wisdom, the “better human” within.
We cannot change what we do not know to be creating our own suffering.
As we begin to see and understand our underlying reactions to the attachments, aversions and mis-knowings about ourselves and the world, we can open ourselves up to the final practice, that of equanimity.
Equanimity
Equanimity is the practice and understanding of how to see life and people in our life, and our circumstances, free from the distortion of our internal representations. It is about becoming clear to our reactive confusion of our attachments, aversions and misconceptions or indifferences.
“To cultivate equanimity we practice catching ourselves when we feel attraction or aversion, before it hardens into grasping or negativity.”
-Pema Chodron
Equanimity is seeing things as they are, not as we are or think they are.
This is a very discerning practice.
The Sanskrit word for equanimity is Upeksha and Upekkha in Pali. It translates to mean equanimity, non-attachment, even-mindedness or letting go.
When we touch equanimity we know that like us, everyone just wants to be happy, free and not suffer. We realize and hold a knowing within that we are all in this giant web together, and as Ram Dass said, “we are all just walking each other home.”
In the practice of equanimity, we can come to a place of innately knowing and feeling the joy of letting go of our own suffering (even if only for a moment).
We see life as a grand opportunity to be present for, and have an open heart and a willingness to understand, learn and grow with compassion.
McLeon shares,
“Equanimity is uncovered when the spectrum of emotional reaction based on attachment, aversion and indifference collapses. You see people without the filter of your own reactions.”
Imagine…
What if more people embodied these practices?
What would it feel like to be in relationship with one another with open hearts to learn, with less reactions driving thoughts and words, and more compassionate curiosity as a genuine interest?
What if we paused more, gave ourselves permission to know our inner world upon our triggers and could speak clearly without our wounded agendas?
What if we called upon these ancient practices, states of mind, these virtues to support our endeavor to return to our highest good and Self, over and over?
What if we knew that there are safe spaces to arrive as we are, offering gentle guidance to the unwinding and remembering of our authentic and innate goodness — to reclaim the “better human” inside.
The 4 Practices Lift Up Humanity
Taking steps to practice, integrate and embody the four immeasurables is a part of wholehearted living and loving or as the title of this article says, becoming a “better” human.
If you are reading this, you have taken a great step of action for yourself and for the world.
I invite you to explore your own understanding of the four practices: loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy and equanimity.
What would it be like to bring the practices into your own language and faith, and learn your own unique way to embody the efforts as a practice for your life?
Feel free to share in the comments.
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Much Love,
Kristina Renée