As with most spiritual concepts, compassion is easier said than done.
Most people go through life reacting to each situation as it comes along, and most reactions are like science lab experiments. When the current emotional state of person A encounters the behavior and/or emotional state of person B, the ensuing reaction will depend on the nature, the quality, and the quantity of the emotions involved. Sometimes the reaction is constructive, sometimes it’s relatively benign, and sometimes it’s explosive.
Because most people live by accident rather than on purpose, the emotions of the people involved are likely to be reactions of their most recent experiences. Each individual is living a continual chain reaction process, never quite knowing what emotions are currently in effect or how those emotions will exhibit in a given situation. Thus, most people feel they have no choice in what their lives bring.
Such environments tend to swarm with Interpreter emotions. Those beset by struggle, uncertainty, stories run amok, and judgment are unlikely to find the calm from which compassion can emerge.
The root of compassion is non-judgment. Sometimes compassion results in non-judgment; sometimes compassion becomes the path to non-judgment. Either way, both the mind and the heart must become calm first. And then, from calm, you can extend compassion to yourself, compassion to every situation, and compassion to others.
Consider the following contributing factors as both ways and means of compassion.
Sharing
You are blessed with abundance. Perhaps your abundance comes in the form of worldly goods, or perhaps your abundance comes in a less-obvious form such as a talent, a particular personal strength, greater insights, security, health, a more tightly-knit family, etc. In some area(s) of your life, you are rich, and you have more than someone else.
However, most of us develop conflicted emotions about sharing when we’re young, and those conflicted emotions can affect us long after we acquire more mature attitudes. Remember when you were a child and were taught to share your toys? Regardless of the value you placed on your toys, regardless of your right of ownership, regardless of how untrue it was for you to share, you had to allow others into your space and let them do what they wanted with your stuff. So now, deep inside your soul, your ability to share may be driven by the old value you placed on your toys and leak through into what you have to give. You may not be able to recognize whether or not sharing is now true for you.
Sharing without compassion is often based on some form of reciprocity, including but not limited to:
- Trade value–and you want to keep the balance fairly even.
- Investment value–and you keep score.
- Ego value–and you want to stay one-up.
- Salvation value–as if by saving someone else you can in some way save yourself.
- Virtue value–and you expect resultant blessings.
True compassion is free from all such burdens. You share because you can, because you have more and someone else has less. You share without fear of losing what you have, without keeping score, or counting your gain (immediate or eventual).
When you share just because you want to, you may notice one or more of the following benefits:
- You gain greater confidence in your own abundance.
- You make the world a richer place.
- You partner with the universe in answering the prayers of others.
- What you give to others, you give to yourself.
These benefits are, in a way, aspects of another form of reciprocity–integrity value.
Heart Connection
It’s been said that compassion requires action. If you don’t put your action where your words are, your charity means nothing. Charity often requires you to give time, effort, talent or money. Depending on the situation, you may be able to give such actions with no involvement from your heart. In this way charity differs from compassion.
In addition to action, compassion includes some form of heart action such as sympathy, empathy or recognition.
When you extend sympathy, you respond more to the situation than to the emotions of the person within the situation. You can feel sympathy with someone in a challenging or desperate situation (illness, earthquake, war, etc.) even if you don’t personally know the sufferer. The situation itself evokes your compassion.
When you extend empathy, you respond to the emotions of the person within a situation. You share the joy, excitement, or pleasure of someone as they delight in a wonderful experience; or you feel the grief, anger or disappointment of someone in an unfortunate situation. Your response is evoked by your ability to respond with the same emotions as those within the situation.
When you extend recognition, you identify with the person without regard to the situation. You encounter someone and comprehend that person’s despair, or happiness, or regret, or quandary. You may or may not know the story behind the emotion, yet you recognize the emotion and respond.
When you make a heart connection of any kind with another person, you feel what they are feeling in one of the above ways, depending on your own experiences, the intensity of intimacy you share with that person, and your openness to others. For strangers on the other side of the world, experiencing something you have never personally encountered, you’re more likely to feel sympathy. For those whose situations and experiences are closer to your own, you may know more empathy. For those you know well or are open to, you may be able to know their emotions without knowing the situation.
To respond to another’s emotions and/or situation without a heart connection of some kind is to extend charity, and charity can add great value. When you extend compassion to another, you reach out to them from the depths of your soul.
Acceptance
The highest form of respect you can offer to others–especially those you love–is to step back and let them make their choices, to experience their lives, even to suffer their own consequences.
Such acceptance looks a great deal like the acceptance we each receive from the infinite. Consider:
- Withholding judgment (even when the other person is wrong).
- Resisting criticism (even when the other person should have known better).
- Respecting decisions (even when the other person is making a huge mistake).
- Offering emotional support (even when you disagree on a moral level).
- Letting others learn by way of ignorance, stubbornness, immaturity, wrong-thinking, and defensiveness.
- Forgiving hurt, mistakes, rejection, indifference, or betrayal.
You receive these gifts wholly and continuously throughout your life. Imagine the quality of your relationships if you could give them as wholly to others. What if you could love others for themselves rather than judge them for their acts? Or see their strengths rather than their flaws? Or recognize their choices as the mechanism of their growth rather than a commentary on their competence? Imagine the state of your own emotional and rational well-being if you always generated that kind compassionate energy from within.
Acceptance is unconditional love. Unconditional means open, free, without strings, non-reciprocal, whole, un-asked-for, even undeserved. Love means from the heart. Consider compassion, acceptance and unconditional love as co-equivalent. With compassion you acknowledge the emotions radiating from the other person, with acceptance you allow those emotions to exist and evolve, with unconditional love you share your own expansive, supportive, heart-felt emotion. Combined, these three interchangeable qualities become one of the greatest gifts it’s possible for you to present to another person.
Hope
When we first begin our life journey, we must learn the skills of the body–to walk, talk, feed ourselves, keep ourselves safe, etc. We must learn the skills of the mind–to think, make choices, learn how things work, etc. We must also learn the skills of the soul–to interact, care, forgive, be grateful, be happy, love.
The first skill set, that of the body, is often the first concern of our parents and caregivers. The better we are at taking care of our bodies, the less others have to do for us and the more likely we are to survive. The second skill set, that of the mind, becomes more important as we go to school and obtain the training to function as adults and provide for our own children. The third skill set, that of the soul, rarely pertains to survival and thus is often relegated to third place, neglected or even ignored. (Sometimes, however, it is commandeered by those with a strong agenda of their own, and we have to unlearn what we’ve been taught.)
With each skill set, the most effective parents and teachers are those who approach the child or student with hope. When we were children, they hoped we would grow, develop and learn. When we have children, we hope they will grow, develop and learn. If those aspirations are driven by fear, frustration, judgment, or condemnation, growth and development are often stunted. When these aspirations contain hope, love, encouragement, acceptance and compassion, growth flourishes and development never ends.
Hope recognizes it’s all a journey. When you extend hope to others you wish for their best good, you encourage them to pick themselves up if they fall, you support them if they tire and weaken, you applaud their efforts, and you celebrate their successes. You know there will be tough times but that not all times will be tough. You know their strengths have the power to expand right through their weaknesses. You encourage their choices with the confidence that all experiences add up, and the hope they will learn the lessons of those experiences. Hope believes in best good, prays for best good, supports best good, and never doubts that sooner or later best good will triumph.
Courage
In your compassionate relationships with other people, courage takes three forms:
- The courage to be true to yourself.
- The courage to support the other person.
- The courage to challenge the rules
When you are true to yourself, this first form of courage will come easily. Your intuition will guide you, your personal values system will sustain you, your abilities will enable you, your service will empower you.
The courage to respect another person builds upon this personal courage, especially if you have included the qualities of acceptance and detachment in your values system. It takes courage to accept others’ rights to have their own truth and then to detach from their results. To support someone you love when you don’t agree with them requires you to stand back and not take their choices personally, even though those choices might embarrass you, hurt you, dishonor you, or frustrate you. Have the courage to detach from such reactions. Give others the right to live their lives, to make their choices, to learn from their results. To grow.
Just as sometimes you disagree with those you love, sometimes you may find yourself in agreement with an enemy. It takes courage to support the position of someone you don’t like. Your choice in such a situation will depend on your values. Which do you value most, maintaining the conflict or sustaining the point of agreement? “Siding with the enemy” often has social implications. It takes courage to own your own truth in the face of what others might think of you.
Which brings us to the courage it takes to challenge the rules. Human beings establish rules for everything: how to play a game, how to behave in public, how to wage war, etc. Many rules are enacted into laws, but rules with no legal force behind them govern our behavior just as powerfully, such as what to eat and when, how to be smart with money, good time management, winning friends and influencing people, etc. If these rules are not true for you, have the courage to break them. Then have the courage to respect other people who chose to live according to their values system even if it means they break rules you might hold dear.
Partnering
Whether you feel it, extend it, or enjoy it, compassion enjoins you in partnership with yourself, with others, with experiences, and with the infinite. All enhancing, expanding creative emotions become more readily available to you–and the results of those emotions will fill your life.
Compassion is powerful energy. Let it fill your heart, your mind and your body, and that energy will expand and radiate out into the world. When you become an agent of compassion, your personal influence also expands and can touch lives other than those you specifically include. You become a force for greater good in the world.
AS WITH MOST spiritual concepts, compassion is easier said than done.
Most people go through life reacting to each situation as it comes along, and most reactions are like science lab experiments. When the current emotional state of person A encounters the behavior and/or emotional state of person B, the ensuing reaction will depend on the nature, the quality, and the quantity of the emotions involved. Sometimes the reaction is constructive, sometimes it’s relatively benign, and sometimes it’s explosive.
Because most people live by accident rather than on purpose, the emotions of the people involved are likely to be reactions of their most recent experiences. Each individual is living a continual chain reaction process, never quite knowing what emotions are currently in effect or how those emotions will exhibit in a given situation. Thus, most people feel they have no choice in what their lives bring.
Such environments tend to swarm with Interpreter emotions. Those beset by struggle, uncertainty, stories run amok, and judgment are unlikely to find the calm from which compassion can emerge.
The root of compassion is non-judgment. Sometimes compassion results in non-judgment; sometimes compassion becomes the path to non-judgment. Either way, both the mind and the heart must become calm first. And then, from calm, you can extend compassion to yourself, compassion to every situation, and compassion to others.
Consider the following contributing factors as both ways and means of compassion.
Sharing
You are blessed with abundance. Perhaps your abundance comes in the form of worldly goods, or perhaps your abundance comes in a less-obvious form such as a talent, a particular personal strength, greater insights, security, health, a more tightly-knit family, etc. In some area(s) of your life, you are rich, and you have more than someone else.
However, most of us develop conflicted emotions about sharing when we’re young, and those conflicted emotions can affect us long after we acquire more mature attitudes. Remember when you were a child and were taught to share your toys? Regardless of the value you placed on your toys, regardless of your right of ownership, regardless of how untrue it was for you to share, you had to allow others into your space and let them do what they wanted with your stuff. So now, deep inside your soul, your ability to share may be driven by the old value you placed on your toys and leak through into what you have to give. You may not be able to recognize whether or not sharing is now true for you.
Sharing without compassion is often based on some form of reciprocity, including but not limited to:
· Trade value–and you want to keep the balance fairly even.
· Investment value–and you keep score.
· Ego value–and you want to stay one-up.
· Salvation value–as if by saving someone else you can in some way save yourself.
· Virtue value–and you expect resultant blessings.
True compassion is free from all such burdens. You share because you can, because you have more and someone else has less. You share without fear of losing what you have, without keeping score, or counting your gain (immediate or eventual).
When you share just because you want to, you may notice one or more of the following benefits:
· You gain greater confidence in your own abundance.
· You make the world a richer place.
· You partner with the universe in answering the prayers of others.
· What you give to others, you give to yourself.
These benefits are, in a way, aspects of another form of reciprocity–integrity value.
Heart connection
It’s been said that compassion requires action. If you don’t put your action where your words are, your charity means nothing. Charity often requires you to give time, effort, talent or money. Depending on the situation, you may be able to give such actions with no involvement from your heart. In this way charity differs from compassion.
In addition to action, compassion includes some form of heart action such as sympathy, empathy or recognition.
When you extend sympathy, you respond more to the situation than to the emotions of the person within the situation. You can feel sympathy with someone in a challenging or desperate situation (illness, earthquake, war, etc.) even if you don’t personally know the sufferer. The situation itself evokes your compassion.
When you extend empathy, you respond to the emotions of the person within a situation. You share the joy, excitement, or pleasure of someone as they delight in a wonderful experience; or you feel the grief, anger or disappointment of someone in an unfortunate situation. Your response is evoked by your ability to respond with the same emotions as those within the situation.
When you extend recognition, you identify with the person without regard to the situation. You encounter someone and comprehend that person’s despair, or happiness, or regret, or quandary. You may or may not know the story behind the emotion, yet you recognize the emotion and respond.
When you make a heart connection of any kind with another person, you feel what they are feeling in one of the above ways, depending on your own experiences, the intensity of intimacy you share with that person, and your openness to others. For strangers on the other side of the world, experiencing something you have never personally encountered, you’re more likely to feel sympathy. For those whose situations and experiences are closer to your own, you may know more empathy. For those you know well or are open to, you may be able to know their emotions without knowing the situation.
To respond to another’s emotions and/or situation without a heart connection of some kind is to extend charity, and charity can add great value. When you extend compassion to another, you reach out to them from the depths of your soul.
Acceptance
The highest form of respect you can offer to others–especially those you love–is to step back and let them make their choices, to experience their lives, even to suffer their own consequences.
Such acceptance looks a great deal like the acceptance we each receive from the infinite. Consider:
· Withholding judgment (even when the other person is wrong).
· Resisting criticism (even when the other person should have known better).
· Respecting decisions (even when the other person is making a huge mistake).
· Offering emotional support (even when you disagree on a moral level).
· Letting others learn by way of ignorance, stubbornness, immaturity, wrong-thinking, and defensiveness.
· Forgiving hurt, mistakes, rejection, indifference, or betrayal.
You receive these gifts wholly and continuously throughout your life. Imagine the quality of your relationships if you could give them as wholly to others. What if you could love others for themselves rather than judge them for their acts? Or see their strengths rather than their flaws? Or recognize their choices as the mechanism of their growth rather than a commentary on their competence? Imagine the state of your own emotional and rational well-being if you always generated that kind compassionate energy from within.
Acceptance is unconditional love. Unconditional means open, free, without strings, non-reciprocal, whole, un-asked-for, even undeserved. Love means from the heart. Consider compassion, acceptance and unconditional love as co-equivalent. With compassion you acknowledge the emotions radiating from the other person, with acceptance you allow those emotions to exist and evolve, with unconditional love you share your own expansive, supportive, heart-felt emotion. Combined, these three interchangeable qualities become one of the greatest gifts it’s possible for you to present to another person.
Hope
When we first begin our life journey, we must learn the skills of the body–to walk, talk, feed ourselves, keep ourselves safe, etc. We must learn the skills of the mind–to think, make choices, learn how things work, etc. We must also learn the skills of the soul–to interact, care, forgive, be grateful, be happy, love.
The first skill set, that of the body, is often the first concern of our parents and caregivers. The better we are at taking care of our bodies, the less others have to do for us and the more likely we are to survive. The second skill set, that of the mind, becomes more important as we go to school and obtain the training to function as adults and provide for our own children. The third skill set, that of the soul, rarely pertains to survival and thus is often relegated to third place, neglected or even ignored. (Sometimes, however, it is commandeered by those with a strong agenda of their own, and we have to unlearn what we’ve been taught.)
With each skill set, the most effective parents and teachers are those who approach the child or student with hope. When we were children, they hoped we would grow, develop and learn. When we have children, we hope they will grow, develop and learn. If those aspirations are driven by fear, frustration, judgment, or condemnation, growth and development are often stunted. When these aspirations contain hope, love, encouragement, acceptance and compassion, growth flourishes and development never ends.
Hope recognizes it’s all a journey. When you extend hope to others you wish for their best good, you encourage them to pick themselves up if they fall, you support them if they tire and weaken, you applaud their efforts, and you celebrate their successes. You know there will be tough times but that not all times will be tough. You know their strengths have the power to expand right through their weaknesses. You encourage their choices with the confidence that all experiences add up, and the hope they will learn the lessons of those experiences. Hope believes in best good, prays for best good, supports best good, and never doubts that sooner or later best good will triumph.
Courage
In your compassionate relationships with other people, courage takes three forms:
· The courage to be true to yourself.
· The courage to support the other person.
· The courage to challenge the rules
When you are true to yourself, this first form of courage will come easily. Your intuition will guide you, your personal values system will sustain you, your abilities will enable you, your service will empower you.
The courage to respect another person builds upon this personal courage, especially if you have included the qualities of acceptance and detachment in your values system. It takes courage to accept others’ rights to have their own truth and then to detach from their results. To support someone you love when you don’t agree with them requires you to stand back and not take their choices personally, even though those choices might embarrass you, hurt you, dishonor you, or frustrate you. Have the courage to detach from such reactions. Give others the right to live their lives, to make their choices, to learn from their results. To grow.
Just as sometimes you disagree with those you love, sometimes you may find yourself in agreement with an enemy. It takes courage to support the position of someone you don’t like. Your choice in such a situation will depend on your values. Which do you value most, maintaining the conflict or sustaining the point of agreement? “Siding with the enemy” often has social implications. It takes courage to own your own truth in the face of what others might think of you.
Which brings us to the courage it takes to challenge the rules. Human beings establish rules for everything: how to play a game, how to behave in public, how to wage war, etc. Many rules are enacted into laws, but rules with no legal force behind them govern our behavior just as powerfully, such as what to eat and when, how to be smart with money, good time management, winning friends and influencing people, etc. If these rules are not true for you, have the courage to break them. Then have the courage to respect other people who chose to live according to their values system even if it means they break rules you might hold dear.
Partnering
Whether you feel it, extend it, or enjoy it, compassion enjoins you in partnership with yourself, with others, with experiences, and with the infinite. All enhancing, expanding creative emotions become more readily available to you–and the results of those emotions will fill your life.
Compassion is powerful energy. Let it fill your heart, your mind and your body, and that energy will expand and radiate out into the world. When you become an agent of compassion, your personal influence also expands and can touch lives other than those you specifically include. You become a force for greater good in the world.
