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.

Compassion is not about simply forgiving and saying things don’t matter, because clearly causing harm matters a great deal.

Anger at others and self-criticism are common problems that deprive many people of happiness and a sense of well-being and purpose. The ease by which such things can be aroused can be linked to painful past memories and experiences. Self-criticism and shame also maintain our sense of threat by stimulating the threat/self-protection system.

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

Emotional memories and our sense of self Early experiences with our parents and others stimulate different emotions and combinations of emotions that become associated with our sense of self and our sense of what others are like. This is how it works. Consider how a child experiences the emotions of others in an interaction and how these become the

It allows us to see that so much of what we are has, in a way, little to do with personal choice. Therefore it makes little sense to blame ourselves for some of our feelings, motives, desires or abilities or lack of them, or for how things turned out.

A distinction that can be helpful here is between shame and guilt – people often get these two confused. When we feel shame, our attention is on ourselves and how others might see us – i.e. think badly of us. In shame, we feel exposed and think that there’s something wrong or flawed about us. We feel anxious, depressed and our hearts sink. We put

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

In compassionate reasoning and thinking, we train our minds to focus on reasoning and thinking about others, ourselves, our relationships and the situations in which we find ourselves in a helpful way. When we ruminate on our anxiety, disappointment or anger, this is only going to lock these feelings in. So can we practise deliberately choosing to