The Dali Lama was just in town for the weekend promoting what he calls seeds of compassion. There were about 5 days of talks to mainly kids of all ages on compassion and how to be more compassionate toward others. I didn’t get to go to any of the events but heard him speak on TV and through his webcasts which you can find at seedsofcompassion.org.
One of the most interesting things he said was that more women should be leaders because compassion comes easier for them than it does for men because men are so caught up in their aggressive tendencies and egos! He also talked about how nothing can come of war and that talking is needed to end the differences between people. He said something about that the leaders of the world should come together and spend a few weeks on vacations together with their families so that they could see that we are all humans.
Compassion is such an interesting and complex subject. A few years ago I studied and read all that I came across on compassion – books and articles online.
What does it mean to be compassionate? Compassion is the feeling of wanting to relieve the pain and suffering and others. It goes a step beyond empathy which is feeling the feelings of another and acknowledging them in another. With compassion we move to make the other feel differently. Compassion requires that we move outside of ourselves and forget about ourselves. That requires that we be strong enough inside of ourselves to do that. If we do that and sacrifice our needs being met over another when we aren’t strong enough inside, it can end up in compassion fatigue (burnout.)
The first thing in being kind to another lies in learning to be kind to ourselves. In learning to serve others, we will often be confronted by our own suffering. It provides for many opportunities for growth and understanding. Helping others will reveal where we ourselves need helping and can lead to the path of healing.
When we first start to act compassionately, it usually is to fill some of our own needs for attention, recognition and approval. We seek what we didn’t get early in life and it is usually unconsciously. We believed those stories we were told and that we told ourself about how we were not good enough or smart enough or pretty enough until we didn’t know the difference between the truth and what is real. We developed our egos to make us feel better about ourselves when our insides were suffering and wanting the world and our lives to be different. The stories we tell ourselves are revealed when we move to help others compassionately. We feel that we can never do enough or do the right thing. We are led into our own suffering to show us the place inside us that need healing. Taking the path can lead us to authentic compassion or egoless compassion where we can come to a place of just giving to receive and to the place where all giving is receiving.
In Oprah’s recent new show “The Big Give” one of the things that keeps coming up is that when the contestants go to give away all the money they often fail to find out what the family or organization is really needing and they give what they think would be fun or nice to give. They are giving what makes them feel best rather than what others really need. Like one guy gave a party to a family that cost $500 when the family could hardly pay the rent. It lasted for an afternoon, but the $500 would have paid the bills to help reduce the stress of the family. Some of the most memorable gifts were just gifts of time and small gifts of appreciation.
When we can keep our own needs to give in check and find out what people truly need by listening to them and their stories we find authentic compassion. As we learn to open ourselves to our own suffering and feel our own pain we open ourselves more to be present with others in their suffering thereby witnessing the pain which makes it go away. I know it seems contradictory. I have been trying to fix clients for the better part of 20 years of being in practice as a massage therapist. Once I was able to go beyond my own needs for fixing which were appreciation and a need for connection, I could see that all the scientific solutions for all of the techniques I have learned and applied suddenly laced any real importance other than just being able to have something to do with the clients. When I could see beneath the surface and acknowledge my own feelings that were underneath the need to help and fix, I could be still enough to see that clients really had their own power to heal and if given the chance to feel their own feelings and make contact with their true essence a deeper healing could occur. The techniques became just a way to help people feel. The techniques became the path for uncovering the seed of compassion that were the real key to health and healing.
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