CPR: Compassion, Purpose, Risk

To find your way through your fear of this coronavirus you’ll need a strong and healthy heart. The heart is where we find compassion, direction, and courage. All three are required to sustain us in the darkest times.

When flooded with anxiety, though, we lose heart. We can become lost and frozen. A kind of heart attack ensues. We become gripped by worry, feeling more dead than alive.

To resuscitate this dying heart you’ll need to use CPR — Compassion, Purpose, and Risk

When you are feeling overwhelmed, lost, and afraid or when you are feeling like some essential part of you is in trouble, use this CPR acronym as a way to repair your broken heart.

C — Compassion

Love is the strongest medicine there is for fear and anxiety.

Compassion is nature’s Xanax. Nothing soothes quite like it. It works as well for the loudest cries of the newborn as it does for the quieter tears of any child, teen, or grown up. If you’ve witnessed a loving mother in action, you’ve seen this magic take place. There is real, and often immediate, comfort in being held, being touched, being loved, being seen.

It’s not surprising then that CPR begins here. Like access to an anchoring breath, always there to ground you, your ability to pause and find self compassion can be an essential tool to help you live alongside worry, anxiety, and fear.

Overwhelmed in a crisis, like we are now, powerfully negative and self critical feelings can take over. We can start to feel inadequate, cowardly, defective, insecure, and ashamed. Since these feelings are so uncomfortable, we tend to avoid and wall them off. That’s not good because then they attack us subtly from inside. They feed our cycles of anxiety and depression.

When you find yourself feeling broken, pause and bring an intention of kindness and compassion to your deepest pain. It might be hard to locate the pain at first. We often hide behind irritability, anger, or blame. If you are feeling these things, take a breath and reflect for a moment. Gently peal back your anger. Just a few layers down you’re likely to find a more vulnerable part of you, tired of fighting, that just wants to be accepted.

Self compassion is a challenge because while it’s easy to affirm the parts of ourselves we feel good about, it’s much harder to love the parts of ourself that we see as unlovable — but those are the parts that need your help the most right now!

So how do we do this?

If you’re struggling with this notion of self compassion, you might need a little help.

I encourage people to practice visualizing ‘images’ of love and compassion so that they can call on them when needed.

• Create in your mind’s eye a memory of compassion or love.

• Think of a time when you felt loved, held, supported. Think of a time when you gave love to another. How did it feel, what sensations did you experience in your body?

• If it’s hard right now to come up with an actual memory, you might imagine instead how you’d be there for a family member, a partner, a close friend in desperate need. How would that feel, what body sensations would you experience?

• For those who really struggle with self compassion, you might try visualizing a smaller (4 or 5 year old) version of yourself. It’s much easier to love something we see as more vulnerable and innocent. Imagine a time when that ‘younger you’ felt deeply wounded, alone, scared. What would you give to someone like that? How would you instinctively respond to the pain of that little you? My guess is you’d respond with love and compassion! Reflect on how this might feel and the sensations in your body.

• As you sit for a moment with these memories or images, focus on their felt sense and on how your body takes in these experiences of compassion. Your felt sense might one of acceptance, calm, kindness, allowance, affirmation, understanding. Your body might experience a kind of loosening, a relaxation, a warmth as you let go and as you feel held by love and compassion.

• Be creative and visualize this love as a kind of benevolent presence. Maybe it takes the shape of a cascading warmth; relaxing, holding, and enveloping you. See it perhaps as a bright and loving light, a serene picture from nature, the kind face of someone who loves you (past or present) who has a loving arm around you, maybe use the image of a spiritual/faith icon that’s important to you.

• Practice pausing, noticing your pain, then visualizing and calling on these soothing images in times of need.

Once you’ve gotten good at self compassion, it’s time to give some of that away!

I’m sure you’ve noticed there’s no shortage of need out there. It could be as close as your living room or as far away as the other side of the globe.

Love is so many things. It’s a feeling and an experience. It’s also an action. We love through acts of kindness. See a need, meet a need. Look around you and give wherever you can because the more you give, the more you receive in return.

Compassion can also be demonstrated less ‘actively’ with a few words of encouragement, a smile, a kind and quiet presence. Sometimes people just need a compassionate space where they can share their fear and pain. Your task here is to listen, validate and reflect what you hear, offering love and compassion though listening.

The last essential element of compassion is allowing love from others.

We often push away what we need the most. Afraid of being too needy or feeling too vulnerable we tend to hide away and not let those who are there for us give us the help we need.

In the same way that it is important for you to be there for yourself, and be there for others, it is also essential that you let in love and compassion from the real people in your life.

As noted above, love is calming and healing. Being loved by a close other can go a long way toward regulating your pandemic activated and out of whack nervous system. Love and compassion are the bedrock of attachment. Trusting and loving each other helps us emotionally regulate and helps us move forward, together.

P — Purpose

To get through anxious times, we also need to be able to take courageous action.

But what actions should we take exactly? In the absence of direction, we can act for the sake of acting (like mindlessly buying massive amounts of TP), more to distract us from our fears than anything else.

You can do better than that. In a crisis it’s more important than ever to take actions that are tied to the heart of who you are. Because feelings come and go, we can’t rely on emotion to motivate us. We are up one day, down the next. We need something more enduring.

To persevere over the long road ahead, you’ll need to live from the heart, from what gives your life value, meaning, and purpose.

It’s time to remind yourself, or maybe explore for the very first time, what your life is for in the first place. Getting in touch with what you value, what your purpose is leads you in the direction you need to go.

If you value family, then that will inform what you might do to make sure that they are taken care of materially, emotionally, even spiritually.

If you value patience then that will inform the way in which you go about the tasks of your day.

If you value equality and generosity then that might move you to see what you can do for those less fortunate in your own community.

If you value physical health then you might get out for a walk or a run.

Meaning and purpose can be the big existential “what’s this all about anyway” kind and the small “how should I live each day” kind. It’s important to be in touch with the deepest parts of your purpose and the more mundane.

Take a moment and write down what gives life purpose, value, and meaning in each of the categories below. Then rank order each of the categories. See if you can come up with some basic actions or goals that might be connected to what you find purposeful and valuable in each category. Compare those actions with the actions you are currently taking on a daily basis. Do they align? Are they drastically different?

1. Family

2. Romantic relationship

3. Friends/Community

4. Physical Health

5. Spiritual Health

6. Education

7. Job/Vocation

8. Recreation/Hobbies

9. Pets

10. National and global identity

11. Environmental

Living a purposeful life connected to your heart can be a powerful backdrop to each day. Reminding yourself when you feel fatigued of what you are living for, can give you the strength you need to get up and do it all again in spite of the challenges.

R — Risk

Even with compassion and purpose by your side, it’s still hard to move forward in the face of fear.  

We want to shelter in place emotionally, avoid what is uncomfortable, and hide out in the safest places. While this is a good anti-viral strategy for ‘flattening the curve’ of potential coronavirus damage, it’s not such a good strategy for learning how to live alongside your fear of the nasty virus in the first place.

Sometimes there is no way but through. That’s why risk is also a fundamental tool to help you through the darkest times. These aren’t reckless health risks I’m addressing here. These are the day to day risks you’ll need to take to stay engaged with life, family, and community.

Risk means that you’ve acknowledged that this new life can be scary but you are committing to moving forward anyway.

Risk means turning toward the things that scare you and not away from them. Avoidance stategies do not work well in normal times. They work even less well in times of crisis. If your head is in the sand you can’t see what needs to be done, you can’t see those who need your help, you can’t see those that are there to support you. Avoidance makes fears worse, not better.

Emotional and relational risk is important here too. We can’t get through this alone. In a crisis, it’s easy to get caught up with yourself and feel that if you admit your fear and vulnerability and share that with the people you are closest to, you’ll all collapse together. In my experience, it’s keeping this stuff in and then having it eventually spill out all over the place that is most alarming and unsettling to the people in your life. Sharing our fear and worry together helps us digest it together. We can do together what we can’t do alone.

CPR for your worried heart is about exercising compassion for yourself and others. It’s about finding purpose to strengthen your resolve and inform the actions you take. It’s about risking to stay engaged in life and with others.

CPR can help you move forward, not vanquishing fear, but living a brave, inspired, and heart healthy life in spite of it.