The school shooting at Marshall County High School in Kentucky was our nation’s 11th this year. It happened on January 23rd. And now our hearts break again with the horror of yet another school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

I remember when school shootings were rare. Now, it seems we have become numb to these kinds of unthinkable events.

There is a well-known Buddhist story of a ruthless murderer, Angulimala. When he grew up, he was quite well behaved, studious and intelligent. He went off to study and became his teacher’s favorite student. The other students became jealous and plotted against him, telling the teacher that he was out to get him. His frightened teacher, trying to get rid of him, gave him an assignment to bring him 1000 human fingers.

Due to the bullying and other factors, Angulimala’s darker tendencies emerged and he began a horrible killing spree. If you can imagine this—he wore a necklace strung with the fingers of all the people that he had killed.

Such a person would seem irredeemable.

However, in this myth by virtue of the power of the Buddha’s compassionate presence, Angulimala manages to see what he’s done, repents, changes his life, and is redeemed.

Perhaps we can only imagine in our mind’s eye, or in our heart’s eye, encountering a person who would have such a powerfully good heart that just being in their presence would inspire us to change our lives. Such a thing may seem impossible, that you would encounter a person that suddenly sees your life, and on that occasion, you would be sincerely willing to change your life completely. But it is not.

Compassion arises as a direct and appropriate response to suffering.

Now, there is no shortage of human suffering in our world. Disease, war, famine, poverty, fear and now school shootings. Each of us experiences pain. And, so it is reasonable to ask: if compassion arises as a response to suffering and there is so much suffering, why isn’t there more compassion?

Perhaps because we rarely allow ourselves to actually face the suffering directly. We are “masters of distraction”. To a great extent, this is our primary human practice. A large portion of our day is consumed with activities that are attempts to protect ourselves from discomfort, pain, and suffering.

Compassion has a direct and integral relationship with suffering. No contact with our suffering, not much compassion.

The willingness to face suffering can give rise to compassion. Sometimes then, reading the newspaper is an act of compassion.

We usually only learn of the devastation caused by school shootings. And this is the most common outcome. For me, it is one of our worst national horrors. Still, I have made a point of reading the reports of the incidents—all that I can find.

Back in 2006, Jencie Fagan, a Nevada gym teacher, risked her own life to stop a fourteen-year-old boy who came to school one day with a handgun. He walked into the school and fired three shots. The first bullet struck another boy in the upper arm. A girl was hurt when the second bullet ricocheted off the floor, burying itself in her knee. The third shot thankfully did not hit anyone.

Jencie calmly approached the boy, walking right up to face him and his gun. After talking with him for a while, she persuaded him to drop his gun. This is where the courage of the warrior would have stopped with an undeniably brave act, and one that almost certainly saved lives.

But Jencie demonstrated the courage of the strong heart when she then surprised everyone by hugging the shooter. She reassured the young boy that she would not leave him alone. She would accompany him to the station and throughout his legal process to make sure that he was safe and to ensure that the police didn’t hurt him.

Later, when asked why she had acted so compassionately toward the shooter, Jencie, who is a mother herself, replied, “I think anybody else would have done it. I look at the students as if they’re my own.”

Another shooting incident happened at Taft Union High School outside Bakersfield, California. One student was shot and is in critical condition. But a 40-year-old teacher named Ryan Heber stood in the classroom face-to-face with his 16-year-old student, who was holding a shotgun. Ryan had no idea whether the student—whose pockets were filled with ammunition—would put the gun down or pull the trigger. Eventually, the teen released the gun, and police took him into custody.

The teacher’s father, David Heber, was interviewed after this incident. This is what he said about his son, Ryan. “Because he knows the boy and the boy knows him … I attribute that to why the boy talked to and listened to my son. It’s all about kindness. It’s all about my son being kind and caring about his students.”

“Because he knows the boy and the boy knows him.”

Legislation for gun control and better mental health services are absolutely essential. We need to provide support rather than stigmatizing and further isolating those at risk for dangerous behavior. (Read this story shared with me by the editors of Spirituality & Health. It’s about how a teacher found a way to reach out.) People are foolish if they believe that these measures are not necessary. So is fearless compassion a necessity. So is knowing our neighbors and our neighbor’s kids and how they are hurting and why they are hurting.

Mindfulness is a straightforward enough word. It means the mind is fully attending to what is happening, to what you are working on, to the person you are listening to, the surroundings you are moving through. It is a basic human capacity.

Yet it is often elusive. Our mindfulness can slip away in an instant. We get lost in distraction, caught up in obsessive thoughts, consumed by worry, planning, fantasizing, comparing or judging. Even in the middle of activities that we love, like eating a great meal, being in nature or engaged in a sexual act, mindfulness seems to evaporate. It slips away and we find ourselves living in our story rather than our direct experience. Mindfulness is simple but not easy.

Many years ago, I was invited teach meditation at my daughter’s Catholic school. I was to meet with several eighth-grade religion classes over the course of a day.

When the first class arrived, I asked them to settle into their seats, close their eyes and begin to focus their attention on the breath. I proceeded to offer fairly, traditional meditation instruction.

It went over like a lead balloon. There wasn’t a single question or comment at the end of the meditation class. With the second class, I knew I would need a different and more engaging approach. I suggested that they begin by arranging their desks into pairs ideally with someone they liked. Then I began the new meditation instruction.

“Today, I would like to teach you how to kiss really well.” The normally apathetic eighth-graders lifted their heads and their eyes got wide as saucers. The teacher in the back of the room looked a bit alarmed and began to clear his throat to get my attention.

I continued, “When you’re kissing somebody you want to be there for the experience. You don’t want the other person looking out the window. You don’t want to be checking your phone for texts.”

“A kiss is an intimate act. At its best, it engages all of your senses. You want to be able to see, hear, smell, taste and touch in ways that are vivid, fresh and alive. Ideally you want to feel your heart fully and observe your mind with curiosity. It’s unlikely you will be able to open to these experiences if you haven’t cultivated the habit of attention. We have to learn to kiss the moment.”

As you might imagine the students became much more interested in the meditation. Now, with an inspired intention they were genuinely motivated to engage in the practice. Word spread through the school that the eighth-graders should be sure to attend the religion class taught by a rather unique guest teacher.

Mindfulness is a capacity of mind to collect, gather and attend to given object. Meditation is a way that we cultivate that capacity. It’s much like going to the gym to keep our bodies fit or showering keep ourselves clean. Mindfulness meditation is good mental hygiene.

Mindfulness is an important aspect of meditation practice, but don’t objectify it. Don’t make it into a big something that you aren’t doing right. Don’t expect magic to happen when you do get it right.

Idealism is one of the occupational hazards of the spiritual path. It can be the death of any practice. When we create a spiritual ideal, we hold tight to some vision of where we think we should be, then we use that idea to not be where we are.

Keep it simple.

When I get up in the morning and brush my teeth. If I don’t I stink. It’s not so different with meditation. If I don’t do it regularly, I stink or at least meet my day and perform my tasks in a habitual way.

Let’s clear up a few misconceptions about meditation that get in the way of practice.

1. Mindfulness doesn’t take more time. Being mindless takes more time. Mindfulness is not time consuming it is time enhancing. It’s not about adding another activity to your life. It’s about bringing more attention to your life.

2. Mindfulness meditation isn’t about shaving your head or wearing saffron robes or adapting a religious belief system. Mindfulness meditation asks that you pay attention to your direct experience and learn from what you observe, feel and sense.

3. Meditation is not a cure-all. Even when we practice mindfulness regularly, we can be insightful about certain aspects of our lives and blind to others. I know experienced meditators who are highly attuned to their bodies, but out of touch with their emotional lives. I know others who understand the mind, but completely ignore their bodies. I can think of longtime practitioners who are able to sit in silence for days, but have limited interpersonal skills. Still others have a universal love for all beings, but are unable to love themselves or others in a personal way.

4. Mindfulness is not just inward looking. It can guide our outward actions. Clear comprehension illuminates how our relationship to our experience can either cause suffering or cultivate wisdom. This enables us to nurture a different, more helpful response the next time we encounter a challenging situation, person, or thought. It helps us to remain calm and grounded when in the midst of an argument with a child, neighbor, boss, or partner; when we confront illness; when we face loss. We can draw on our cultivated tranquility and access a wiser inner guidance.

When we gather our attention onto a particular object or experience and stay with it as it changes, we develop concentration and a certain mental pliancy. The growing stability of mindfulness predisposes us to move beyond superficiality, to penetrate experience and investigate it in order to have a deeper understanding.

The breath invites us to rest, restore, and be revitalized. We unhook ourselves from the daily frenzy and bring into balance the instinctive tendency to fight, flight, or freeze.

The breath invites us into the body. John O’Donohue, the wonderful, wild Irish poet, once wrote, “We need to come home to the temple of our senses. Our bodies know that they belong… it is our minds that make us homeless.”

We come home as we sense the breath’s texture, rhythm, and pace, the differing length of each inhale and exhale. With time and practice, we learn to align with the breath and move with it, to allow the breath its own natural depth and flow. Every breath takes us to where we belong. As we relinquish command of it, we gradually feel the breath breathing us. This is good training for releasing control of and understanding how to cooperate with life.

A few years ago, I suffered a heart attack that required emergency triple bypass surgery. I have companioned many people through their illness and death. Yet, I discovered that the view from the other side of the sheets is very different.

At one point in the hospital, after surgery, I lost my stability. I couldn’t concentrate. My mind was like a barking junkyard dog. I got swept up in the fear, the pain and dependency. The mind, heart and body became so confused. Perhaps like lots of other patients I started identifying with the anxiety, with my shrinking world. I felt myself getting smaller and smaller.

Hospitals have a fix it mentality. They are environments of expectation. There is a protocol for everything and a plan to move you through the anticipated process. Some of this is necessary and essential to recovery. Without it I would not be here today to write this article. However, the emphasis is completely future-oriented. Immersed in such conditions, I found it difficult to stay present. Gradually I got swept up in solution consciousness and joined with the predominant mindset of evaluating my state of being by some external measures. It was a hell realm.

Too often, caregivers tend to amplify the patient’s fear or exacerbate the condition of confusion by focusing exclusively on problem solving. In so doing, they may intensify the contraction. Soon, just as I had, the patient loses contact with their innate resourcefulness.

No one asked me how I felt—only where my pain was on a scale of 1-10. Did I have a bowel movement yet? Was I doing my breathing exercises?

I was touched all the time, but rarely was that touch felt as healing. Mostly I was “monitored”. I’m sad to say that my caregivers had more of relationship with the device they were using then they did with me. The staff was so unmercifully driven by tasks and expectations and their anxiety over not being able to manage those tasks got passed on to me.

There is a lot of fear around going toward suffering. We’re afraid we’ll get overwhelmed. Compassion is the antidote to this fear. Compassion enables care profoundly without becoming overwhelmed. Compassion has no agenda, no judgments, no shoulds. We cannot help a person if we are trying to change them. So, compassion expresses the gentleness, the kindness necessary for our heart, our soul to relax, to trust, to open to suffering. Without compassion, caregiving becomes a series of mechanical, technological efforts that exhaust everyone and heals no one.

In caring for someone who is sick we use the strength of our arms and backs to move a patient from the bed to the commode. We lend the patient our bodies. We can also lend patients the concentration of our minds, the fearlessness of our hearts. We can be a reminder of stability and confidence. We can expand our heart in such a way that it can inspire the individual who is struggling to do likewise. Then we become a true compassionate refuge. Our presence restores trust in the patient’s own capacity to heal.

I don’t heal because my problems are being solved. I heal by reconnecting with what I may have lost in the fear and contraction of illness. The dynamic companionship of compassion breeds courage and allows me to go toward and learn from the suffering I might otherwise try to avoid. That’s how we restore wholeness.

If we are wedded to our role as a helper, using only our strength and expertise, we may inadvertently cause the patient to feel weak and helpless. If we are occupied with only fixing problems without attending to the whole person, we may be encouraging the person to see themselves as broken.

Whereas, if we can attend to this person as intrinsically whole, they can contribute to their own healing. As caregivers, we need to be more than problem solvers. We need to be portals to a larger possibility.

My two-cents on supporting people who are sick?

Love them.

Help them to embrace and love the obstacles in front of them.

That will lead them back to what they feel most disconnected from—and that is the true source of their healing.

Mirrors reflect the truth of what strikes their surface. The eyes of a dying patient are the clearest mirrors I have ever known. In their gaze, there is simply no place to hide. Over the years, the habits of my life have been reflected in those eyes.

Once while washing the back of a hospice patient named Joe he turned toward me and said, “I never thought it would be like this.” I asked what he had thought it might be like. He answered, “I guess I never really thought about it.” Death had taken him by surprise. Perhaps we are not so different.

In the sacred, Hindu epic poem the Mahabharata there is a question that speaks to this tendency. “In all of the worlds what is most wondrous?” The answer that is given is; “That no man no woman though they see people dying all around them believes it will happen to them.”

We make an enormous effort to keep death at arms-length. We spend more than 50% of our healthcare dollars in the final six months of life, literally throwing money at death. We shut away our elders in nursing homes to avoid confronting their pain and our destiny. We have a multi-billion-dollar cosmetics industry that tries to keep us all looking young. We even put rouge on people in the coffin.

Death is the fulcrum issue of our life and yet we can barely use the word. People don’t die they “pass away” or they “expire” like credit cards. We make plans for all sorts of activities; when to get married, the number of children we will have, where to go on vacation, which career moves to make or how we will spend our retirement—all of which may never happen. But death, the one event that is certain to occur, barely receives a sidelong glance.

Dying is at its heart a sacred act; it is itself a time, a space, and process of surrender and transformation. The sacred is not separate or different from all things, but rather hidden in all things. Dying is an opportunity to uncover what is hidden.

Walking the gauntlet of thirty beds on the long single hospice ward at Laguna Honda Hospital, I noticed Isaiah out of the corner of my eye. An African-American man raised in Mississippi, Isaiah was actively dying. His breathing was labored, and he was sweating up a storm. I sat down next to him.

     “You look like you’re working really hard,” I said.

     Isaiah raised his arm, pointed to the distance, and said, “Just gotta get there.”

     “I forgot my glasses. I can’t see that far in the distance. Tell me what you see.”

     Isaiah described a bright green pasture and a long hill leading to a grassy plateau.

     I asked, “If I promise to keep up, can I come?”

He grabbed my hand tight, and Isaiah and I started climbing together. His breathing got shorter, and he perspired more with every step. It was a long walk. Not an easy one.

     “What else do you see?” I asked.

He described a one-room red schoolhouse with three steps leading up to a door.

My training informed me that Isaiah was disoriented to time and location. I could have told the old man that his visions were likely being caused by brain metastasis and morphine. I could have reminded him that we were in a ward at Laguna Honda Hospital. But that was only true on the most superficial level.

The deeper truth was that we were walking to a little red schoolhouse.

     I asked, “Do you want to go in?”

     Isaiah sighed. “Yeah. I’ve been waitin’.”

     “Can I go with you?” I asked.

     “Nope.”

     “Okay, then, you go,” I said.

A few minutes later, Isaiah died quite peacefully.

The great spiritual and religious traditions have any number of names for the unnamable: the Absolute, God, Buddha Nature, True Self. All these names are too small. In fact, all names are too small. They are fingers pointing at the moon. I invite you to connect with what you know and trust most in your heart of hearts.

I use the simple term Being to point at that which is deeper and more expansive than our personalities. At the heart of all spiritual teachings is the understanding that this Being is our most fundamental and benevolent nature. Our normal sense of self, our usual way of experiencing life, is learned. The conditioning that occurs as we grow and develop can obscure our innate goodness.

Some part of us, deep in our hearts has known this truth. If not, we would not long for a return to it. And this part of our being knows that we will never be satisfied until our whole being is immersed in this oneness.

No one alive really understands death. But as one woman who was close to death once told me, “I see the exit signs much clearer than you do.” In a way, nothing can prepare you for death. Yet everything that you have done in your life, everything that has been done to you, and what you have learned from it all can help.

Death and I have been longtime companions. My mother died when I was a teenager and my father just a few years later. But I had lost them years before the events of their deaths. They were both alcoholics, and so my childhood was characterized by years of chaos, neglect, violence, misguided loyalty, guilt, and shame. I became adept at walking on eggshells, being my mother’s confidant, finding hidden liquor bottles, clashing with my father, keeping secrets, and growing up too quickly. So in a way, their deaths came as a relief. My suffering was a sword that cut two ways. I grew up feeling ashamed, frightened, lonely, and unlovable. Yet that same suffering helped me to empathetically connect with others’ pain, and that became part of my calling—for more than 30 years I’ve provided end-of-life care for patients and taught a contemplative approach to death through Zen Hospice Project, which I am co-founder of.

Buddhist practice, with its emphasis on openness, wisdom, compassion and impermanence, was an early and important influence for me. Facing death is considered fundamental in the Buddhist tradition. It can mature wisdom and compassion, and strengthen our commitment to awakening. Death is seen as a final stage of growth. Through the application of the teachings below, I learned not to be incapacitated by the suffering of my earlier life, but rather to allow it to form the ground of compassion within me.

OPENNESS

In the Buddhist way of thinking, openness is one of the key characteristics of an awake and curious mind. It does not determine reality, it discovers it. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the charismatic Tibetan Buddhist teacher, spoke of the heart of Buddhist practice as that of “complete openness.” He described this openness as “a willingness to look into whatever arises, to work with it, and to relate to it as part of the overall process…It is a larger way of thinking, a greater way of viewing things, as opposed to being petty, finicky.”

Openness doesn’t reject or get attached to a particular experience or view. We cannot be free if we are rejecting any part of our experience. Instead we can cultivate a spacious, undefended, non-biased allowing. We can meet each new experience with fresh eyes. Openness is the nature of awareness itself, and that nature allows experience to unfold.

This openness welcomes paradox and contradiction. It permits whatever emerges to emerge. Openness means keeping our minds and hearts available to new information, experiences, and opportunities for growth. It means having tolerance for the unknown. Openness is not passive. It means we are receptive, ready and free for engagement. As James Baldwin once said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

WISDOM AND COMPASSION

In Buddhism, wisdom and compassion are spoken of metaphorically as the two great wings of our practice. If the balance between the two is underdeveloped or immature, we cannot take flight and find freedom. Attempts at compassion without wisdom easily become sentimental and mushy. Attempts at wisdom without compassion can seem cold, indifferent, and cerebral.

The wisdom that gives rise to compassion is the clear understanding of our interdependence. We are each exquisitely unique and differentiated yet not fundamentally separate. When we release ourselves from a narrow sense of separateness, we open to a wider worldview. One that wisely appreciates that we are not alone, nor can we manage this life alone.

People don’t usually think they possess wisdom. They believe it is something you must acquire over the course of a lifetime through experience. It’s true, there is an analytical wisdom that needs to be trained and developed over time. But we also have an innate wisdom. If we listen carefully we can attune to this self-revealing wisdom-nature through mindfulness meditation. Living an authentic life requires trust in a deep inner wisdom and the willingness to bring it into conscious and compassionate action.

IMPERMANENCE

Impermanence is an essential truth woven into the very fabric of existence. It is inescapable, perfectly natural, and our most constant companion.

Considering the impermanence of life, its constant change, gives us perspective. As we come in contact with life’s precarious nature, we also come to appreciate its preciousness. Then we don’t want to waste a minute. We want to enter our lives fully and use them in a responsible way. Death is a good companion on the road to living well and dying without regret.

An acceptance of impermanence helps us learn how to die. It also reveals the flip side of loss, which is that letting go is an act of generosity. We let go of old grudges, and give ourselves peace. We let go of fixed views, and give ourselves to not knowing. We let go of self-sufficiency and give ourselves to the care of others. We let go of clinging and give ourselves to gratitude. We let go of control and give ourselves to surrender.

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Death comes to all. Whether we like that fact or not, it is certain to happen. Instead of avoiding this truth, it is useful turn toward it and see what it has to teach us about living. Facing our own mortality can shift our priorities and values, and profoundly change our views of reality. When people know they are going to die, that last year of their life is frequently the most loving, most caring, most awake year.

In Buddhism, the reflection on our mortality is a key component of spiritual practice. It is not seen as an ideology to be adopted as a protection against death. Rather, it is an opportunity to become more intimate with death as an inevitable part of life. While such reflections may seem morbid to some, I have found the practice of cultivating a wise openness to death to be life affirming. The value of these reflections is that we see how our ideas and beliefs about death are affecting us right here, right now.

The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.  — Peggy O’Mara

No matter how you try, you can’t please your inner critic.

There is no fooling it. The critic knows your every move, every trick up your sleeve, every bit of your past. It has been right there with you throughout your life. You shower with it. Take it to work. It sits next to you at every meal and even sticks around for dessert. It’s there during and after sex. And yes, it’s even there when you are dying — something I’ve learned over the past thirty years as I have sat on the precipice of death with a few thousand people.

Your inner critic compares, praises, devalues, diminishes, invalidates, blames, approves, condemns, and attacks your appearance, job performance, the way you conduct relationships, your friends, your health, your diet, your hopes and dreams, your thoughts, and your spiritual development. Pick something, anything, as it is all interchangeable. Let’s face it: in the critic’s eyes, nothing you do is good enough.

The critic is the enforcer, demanding compliance to an acquired set of standards and moral codes. It’s the voice that says, “My way or the highway.” And it wields brutally its chosen weapons of fear, shame, and guilt in order to get you to do what it wants.

Often in our most vulnerable moments, when we would benefit from tenderness, we club ourselves with self-judgment. Even near the end of life, it is common for people to look back with regret, to become obsessed with “if only” conversations, or to tell themselves that they aren’t doing a good job of dying. Friends and relatives add to the pile of guilt by projecting their own inner critic’s voice onto the person who is dying, suggesting that he should try harder or she should let go more gracefully.

The inner critic is ambivalent about change, shifts in identity, creativity, and inner work, and it is downright terrified of anything bubbling up from the unconscious. The judge prefers status quo, the familiar, the predictable. It insists on homeostasis. “Don’t rock the boat,” it advises. “It’s not safe.”

That’s why focusing on self-improvement or making any attempt to fix what the critic views as “the problem” never works. In seeking the approval of others, conforming to an external standard, and trying to please, we are looking for love in all the wrong places. Praise and blame are symptoms of an infectious disease. And as with any illness, we need to do more than treat the symptoms; we have to address the underlying causes. We need to go to the heart of the matter. We need to see how the habit of constant self-judgment diminishes our life force, steals our inner peace, and crushes our souls.

The pursuit of perfection is learned early on and, for most of us, becomes a lifelong addiction. It is an ego-based quest that easily can eclipse the soul’s journey to wholeness. This is why, in order to bring our whole self to the experience, we must address the often unconscious, corrosive voice of the inner critic. It is the primary obstacle to self-acceptance, trust, and the expansion of our dynamic potential. It stops all growth, arrests inner development, steals our power, and makes negative self-talk the norm. Furthermore, the judge impedes our ability to connect and empathize with other people. Chances are if you’re extremely critical of yourself, you’ll be a harsh critic of others. You may think it even if you don’t say it.

To free ourselves from the inner critic, we have to understand something of its origins, how we are impacted by it, and how we can successfully disengage from its negative influence. In short, our treatment plan includes the application of wisdom, strength, and love.

The first step down the path of freeing ourselves from the inner critic is that we must acknowledge that some of us have a mistaken loyalty to our critic. We think it keeps us sharp and leads to more critical thinking we need in our jobs or to understand the world. Looking closer we see that the mechanism of the critic was formed in early childhood and is pretty simple and unsophisticated.

People often imagine that the negative, grating voice in their heads is helping them. But it’s not. The critic doesn’t believe in our basic human goodness. It only believes in rules and moral codes. Psychologically, the critic is the protector of ego. It denies everything else. It doesn’t know your soul. It doesn’t trust your heart to know how you feel, to be empathic and compassionate in relationships. It doesn’t have faith that your intuitive gut sense can guide you in situations you’re encountering for the first time. The inner critic only wants you to heed its advice. It doesn’t trust in your ability to reason and evaluate as a way to navigate through life’s dilemmas.

Next, we must defend ourselves against the inner critic, which is tough work. It takes practice.

To defend ourselves against the inner critic requires summoning the courage to face the powerful and coercive force head-on. We can start by telling the emotional truth, “That hurts when you talk to me that way”. Expressing disinterest in the critic’s advice, using humor, staying connected to your physical center, harnessing your strength and speaking in short declarative and conclusive statements — are all strategies that are meant to stop the conversation and restore our contact with the dynamic expansiveness that is our essential nature. When we have successfully defended against an attack and disengaged from the critic, we may feel a shift in physical energy, perhaps a release of tension, a free flow of breath. Emotionally, we may feel increased confidence and compassion for what hurts. Mentally, we may have more clarity and less confusion. However, be prepared for residual feelings and sensations, questions and doubts to linger for a period of time. In other words, don’t expect to feel warm and fuzzy right away.

The alternative to the critic is found in the movement from judgment to discernment. Judgment is the harsh, aggressive habit that shuts down the conversation, binds us to the past and old behaviors, and closes off our access to other capacities. Discernment makes space, helps us to have perspective, and allows more of our humanity to show up. It helps us sort what is useful and what isn’t. And then we can decide our course of action.

Lastly, we must learn to accept ourselves for who we are.

It opens up the possibility of accepting ourselves for who we are. With acceptance, what emerges is an increased sense of trust. We release ourselves completely from the comparison, assessment, and rejection of the inner critic. We stop blaming ourselves for having desires and wants, and instead accept these desires as a flavor of love, one that expresses our hearts’ deepest longing for what is true and real.

This process of acknowledgement, defense, and finally acceptance begins an alchemical process. The undesirable can be changed into the desirable not by coercion, but by mindfully embracing our flaws, shortcomings, warts, and all those rejected, painful, and scary aspects of ourselves as part of a whole. We release ourselves from the misguided pursuit of perfection. Instead, we expose our imagined imperfections to the fierce fires of wisdom, strength, and love, and in so doing, we learn to turn lead into gold.