The Compassionate Mind Quotes

“The experience of being born into a loving household or a stressed and abusive one would actually affect how my brain matured and the types of connections that were made between my neurons. It is not just my ‘values’ that would be shaped in a certain way by my relationships with others (e.g. my parents), but my actual brain, from where my thoughts, feelings and desires flow, is sculpted by my relationships.1 If I’d been unlucky enough to have been born into, say, an old-style orphanage where infants were left in cots all day and there was little care or interaction, then all the potential that lies inside me, which could have been sculpted by love and kindness feeding my brain, would simply have withered away. I would have suffered intellectual losses and decline.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“True empathy, though, is an act of imagination. We have to imagine what it would be like to be in the minds of others, to walk in their shoes. We have to consider their background and how it would have impinged on them/us; we have to consider their context – that is, their fears, desires, hopes and wishes.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“This ability to have empathy for difference, to be open to diversity, to work hard at thinking about how other people may differ from you is a key step on the road to compassion – and it’s not always easy.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“We need to recognize, however, that when we accept ourselves as we are, and life as it is, we may find it easier to find peace and contentment within ourselves. This is absolutely not a position of passive, defeated resignation but rather it is about looking around to see what we can do now with what we’ve got. It’s about ‘being in the moment’ as opposed to living in regret and with ‘if onlys’ or ‘isn’t it unfair’ or ‘I could have been . . .”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“Receiving kindness, gentleness, warmth and compassion tells the brain that the world is safe and other people are helpful rather than harmful. Receiving kindness, gentleness, warmth and compassion improves our immune system and reduces the levels of stress hormones. Receiving kindness, gentleness, warmth and compassion helps us to feel soothed and settled and is conducive to good sleep. Kindness, gentleness, warmth and compassion are like basic vitamins for our minds.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“Compassion is not about avoiding all conflicts; it’s more about the way in which we engage in differences and conflict.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“It’s compassionate because, although taking what might seem an easier path in the short term (e.g. avoiding doing anything) might give us temporary relief, it doesn’t take us anywhere”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“That for me is a key to compassion – recognizing that we have not been designed, that we all just find ourselves here, not because we (or some other power) chose for us to be here.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“When the Dalai Lama first came to the West, he was stunned by the levels of self-dissatisfaction, self-disappointment, self-criticism and self-dislike he encountered. For all our technology and comforts, he found us a people in conflict with ourselves.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“Our sense of disconnectedness is the price we pay for having a brain that gives rise to a sense of our being an individual self.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“The passions, motives, wants, lusts, fears and vengeances of our ‘old brain/mind’ can hijack the capabilities of our ‘new brain/mind’. When it does that, we simply find ways to satisfy those desires or find reasons for feeling what we feel, supporting our prejudices. Emotions can suggest their own self-justifying reasons. ‘I feel it, so it must be true,’ we say. ‘I feel anxious, so this must be dangerous and I should avoid it.’ ‘I feel disgusted, so this means it’s bad.’ ‘I feel that this is wrong; therefore it is.’ ‘I feel that I can’t trust you; therefore you are dangerous to me.’ We don’t question what we feel or do because we have ‘gut feelings’ and urges that we’re right.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“Shame-based self-attacking Compassionate self-correction •   Focuses on the desire to condemn and punish • Focuses on the desire to improve • Punishes past errors and is often backward-looking • Emphasizes growth and enhancement • Is given with anger, frustration contempt, disappointment • Is forward-looking • Concentrates on deficits and fear of exposure • Is given with encouragement, support, kindness • Focuses on a global sense of self •   Builds on positives (e.g. seeing what you did well and then considering learning points) • Includes a high fear of failure •   Focuses on attributes and specific qualities of self • Increases chances of avoidance and withdrawal. • Emphasizes hope for success • Increases the chances of engaging. Consider example of critical teacher with a child who is struggling. Consider example of encouraging, supportive teacher with a child who is struggling. For transgression For transgression • Shame, avoidance, fear • Guilt, engaging • Heart sinks, lowered mood • Sorrow, remorse • Aggression. • Reparation. We can contrast this with a compassionate”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“We can live life in the ‘if only’ lane or make the best of it and appreciate where we are right now. So the question for me was not ‘How can I have 20 years’ experience on Day 1?’ because that wasn’t possible. Everyone has to walk exactly the same road as I was walking, from being inexperienced to experienced. There is no other way. Rather the question she wanted me to ask myself was ‘How can I be the best young, inexperienced therapist I can be, given my limitations?’ Because that was all there was for these individuals – there was no one else. It was a harsh lesson in some ways but it helped me confront the reality of my limitations: I could only be what I could be.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“Mindfulness is about deliberately using one’s attention to create brain states in which patterns in our brains can be stimulated and networks of brain cells can be developed that are conducive to calming the mind and developing soothing compassion.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“develop different abilities (and vice versa). For example, with more compassionate attention and thinking, we might increase our feelings and motivations to be caring; or practising compassionate attention and thinking might increase our empathy and reduce our condemning tendencies.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“So can we practise deliberately choosing to refocus our reasoning helpfully – to ask ourselves the question: ‘What’s a helpful way for me to think about this problem, situation or difficulty?’ Imagine reasoning it through with a friend, or having a dialogue with someone else who is compassionate”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“to be compassionate is to stand back from these emotion and mood states of, say, depression, anxiety or the urge for vengeance and neither pathologize nor indulge them. Rather our thoughts can be directed towards what we need to do to see these as often ‘normal though undesirable’ aspects of our minds while at the same time making an effort to change our brain-state patterns to ones more conducive to acceptance, contentment and well-being.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“The moral is, of course, that we require both a sophisticated and an agreed form of welfare-focused social organization to contain our potential tribalism and abusive power hierarchies, and we must also recognize that, if we don’t understand and train our minds very carefully and learn to be wary of the dangers of allowing ‘new brain/mind’ competencies to be directed by ‘old brain/mind’ passions, we’re going to be in trouble.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“Many of the atrocities that have taken place over the last few thousand years have been the result of ‘new brain/mind’ competencies linking up with ‘old brain/mind’ motives and defences. We can even use our ‘new brain/mind’ competencies to justify our actions and give us very sophisticated ways of acting them out. Animals will defend their groups and territories at all times, but only humans can think about how to do it more effectively with guns, or sadistically by torturing those who are either not in the group or who have betrayed it. At least a third of all the world’s research money is spent on weaponry. Rich nations sell poor nations armaments, crippling their economies, maintaining tyrants and causing untold harm, with the profits from the arms sales flowing back to the rich nations. It is, of course, disastrous, but is the consequence of a fantastic ‘new brain/mind’ not being able to sort out the tribal motives of the ‘old brain/mind’ – greed and a belief in the importance of aggressive power. Even religions can feed into this tragedy.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“We have to think beyond individuals and individual minds and brains, and think about ourselves as mutually influencing beings. So on a simple level, our irritation with each other will raise our stress and increase our vulnerability to a range of health problems and to social discord, while our kindness to each other will lower our stress and impact positively on our well-being and increase our social safeness. At a more complex level, mental illness and criminality are woven from complicated genetic, social mentality and cultural/social interactions. And, of course, at an even higher level, the ways in which our societies operate, seek goods and services, secure trade agreements and enable international companies to extract huge profits from stock markets (and, as the recent crash has shown, exploit them) will greatly affect the lives and pattern the minds of people far away. We are all interconnected minds. It’s clear, however, that we can make choices, too. We can live in a world where we choose to foster our tribal psychology or sit back while it develops in areas of poverty and injustice. We are then faced with angry groups who come after us. We can choose to develop our competitive, ‘have to be the best and have the most’, ‘my interest or my tribe’s interests above yours’ archetypal side. Or we can choose a compassionate approach that’s more thoughtful of others. Ideally, of course, we blend these. We think carefully about our values and try to be the ‘best we can be’ but, at the same time, not ruthlessly exploitative.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“The cooperative mentality can orient us to be egalitarian in our ways of thinking. Recent evidence suggests that egalitarian attitudes produce more healthy responses when people are confronted with stressful social encounters than biased, competitive and non-egalitarian attitudes.13 There’s also growing evidence that fostering cooperative attitudes and behaviours in children and adolescents (in contrast to competitive and individualistic ones) promotes positive relationships, improved mental and physical health and higher achievements.14 In addition, it’s increasingly thought that cooperative groups will out-compete competitive/individualistic ones in the long term. In fact, business is finding out that the internet is a good source for problem-solving because people simply like to share their thoughts and ideas for free! It’s sad that, in the face of this, governments continue to buy into the business model that competition creates efficiency. Within the NHS, for example, we’re increasingly split into small competing groups called ‘business units’. Fostering high levels of cooperation would be far better.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“We do not become greedy by seeking the ugly; we do not seek power to make things ugly. Books comprising myths can thus prevent us from seeing that it is our own greed for nice things that can be, for others, a source of injustice and vengeance. By constantly creating these false good/beautiful, bad/ugly distinctions, we are able to turn a blind eye to our own destructiveness, because we think that we are pursuing the pleasant, the beautiful and the good. The compassionate point is to focus on what is common to all of us – which is the struggle we have within our own evolved brains and minds with so many competing urges and feelings. We can open our eyes to the ease with which we can become deluded and not see the realities we are creating around us – through no fault of our own.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“Now archetypes are no more than ‘rules of thumb’, ideas that are linked to the innate aspects of our minds. Personas, shadows, hero archetypes and so on are just ways of describing and thinking about different aspects of ourselves. In fact, psychologists are constantly debating and researching how best to describe and understand the interactions of what is innate in us and how our innate potential turns into lived experiences. The point here is to think about the ways that archetypal processes live in all of us and can be harnessed, often without our full awareness.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“We recognize that we have enormous capacities for being benevolent or malevolent, which we need to gain insight into compassionately. Only then should we start to think about ourselves in more local terms, such as our tribe or political group. Our evolved mind will already have been working in the other direction, to stir up strong passions of identification with our local group, and it is understanding how we work against those passions, by identifying ourselves as human beings, that can become key to our actions.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“So for mammals, sexual competition, driven by the desire to both engage oneself and prevent others from engaging in sex, will texture their lives. Long before humans appear at the very twilight of our day, we will see the working of the archetypes that enable sexual competition, loyalties and betrayals, group living and tribalism, submission to leaders and fear of dominant males, the striving for status and social position, cooperative hunting and working together – all the themes that, when we eventually arrive, are going to play big time in the minds of humans. I find it amazing that so many of the desires that flow through me, and indeed all of us, were designed not only long before me but long before all humans.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“We can also become more aware of how our societies may be stimulating the selfish ‘me first’ part of ourselves with unrealistic fantasies and desires and setting us up to want more and more and, at the same time, to feel more disappointed and personal failures”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“We can learn to be open and even amused by some of what goes on in our minds once we are honest about it. However, acting out some of our fantasies, being taken over by some of our desires, wants, fears or vengeful feelings, can cause problems – so as we’ll see, we can learn to develop a way of becoming aware and honest but equally more in control of some of our feelings and urges. Our actions have consequences, and we as a species can understand that and (sometimes) foresee them. Life is about learning when to act and when not to act on our desires and emotions. This takes us to the heart of compassionate behaviour because it isn’t just about acting in kind, warm and friendly ways. It’s also about protecting ourselves and others from our own destructive desires and actions; it’s about being assertive, tolerating discomfort and developing courage”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“when we give up blaming and condemning ourselves (and others) for things then we are freer to genuinely set sail towards developing the insight, knowledge and understanding we need to take responsibility for ourselves and our actions. Learning and practising compassion will help us feel more content and at peace with ourselves and also more concerned for others.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“Another form of resistance to developing self-compassion can be produced when people begin to develop it, especially by doing the same sort of exercises as in this book, and this exposes a yearning in them that may have been buried for a long time. This yearning may be for a sense of closeness or for a feeling of being connected to others – not alone – or a desire to feel loved or wanted. As the candle of self-compassion starts to flicker, it can illuminate great sadness and yearning within us. For some people, that can be overwhelming at first, and so we must go a step at a time – compassionately.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“coming to terms with rather than ridding herself of her inner feelings and fantasies, by accepting that they are part of the human mind, as writers of horror stories easily show.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind