Compassion Meditation, Antidote for Compassion Fatigue

Monthly RC Mindfulness: Come Fill Your Cup - April 2021

More than 40 RC trainers, champions and staff attended the first RC Monthly Mindfulness session! We at TSI could not be more excited about the strong turnout for this new RC offering for client agencies. 

As promised, this blog offers a brief summary of the session, initial feedback from participants, and resources to advance learning and practice.

Enjoy the read and remember that all staff, Champions, and Trainers at RC agencies are welcome to attend this free, monthly drop-in offering – share this registration link with your coworkers today. We hope to see you May 5^th when we will focus on another evidence-based mindfulness practice – gratitude.

Session Summary

Three types of empathy were identified and described – Cognitive (understanding another person’s thinking and perspective), Emotional (feeling what another person is feeling), and Compassion (feeling concern for another who is suffering). Each type of empathy is an important tool available to all RC treaters.

When a teenage client is upset about her mother not showing up for a scheduled visit, cognitive empathy helps an RC treater understand the client’s perspective and thinking whereas emotional empathy helps a treater feel in their own body what the client is feeling in their body. In this way, cognitive and emotional empathy provide RC treaters with important information about both the client’s experience and about their own experience of the client.

We can, however, become overwhelmed by emotional empathy. If someone is experiencing pain and distress, their nervous system is activated. Emotional empathy can, in turn, activate the parts of our own nervous systems associated with pain and suffering – we literally feel the client’s pain. When we as RC treaters feel the pain and distress of our clients (and of our colleagues) day in and day out without adequate recovery, we are subject to distress in the form of compassion fatigue, burnout, and vicarious trauma.

Compassion meditation is an evidence-based practice that can mute empathetic distress and thereby serve as an antidote to compassion fatigue. Building our capacity to experience compassion for ourselves, our clients and our colleagues is an active step we can take to support our own well-being and to help sustain our Risking Connection agency-wide culture.

Consider experimenting with compassion meditation in the coming month, using one of the resource links offered below. Remember to “do no harm” as you practice, meaning:

• All practice is optional
• Take a break or stop if you’re feeling distressed
• Be kind and gentle with yourself and others
• Seek support as needed

Initial Participant Feedback  

• I thought the session was excellent – a nice mix of information and practice.
• I had an amazing sense of serenity following the practice.  I even found myself practicing the prompts [the next day] during my “walking meditation".
• Members of our team attended as a group. I loved it and it’s very important [to my program]. We had an amazing discussion following [the session].

Compassion Meditation Resources:  

• PowerPoint slides from the April 7 RC Monthly Mindfulness session.
  
  
• Loving-Kindness Meditation from Greater Good Science Center, (15 minutes). Strengthen feelings of kindness and connection toward others - printed script and guided audio. This is the full version of the practice we did in the April 7 session.

• Guided Self-Compassion Meditations from Kristen Neff (sample 5-25 minute practices)

• A host of compassion meditations are available at Greater Good Science Center
  
  
• How to Become a Friend to Yourself: How Self-Compassion Can Help Transform the Way you Handle Suffering from Greater Good Magazine

• Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body, by Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson. See Chapter 6, ‘Primed for Love,’ to learn about the three types of empathy and the evidence-base for compassion meditation.