Compassion Community of Practice
The purpose of the Compassion Special Interest Pod is to provide a secular Compassion Community of Practice (CCoP) as a way of co-regulating and processing difficult emotions that arise within the Ecological Awareness Cycle. The CCoP serves as both an antidote to empathic distress fatigue and climate-related burnout in the coach, and their clients in turn, and also develops qualities beneficial to the coaching relationship and better coaching outcomes.
The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervenor.
Principles
- Practice over theory
- Guided compassion practice as a foundation for compassionate listening and dialogue
- Consistent format with changing themes
- Be Present: Guided Compassion Practice
- Be With: Attuning to One Another
- Hold Space: For Inquiry & Resonance
- Inclusive and accessible to all
Topics
- Self-compassion
- Embracing shared common humanity
- Cultivating compassion for others
- Compassionate listening to self and others
- Why compassion practice?
- Cultivating qualities beneficial to the coaching relationship
- Compassion practice and better coaching outcomes
- Compassion practice as an antidote to empathic distress fatigue and climate-related burnout
- Coach maturity and vertical adult development
- The neuroscience of compassion
CCop Meetings
We plan to meet monthly (generally on the third Wednesday of every month starting in November 2024) at 4-6pm London time. Please check the Coming Events page to find out more and to register.
18th December 2024
14th January 2025
12th February 2025
19th March 2025
Get In Touch
Without inner change there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters.
Compassion Retreat Spaces
During September and October 2024, we’re offering a four-session series of Compassion Retreat Spaces. These are designed to help CCA members – and by extension, their clients – turn gently towards where there is numbing, and to kindly meet difficult emotions, wherever participants find themselves in the Cycle.
The Spaces are designed to support nourishing, deep adaptive individual and community-based reflection, learning, growth and renewal, and be supportive of conscious intention-setting for 2025. Each Space introduces a compassion practice and explores a particular theme. Below you’ll find a link to each session (click on the title) together with a copy of the Resource Deck. Display these by clicking on the image. You can read the resources on here, or you can print or download them.
Creating And Maintaining A Sangha
In society, much of our suffering comes from feeling disconnected from one another. We often don’t feel a real connection even with people we live close to, our neighbours, our coworkers, and even our family members. Each person lives separately, cut off from the support of the community.
Practicing mindfulness (and compassion), we begin to see our connection with other human beings. To flourish in our own practice and to support others, we need a community.
Being with a Sangha can heal these feelings of isolation and separation. The Sangha is a garden, full of many varieties of trees and flowers. When we can look at ourselves and at others as beautiful, unique flowers and trees we can truly grow to understand and love one another. One flower may bloom early in the spring and another flower may bloom in late summer. One tree may bear fruits and another tree may offer cool shade. No one plant is greater or lesser or the same as any other plant in the garden. Each member of the Sangha also has unique gifts to offer the community.
We each have areas that need attention as well. When we can appreciate each members’ contribution and see our weaknesses as potential for growth, we can learn to live together harmoniously. Our practice is to see that we are a flower or a tree, and that we are the whole garden as well, all interconnected.
With the support of the community, we can practice to cultivate peace and joy within and around us, as a gift for all of those we love and care for. We can cultivate our solidarity and freedom – solid in our deepest aspiration and free from our fears, misunderstandings, and suffering.
When you engage in Sangha building, the most important thing to remember is that we are doing it together. The more you embrace the Sangha, the more you can let go of the feeling of a separate self. You can relax into the collective wisdom and insights of the Sangha and see clearly that the Sangha eyes and hands and heart are greater than that of any individual member of the Sangha.
From Happiness by Thich Nhat Hanh (2009)