Creating Compassion: A 7 Week Guide to Build a Healthier, Happier, & More Peaceful You Through the 7 Mirrors of Compassion

This book has a dual purpose. The primary being to help anyone who would like to live a happier and more connected life through accessing the compassionate self. This will be done by integrating mindfulness based and compassion focused techniques that will be suggested for a week at a time. As such, each chapter can be read at the beginning of the week to introduce a new set of concepts that will build on each other, as well as exercises that will help strengthen one's compassion muscle. Of course, if you need longer than a week to refine a specific set of skills that is perfectly fine, however, these mindfulness based and compassion focused techniques are skills that one will need to practice across one's life so that they can be automatic in nature. In this, an individual can use this book to learn to accept the dissatisfaction that may be present in "the way it is" versus "the way they want it to be" and find greater compassion, connection and kindness within themselves and others. Through this, one can learn to dissolve the negative "self-talk" or deep seeded shame that may be holding them back from a healthier, happier, and more peaceful life.

"The Compassionate Connected Self finds peace in the certainty of the here and now, versus the Separate Self looking to past experiences or an uncertain, fantasized future."

The second purpose of this book is to provide a basic framework of engaging in Compassion Focused interventions in an individual or group structure. Compassion based techniques (e.g., Au et al., 2017) and Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT; Gilbert, 2009) both are found to help reduce anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, as well as a plethora of other conditions (Millard et al., 2023). Specifically, compassion techniques appear to be especially strong against shame (i.e., an emotion connected to negative thoughts about oneself). This book's unique angle is utilizing the seven mirrors of compassion, which are based on Buddhist mindfulness-based principles (e.g., Hochswender, Martin, & Morino, 2001), to build a basic structure.

This book will increase (a) cognitive awareness of necessary versus unnecessary suffering, (b) cognitive control / acceptance through sitting with and letting go of not only negative emotional experiences, but of equal importance, those judged as positive, and (c) cognitive-affective flexibility and regulation through learning to dissolve negative emotions using compassion, kindness, and acts of altruism. However, the first goal is learning the process within oneself before applying it to others. Thus, it is strongly suggested to build one's own self-compassion practice first.