Many spiritual traditions stress the importance of loving, or at least having compassion for, yourself. IFS tells you precisely how to do that. For example, Kristin Neff and Chris Germer have brought a large and wonderful movement to the public called Mindful Self-Compassion, based on some Buddhist practices that are quite compatible with IFS. IFS makes such practices a little more concrete by helping you extend care and nurturance to specific parts that are suffering or are former enemies, and you can notice how they react.
Buddhist teachings use the term monkey mind to describe how our thoughts jump around in our consciousness like an agitated monkey. As Ralph De La Rosa notes in The Monkey Is the Messenger, “Is it any wonder that the monkey mind is the scourge of meditators across the globe? For those trying to find respite in contemplative practice, thoughts are often regarded as an irritating nuisance, a primitive agitator sneaking in through the side door…. In meditation circles, some unintended consequences of the monkey metaphor prevail: that the thinking mind is a dirty, primitive, lower life form of no real value to us; it’s just a bunch of garbage on repeat.”7
Later we’ll look more closely at some of the ways people practice spiritual bypassing—a phrase coined by John Welwood in the 1980s. Jeff Brown explores the phenomenon in depth in his film Karmageddon: “After my childhood, I needed the kinds of spirituality that would keep me from allowing the pain to surface…. I was confusing self-avoidance with enlightenment.”9
In fact, one central message in the canonical story of the Buddha’s awakening is that thoughts and desires are the primary obstacles to enlightenment. As he sat in meditation beneath the Bodhi Tree, the Buddha was assaulted by a series of impulses and urges—lust, desire, fulfillment, regret, fear, insecurity, and so on—and it was only by ignoring or resisting them that he was able to attain enlightenment. That being said, the ubiquitous, Buddhist-derived practices of mindfulness are a step in the right direction. They enable the practitioner to observe thoughts and emotions from a distance and from a place of acceptance rather than fighting or ignoring them. For me, that’s a good first step. Mindfulness is not always pleasant, however. Researchers who interviewed experienced meditators found that substantial percentages of them had disturbing episodes that sometimes were long-lasting. The most common of those included emotions like fear, anxiety, paranoia, detachment, and reliving traumatic memories.10 From the IFS point of view, the quieting of the mind associated with mindfulness happens when the parts of us usually running our lives (our egos) relax, which then allows parts we have tried to bury (exiles) to ascend, bringing with them the emotions, beliefs, and memories they carry (burdens) that got them locked away in the first place. Most of the mindfulness approaches I’m familiar with subscribe to the mono-mind paradigm and, consequently, view such episodes as the temporary emergence of troubling thoughts and emotions rather than as hurting parts that need to be listened to and loved. Why would you want to converse with thoughts and emotions? They can’t talk back, can they? Well, it turns out that they can. In fact, they have a lot of important things to tell us.
In Buddhist terms, IFS helps people become bodhisattvas of their psyches in the sense of helping each inner sentient being (part) become enlightened through compassion and love.