A Necessary Ingredient for Sanity in Our World Today; The Empowering Force of Compassion

When I stop and just feel what is going on in myself, and listen to what I most need, I discover a drive for being held, and for holding. For care and comfort, and for comforting. And somehow tied to that is a need to be more accepting of how little I know for sure. And to realize this is one aspect of compassion⎼ to recognize I share so much with others but there’s so much more I don’t know. And to value all of it, the knowing and the not-knowing. And the learning of how to be more open and compassionate, for myself and for others.

 

It often feels like one aim of the DT administration is to suck the life out of our mutual concern for others. Embedding compassion in the community itself would help not only ourselves but all those around us. It would make us feel stronger, more ready to act. And I think DT abhors this possibility, yet this is exactly what we need right now.

 

But what exactly is compassion? What images do we have of it or of compassionate people? How would we change if we were more compassionate? What differentiates it from other mental or emotional states associated with it, like empathy, sympathy, or pity? First, we must realize that we can actually develop our compassion.

 

One book that could be a resource for us is The Compassionate Instinct, edited by Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh, and Jeremy Adam Smith. The book explores scientific evidence and philosophical arguments for compassion. In the first essay, Keltner argues that it is “rooted in our brain and biology, and [is] ready to be cultivated for the greater good.” It’s in us as a possibility, to be developed—or subverted. Our brains are plastic in that they’re continuously rewiring; that’s how we learn. Learning means change. We change according to our experience and education. Even the way our DNA expresses itself and influences our development depends on experience.

 

Compassion is not just empathy, or not necessarily feeling the suffering of others, but a readiness to recognize and act to relieve that suffering. It’s a responsiveness that empowers us. It’s not just sympathy for, and certainly not pity for, what others are experiencing. Pity can be so condescending, separating, and compassion is more of a welcoming. It’s a recognition and valuing of the fact that we never have a full understanding of any other person. Each person is partly an infinite mystery, and we share that mystery and so much else with them.

 

To develop our compassion, it’s best if, in each possible moment, we intend to respect and directly learn who we are. This means mindfulness, or trauma informed mindfulness, and compassion practices. To respond with clarity to events, and to make decisions with depth of thought, we must be able to observe and be present in our experiences, and feel in ourselves the presence and responsiveness of others. We need empathy.

 

We can, for example, pause in whatever we’re doing. Maybe close our eyes or look closely around us; or just feel our feet on the ground, how the weight is distributed on our feet, what our toes feel like in our shoes. How it feels to just stand where we are. Can we smell the air? Where in our body do we feel the breathing in? And when we breathe out, can we feel our shoulders relax, and settle down?

 

Maybe our minds are full of thoughts, self-attacks for not doing enough or wishing the election had turned out differently. With so much awful news, it’s so easy to distance, hurt, exhaust and thus disempower ourselves. We might feel we don’t deserve compassion. But when the world needs us so badly is exactly when we must give ourselves to it….

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to The Good Men Project.

What Might Being at Peace Mean? The Deep Joy Embedded in Presence that Inclines Us to Laughter

Each morning, before meditating, I follow a version of the Buddhist practice of dedicating the meditation to relieving the suffering of others. I wish that I, my wife, and anyone close to me who is suffering, or every being anywhere, be at peace. The practice calms me. But I must admit that it’s not always clear what being at peace would realistically be like in our world today or if my notion of peace is like anyone else’s.

 

It’s clear to me that saying it and meaning it, doing it with sincerity, is possibly a beginning of an answer in itself. Telling ourselves being at peace is possible is a door to being there. Or maybe it’s a door to persuading ourselves we deserve it.

 

So, what do I mean by being at peace? It can sound to many of us like contentment or being satisfied; and it does share something with those two states of heart and mind. Yet, it’s closer to calmness or happiness, both of which might be components of peace.

 

But contentment, satisfaction, and even happiness have a bad rep in many quarters today. There’s so much that is terrifying right now, so many threats, so much injustice, how can we want peace? How can we be content, happy, or satisfied? Don’t we want discontent, fury, and outrage? Don’t we want determination and commitment to change?

 

And so many of us, even critics in my own mind, seem to doubt we deserve it. It seems we’ve been educated in discontent with ourselves.

 

I think fostering discontent with political policies that harm people is simply responsible behavior. But discontent that arises from conducting a war with ourselves is an entirely different story. It assists those who would do us harm. It undermines our work to create a more compassionate and equitable country by undermining our ability to be compassionate with ourselves. Being at war with ourselves exhausts inner resources that could help us imagine positive actions to take, and then take them.

 

And maybe recognizing this is a key to feeling at peace ⎼ accepting and being able to live in our own minds and bodies. ‘Accepting’ not in the sense of being unaware of the reality of what we are and what we face, but instead very cognizant of it. It’s not easy to accept that we can’t always be strong or feel good or know the answer, or to not automatically attack whatever feels threatening. Being at peace begins with not being at war with ourselves.

 

Our thoughts often take the form of stories, or internally created and enacted stage-plays or scripts. “All the world is a stage,” said Shakespeare. These plays can be noticed through mindful observation and are described not only in meditation teachings but the psychological approaches of Transactional Analysis and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

 

Self-criticism can be helpful, if it motivates us to be aware of painful patterns of thought and behavior. But it can also separate our inner world into warring parties. The self-critic is one character or side in the drama. The criticized is another. Too often, we react to the critic as if it was a celestial judge. When we abstract ourselves from the moments of our lives and try to reduce our world to only an idea of it, we suffer. Our ideals can be impossible to live up to, yet we all have them. We are all imperfect, full of contradictions. To the degree we hold an ideal too tightly, to that same degree we can hurt ourselves for not meeting that ideal…

 

*To read the whole blog, please go to The Good Men Project.