Compassion is essentially simple. We share with all
life the capacity for feeling, the experience of having a
body, mind, and heart in continual interface with
countless other bodies, minds, and hearts. Our
capacity to feel deeply means we share with all life the
possibility of experiencing delight, joy, trust, and
intimacy, just as we share in the capacity to experience
pain, sorrow, grief, and fear. Living within a
physical body, we all share the experience of aging,
frailty, illness, and death, just as we share the precious
times of strength, health, safety, and vitality.
Through our minds we share the capacity to experience
confusion, agitation, and complexity, just as we share the
possibilities of serenity, clarity, and balance. An
understanding of this profound interconnectedness of all
life is at the root of the compassionate heart dedicated
to alleviating suffering without reservation or exception.
What happens when we lose touch with our capacity for
compassion? In the loss of compassion, a gulf of
separation emerges, an apparently unbridgeable gap between
"self" and "other," "I" and
"you," "us" and
"them." This is not an empty divide--the
gulf of separation holds an ocean of feeling. In the
loss of compassion this gulf fills with feelings of anger,
blame, fear, hatred, and resentment; painful feelings that
serve to widen and solidify the division.
|
|
In the loss of our
heartfelt capacity to receive and embrace sorrow and distress, we
lose one of the most precious and liberating gifts it is possible
for us to know. We lose our understanding of
interconnectedness and in doing so we lose the most true,
authentic core of our being. Cast adrift from an
understanding of interconnectedness, we become captives of the
complexity of fear, anger, blame, and isolation. This is the
greatest of all suffering.
We can find ourselves feasting on a daily diet of isolation and
separation. Take a moment to reflect on a person from your
past or present whom you struggle with, who may have harmed or
hurt you with words of rejection, with abuse or blame, and notice
the feelings and responses that emerge. Perhaps you can
sense a slight hardening of the heart, feelings of resistance or
tension, or a flood of memories, past conversations, and
events. Connecting with that person even from a distance may
open the door to such powerful feelings of agitation, fear, or
anger that we instinctively flee from them into fantasies or
daydreams.
We are strangely close to the people in our lives we struggle
with, fear, or resent, just as we are close to the difficult
places in our own hearts and minds--our tendencies towards
self-abasement, greed, or feelings of inadequacy. These
difficult places and relationships occupy a pivotal role in our
lives and hearts. We think about them endlessly; we obsess
far more about the difficult people in our lives, analyzing their
imperfections, replaying the historical and familiar story of
resentment, than we think about the people we love and
enjoy. Endless time is spent dwelling upon, judging, and
analyzing our own imperfections, the many ways in which we
disappoint ourselves. How much time do we give to
appreciating and celebrating our own tenderness, generosity, and
sensitivity? Tremendous energy is consumed in planning our
strategies of avoidance, modifying or eliminating the
relationships we struggle with, endeavoring to perfect ourselves
by rejecting everything we deem imperfect. In all of these
endeavors we tend the garden of separation and sorrow. Who
are the real enemies in our lives? Mostly they are the
people who we are no longer willing to listen to and the places in
ourselves we deny.
The difficult people in our lives, the difficult places in
ourselves, appear to hold so much power, but it is a power we have
given to them. As we become captivated by the complexity of
resentment, anxiety, and judgment, we delegate the authority to
define our well-being, happiness, and freedom to the difficult
person or part of ourselves. We also believe that once we
have removed the difficult person from our lives or once we have
improved or perfected ourselves we will be happy, compassionate,
and free, not understanding the futility of this quest. Ram
Dass once put it, "I'd rather be happy, than
right." We could ask ourselves, "Would we rather
flounder in the waves of resentment or find the compassion to
forgive and move on in our lives? Would we rather pursue the
desperate dream of perfection or find the wisdom and compassion of
acceptance and understanding?
|
|
