The Compassionate Mind (Compassion Focused Therapy)

The idea is that, as you sit there, allowing yourself to focus on your breathing, you become more relaxed as you become increasingly familiar with your body and more aware of where tension resides in it. Gradually, you may come to think of your body as a friend and take an interest in it and in how you can nurture it, care for it and help it relax.

Finally, a person might think that being happy would mean giving up what they consider to be justifiable anger and forgetting the injustices of the past and their desire for revenge. They need to keep reminding others (and themselves) how bad things have been for them, hoping for recognition or rescue. The recognition they seek often never comes so

What you’re doing in these exercises is practising overruling your threat/self-protection system, which is determined to focus you on the glass as half empty. Its job is to warn you that you might run out of water or to make you exclaim: ‘Hey, what happened to the other half? Some bugger drank it!’ It’s what it’s designed to do, and you could let i

Developing self-awareness, openness and sensitivity

your arms at right angles to your body. Note how your body feels and how gently grateful it is to you for spending time trying to let go of tension. Spend a moment really trying to experience the idea of your body being grateful to you for spending time with it. When you’re ready, get up and carry on with your day.

The importance of learning tolerance for painful feelings is fairly clear. However, it’s perhaps surprising to discover that some people also need to learn to tolerate and savour positive emotions. For some people, enjoyment for its own sake can feel wrong. Some depressed people develop a ‘taboo on pleasure’ or certain types of it – a trait for whi

key for you, you might find The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing yourself from chronic unhappiness by Mark Williams and his colleagues very helpful.7 The point

The point is that we can be so lost in our hopes or fears about tomorrow or our regrets of yesterday that we miss the moment now – we live in a remembered or imagined world, not in the world of right now. Of course, sometimes it’s very important to reflect back and project forward, but when we do this, we want to do it purposely rather than just be

Note as well that what the human brain will do is to put a label on each of these complex feelings. The problem is that the label might not be very accurate but only the nearest approximation of what we feel. For example, people can experience the pain of having a sense of separation from others, which might be linked to emotional memories of other