Mindfulness Meditation: Advocating For Yourself
When it comes to our mindfulness practice, we’re often all too focused on external goals. We think of mindfulness exercises as a way to improve our ability to handle the stresses of everyday life. Perhaps we use meditation as a means of cultivating greater presence and awareness, in the hopes that it will help us to improve our relationships with family members, friends, and co-workers.
While all of these are worthwhile and noble goals to have, it’s easy to neglect our own needs at the same time. Developing compassion for those around us is important, of course. But, we can’t forget to develop the same sort of compassion for ourselves. Our practice doesn’t have to be limited to our relationships with the people and things around us. It can also soften our relationship with ourselves.
Self-Advocacy Meditation
When we talk about self-advocacy, we’re referring to the idea that you advocate for your own needs. In other words, the idea is to treat yourself as though you’re just as worthwhile as any other person. Once you begin to advocate for yourself, you may find it easier to expect others to treat you with the same respect you afford yourself.
On the one hand, our culture seems to promote self-esteem and self-worth. On the other, though, we find our society promoting interests that can be quite damaging to the individual. While caring for others and having compassion for all beings is a noble goal, we can’t do this at the expense of our own wellbeing. Self-advocacy here means reasonable needs and basic respect, such as equal treatment and freedom from abuse. It does not mean every want is automatically justified.
This mindfulness exercise invites you to bring the compassion you feel for others to bear on yourself as well. In the worksheet, you first practice wishing someone or something you love well, then you might bring to mind yourself as a child, and let that care gradually extend to yourself as an adult. By the end, you may settle into these feelings of loving-kindness and begin to direct them inwards. If memories of childhood bring up difficult feelings, you can pause, or practice with a counselor or therapist.
