Are you compassionate? Are you sure?
The difficulties and gifts of compassion.
Before we dig into compassion, let’s dig into some other gifts first. You are almost certainly a person who doesn’t wish to be mean and worries when your words hurt others. This is amazing, and is the gift of kindness. You are almost certainly a person who feels a pang of sadness when others are sad. It is beautiful to spend a moment feeling what another is feeling, and this is the gift of empathy. You are almost certainly a person who steps up to help when you see someone drop something or needing a door opened. You’ve spent many, many hours looking after others. This is the gift of caring.
So what is compassion? The gift of compassion is seeing someone’s suffering. Whether it be a big season of suffering or a tiny moment of suffering, compassion notices it and witnesses it. But man, this can be hard! We sometimes feel awkward being a witness, like we might be intruding on someone's privacy or making them feel weak or inadequate. So instead of witnessing, we give words of encouragement that might help them through it. But that is the gift of caring, not compassion. Compassion is also hard when the suffering we witness comes off as angry (or “angsty” as my teenage daughters would say). Anger often triggers our emotional wall to go up, protecting our own mental health. Then we must take the additional step of calming our own wall down before being a good compassionate witness. Even life itself makes compassionate witnessing a challenge! Noticing sufferings is hard to do when our lives are so fast and filled. The tiny sufferings and the silent sufferings slip past us - unnoticed - so very easily.
The gift of compassion is also wanting the best for someone. Ok, we might not be great at noticing suffering, but we can still tackle this pretty straightforward part of compassion, right? Well, this part is also tricky. For example, sometimes what’s best for someone is too close to something that we also desire, and it triggers our envy. Then ego narratives like, “have they worked hard enough for this?” begin to creep in. Here’s another example. Yoga philosophy speaks of Karuna, or wishing others to be free from suffering. But what if our ego narrative begins questioning if they have learned their lesson? Ouch. And what if “the best” for someone is something that doesn’t match your values? Then it can feel like wanting the best for them means you are accepting their life choices. So hard! And then there is our own deep desire for connection that can get tangled into all of this. Narratives of loneliness begin to creep in like, “What about me? Where are the people wanting the best for me?”
So are we compassionate? We'd love to give a thumbs-up and say, “working on it!” But are we really working on it? Compassion takes commitment. A daily mindfulness practice like meditation, yoga, prayer, hiking silently in nature… can really help slow our thoughts so we notice more. Practices like daily journaling, reading mindfulness blogs, listening to podcasts about emotions, therapy… also help us untangle our personal blocks to compassion.
The wondrous thing about compassion is that it’s worth it! As difficult and time-consuming and gut-wrenching as it is, working hard on our compassion comes back to us a hundred-fold. Psychologist Paul Gilbert says, “compassion can flow naturally when we understand and work to remove our fears, our blocks, and our resistances to it. Compassion is one of the most difficult and courageous of all our motivations, but it is also the most healing and elevating."
Until next time,
Laura
(Please note that witnessing someone’s suffering is not the same as standing by when there is harm being done. And wishing the best for someone can happen while you are walking away from someone who is doing you harm.)
