My Journey with Compassion: Part 2
This is the second part of a mini-series exploring my personal and professional journey with compassion. You are about to re-join 23 year old Teacher Jo, who gets ill and is forced out of the classroom.
If you’d like to read from the beginning, you can find Part 1 here, which starts with eight year old Jo, learning about meditation.
A brush with death [2012]
In 2012, my appendix burst. Like full on burst. I had been having stomach pains for a few weeks but the GP told me that I had been doing too many sit ups. While this may have been the case, sadly, my Appendix was also going through its final days. During my two week hospital stay I can remember feeling incredibly joyful. Yes, I was scared. Yes, I was struggling to walk. Yes, I had lost four kilos in ten days. But, I was alive.
It sounds glib, but I can distinctly remember thinking “I want to slow down”. I had spent the last two years teaching and the pace had been frenetic. I loved it. But, this felt like a reckoning. My body had literally stopped me in my tracks and showed me “I could not do it all”. Looking back with my psychologist glasses, I see this as a reintroduction to self compassion: “it is ok to be human and to get ill”, “sometimes the pace needs to slow down”, “the day to day can be beautiful, like, you know, eating this avocado that someone smuggled into the hospital”.
Compassion x Psychology v1 [2017]
During my training to be an Educational Psychologist I was lucky to work in Hackney. One of my supervisors Dr Bernadette Carelse (now ordained Buddhist, Guhyasakhi) specialised in using Mindfulness to support individuals. Luckily, while I was there, the council funded Bernadette to run a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) short course for employees. Over the next six weeks, I welcomed formal meditation back into my life. With my burgeoning trainee psychologist spectacles, I noticed the way regular meditation changed my work. I felt like I could hold multiple perspectives in mind at once. I was less critical of myself. I felt less anxious as a practitioner. I was more able to facilitate ways forward. Very quickly meditation became a foundational part of my morning.
Compassion, but not compassion [2018]
You might notice that I didn’t use the word compassion in the italics immediately above. I don’t think I developed the vocabulary of compassion until later. Trainee Psychologist Jo did not have the lexicon.
A few years later Psychologist Jo read a book called Five Invitations (by Frank Ostaseski) which describes his work using compassion as a tool to help people navigate death. I connected with this on a number of levels. I think the stories of care really resonated with me. I also had a magical conversation with Ivor Williams about how we could design better processes for helping people live and die. I felt inspired. I saw this intersection of suffering, humanity and care as incredibly powerful.
What was my next logical step? Submit a Fellowship proposal to research “using the psychology of death to support Young Carers in the UK!” I am not going to lie, reading it back, this title seems very intense now. But, I share it to show that I was becoming very interested in using compassion in my work, but I didn't really have the language to articulate myself. I was circling compassion, but not “as compassion”. Psychologist Jo feels the need to make a confession at this point. I was actually introduced to Paul Gilbert’s work into compassion around this time (thank you Fliss Court!), but did not join the dots. Clearly I needed a writing practice to think things through more deeply!
Compassion-based Supervision [2019]
In a magical bit of synchronicity, around the same time as applying for this Fellowship, I started working with Dr Charlie Heriot-Maitland and The Difference, to provide compassion-focused supervision to senior leaders in Alternative Provision (called Compassion Focussed Coaching).
Charlie is a Clinical Psychologist who specialises in using Compassion Focussed Therapy and also works to apply these principles to support professional reflection and organisational change. For me, the timing really was perfect. Charlie had developed a compassion based supervision model and The Difference were curious to know how it was being experienced by their senior leaders. Over the next year we worked together to understand this. And, at the same time, I started to put vocabulary to my thoughts and feelings around caring professions and Young Carers. I was particularly struck by the way aspects of compassionate mind training could create the conditions for deep reflection and caring action.
After the first year it was clear that the approach was incredibly useful and that it should be scaled up. So, I joined the team. Over the last four years we have built on these ideas and refined a supervision model which has been used by about 40 senior leaders in schools. In 2021 we wrote a handbook for training other practitioners in using CFC and welcomed Elizabeth Denton and Stacy Moore to the growing team of supervisors. This experience has been hugely important for me because it has involved a deep dive into the psychology of compassion and the operationalisation of it in reflective spaces. We have really had to understand what it needs to look and feel like to experience compassion-based supervision… Needless to say, contemporary Psychologist Jo feels a huge amount of gratitude for Charlie, Elizabeth and Stacy’s wisdom and curiosity in this area.
Compassion x Young Carers [2022]
Well done and welcome - we are almost at the present day!
After COVID-19 travel restrictions started to ease, I was able to plan my travel for the Fellowship. Thanks to my work in the years between my initial application and the ability to start research, I completely changed my understanding of my research question. This is actually a classic part of any research process. But, it was spread over three years, so it felt a little more stark. You can find out more about my research here. In summary, it involves travel to America and Japan to gather data about how compassion is being used to support people in caring roles (professionals and people caring for family members).
America: land of opportunity [and compassionate practice, 2022]
In October 2022, I spent a month in America as part of my research into using compassion to support caregiving. I met some wonderful, generous people and organisations and will write about them separately (there is too much to say!) I will share two, very different, but equally important stories: The Salon and The Beach.
So, I went to my first Salon. My understanding of a Salon was “that people sat around and discussed politics and philosophy”. I think I gathered this definition from reading novels set in 60’s America – sounds like fun! I arrived at a plush house in the hills of Oakland. It turned out that the event was fully catered and had a stage in the garden for acts. There were going to musicians, poets and magicians. As well as a free bar and lots of cool looking people milling about. After about 20 minutes of meeting people, there was a problem: acts kept cancelling. Suddenly the hosts are looking at me and asking if I can “do a talk”. “Of course!”, I say, “how exciting”. Then I had a mini panic. Don’t get it twisted, I am comfortable talking about compassion in front of people. But, normally the session lasts for about an hour and I have a few days to prepare. This will be a fifteen minute slot and the audience are expecting magic and music. Spontaneously talking to a garden full of strangers about compassion helped to highlight that the concept of compassion is global. We all suffer. We mostly want to help other people. Sometimes our suffering can divide us. But, it can also connect us.
The second story, The Beach, involves an outward bound day organised by Earthways and facilitated by the wonderful Roy Remer and Cynthia Morrow. We spent most of the day fasting, meditating and exploring a nearby beach in California. Towards the end of the day we each had time to monologue about our experience and then Roy and Cynthia shared some reflections on what we had said. Cynthia observed that I seemed to be able to “take pleasure in being part of something bigger”… “noticing beautiful scenes in nature, along the journey”. I loved this summary and it felt like it captured my experience of the day. It also reminded me of The Fallow Years (see Part 1, section 2). Even when I was not meditating or working professionally with compassion, it felt important to notice ‘beautiful scenes’ during my day. Now that I have developed my vocabulary for talking about compassion and applying it to help other people, it feels even more important to notice moments. Using this language, I frame it as facilitating connection to ‘something bigger’ - nature and humanity - and I hope this is something I can continue to take with me on the journey.
Future Directions
Looking back and tracing my journey with compassion back to childhood has been a wild ride. It has also highlighted just how lovely it is to be working in this area at the moment. Three upcoming compassionate highlights are:
Continuing to provide compassion-based supervision. If that sounds like something you or your team would be interested in, you can get in touch here.
The next phase of my Fellowship will involve working with Young Carers in the UK, to interpret the US data and design some useful frameworks and training for practitioners. If you are interested in hearing more about this work, or you work with Young Carers and would like to collaborate, you can message me here.
Creating materials to help families apply compassionate approaches to parenting. If you would like to hear more or collaborate on this, please let me know.