DECEMBER 2025 EDITION
The Monday Night Sangha Newsletter
The Critical Nature of Self-Love
“When we focus intensely on a thought, an idea, or repeatedly ruminate on an experience, we are shaping both our inner and outer world.”
In a recent interview entitled Infinite Possibilities, hosted by Pamela Gregory and available on YouTube, theoretical physicist Dr. David Clements spoke about how “energies get compressed” through sustained focus on a thought, feeling, or idea. He describes densification as a state in which the natural flow of consciousness becomes reduced or constrained. In this view, the body can be understood as a container that holds these dense energetic patterns.
Seen through this lens, self-love becomes essential — not as indulgence, but as a way of softening the inner conditions that allow these patterns to take hold.
Tara Brach, in her book, True Refuge, offers a complementary image:
“Imagine that at the moment of birth, we begin to develop a spacesuit to help us navigate our strange new environment. The purpose of the spacesuit is to protect us, and to win nurturance from caretakers who, to varying degrees, are bound by their own conditioning and their own patterns of behavior. Anytime our needs aren’t met, our spacesuit creates the best defensive and proactive strategies it can.”
The Energy We Carry
In this metaphor, Tara Brach is pointing to what many of us recognize as the ego, or our defensive strategies. Each time we protect ourselves in this way, we may experience a kind of energetic densification — a tightening or holding that reinforces familiar patterns. Over time, these patterns can feel weighted in the body and nervous system, subtly shaping how we meet the present moment and influencing how we respond to future experiences.
What we do in each moment informs our future experiences.
Adding Another Component
I also highlight the work of Dr. Dan Siegel and Dr. Rick Hanson on the brain’s negativity bias. Our brains evolved to learn quickly from threat. As a result, we tend to spend more time focusing on difficult or painful experiences and far less time fully taking in the good ones. Over time, this can leave many of us habitually judging, assessing, and defending.
Rick Hanson offers practical tools for cultivating well-being and retraining the mind through positive neuroplasticity. One of these is the HEAL practice, a simple four-step process:
H — Have a positive experience and notice it.
E — Enrich the experience by staying with it and savoring it.
A — Absorb it, allowing the body and nervous system to take it in.
L — Link (optional) the positive experience to a difficult one, helping to soften its impact.
This is an act of healing and of self-love. In this act of healing, self-love becomes the tool that helps thaw our inner densifications, transforming old patterns into a newfound softness.
You can explore this practice further on YouTube: Mindfulness Exercises – The H.E.A.L. Model with Dr. Rick Hanson.
Why Self-Love Matters
When you immerse yourself in the practices of self-love and self-care, you cultivate a stable inner residence — a felt sense of presence and authenticity. From this place, your nervous system softens, and your way of being naturally influences how you relate to the world and how others respond to you.
Rather than building restrictive walls or hardened armor, you begin to gently loosen long-held defensive patterns. You are not merely hoping for a better tomorrow; you are actively shaping the conditions for a more spacious, luminous, and resilient future.
Self-love also makes it easier to meet another person’s difficult behavior — within reason — with clarity, boundaries, and loving-kindness.
A Moment from Everyday Life
Recently, I visited a local store to return a purchase. The door nearest to the returns office only opens from the inside, and the line for returns was outside the office, running past the door I wanted to enter. I knocked and kindly beckoned a woman to open it for me. She stared at me for a couple of seconds with what felt like pure hatred. She eventually opened the door, making sure her body language conveyed her resistance. When I smiled to thank her, she turned away in disgust.
A year ago, I am certain I would have responded in kind. Today, it was easy to open my heart and offer her loving-kindness while waiting in the return line. The tension that was beginning to form within me softened and then quickly dissolved.
As the Buddha is believed to have said, "loving-kindness is the best protection there is." And not just for ourselves but for those with whom we interact.
The Role of Practice
When we become caught in rumination about the past, or react impulsively from anger, presence is no longer centered. In those moments, we lose access to choice and agency, allowing old conditioning to guide our responses without our awareness.
Consistent practice is a bridge back to ourselves and an effective way to disrupt rumination and hyper-focus. Breath work, meditation, and mindful movement can be especially supportive. Centering ourselves through practice is the remedy.
Join me on January 12 for a guided meditation: Connecting with the inner child with love and understanding.
With loving kindness and peaceful presence
Susan Keller
Conscious Calm Presence