Compassion

I have written about how my first words as a toddler were all spitfire and aggression...”bugger, bugger, bugger” and then I spat repeatedly. I was born with a streak of bull terrier assertiveness. Get out of my way, or else. Do not cross me. As I grew older this morphed into “do not lie or cheat intentionally towards me” or you will know my wrath.

As the paradox would have it be, all as part of the divine comedy, my greatest gift in life has been to learn to live in compassion. And that the more I do, the more connected I feel to all of life and the happier I am.

The Dalai Lama has said, "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion."

This has been my experience. It was why I created a program called Dare to Care, Radical Truth with Compassion. How to speak truth, and to do so with compassion.

Compassion = to suffer/endure together.

Early this month, November 2009, Andre Agassi, the great tennis player, did an interview with Katie Couric on 60 minutes. If you haven’t seen it, I would recommend it. Here was a man who for years showed up every day to do something he privately hated. Tennis was his fathers dream, not Agassi’s. For the first part of his tennis career, he lived the dream for his father. How many of us are doing that? Living out our life for someone else, or for an expectation we think others have of us? As such a public figure, the burden of carrying this illusion, the pretense of acting out that he was happy, that he loved tennis, and life was good, became so great that privately Agassi went through his own dark night. Drugs were part of his self destruction. If not drugs, then people resort to a basket of temptations...such as alcohol, (usually more socially acceptable, and not up for criticism by the drug testing labs) or sex. When the break down was complete, and he had reached his own festering swamp pit, a place most of us must get to in order to invite transformation, he made his choice. This time, for the first time ever, he chose tennis. Not for his father, or for the public, but for himself. When Katie Couric asked him if where up to hearing Martina Navratilova’s reaction on hearing of Agassi’s drug use, Agassi looked directly into the camera, and you could see his pain, but you could also see that he really was up for anything. He had gone on a deep inner journey to face all of the truths and lies about himself, and there was nothing that he couldn’t now face. He took it, harsh as it was. And then he talked about compassion. "The one thing that I would hope is not that there aren't rules that need to be followed, but along with that would come some compassion that maybe this person doesn't need condemnation. Maybe this person could stand a little help. And I had a problem. And there might be many other athletes out there that test positive for recreational drugs that has a problem. So I would I would ask for some compassion."

To me, this was the apex of the interview. Are we able to bring compassion to the table? And why do we find it so hard? How have we reached a place that we ask so much of our “hero’s”, that if and when they fall, we dismiss them like scraps of paper. Many of our fallen hero’s have yet to reach the place where they have gone so deep inside to face all of their demons, as I witnessed Agassi had, and they still hide behind lame excuses and entitlement. However, like all of us, they have a larger story that often we, the public, have no clue about. Just as we had no clue about Agassi until he published his book.

In my work, I get to experience, every day, the story behind the story of people. I see first hand how people in positions of power and status have so many fears, insecurities, questions, confusion, doubt. I have learned, through the rich and intimate conversations that I have with wonderful people on a daily basis, just how vulnerable we all are. All of us, like ice bergs, have the surface projections. The stuff everyone can see. And then there are layers below this. Down down down. Often time’s in my work, we reach the layers that have never been spoken aloud to anyone. This is privileged work. I hold these conversations in the highest respect. They are sacred conversations, speaking of the soul of us. And it is because of these conversations, day in day out for 14 years, I know without any doubt at all, that compassion is the greatest gift we can give to anyone. And it is the greatest gift we can give to ourselves.

The magnificent Karen Armstrong, TED prize winner, created, with the guiding help of thousands, Charter for Compassion.

Compassion asks of us to wish and hope and pray that others be relieved of suffering. It requires that we can feel for others. We are only able to take a third person perspective when we reach a certain stage of development. Until this point, we only see through the lens of “I”, ‘me’ and “mine”. People who are stuck in this stage of self centeredness also require our compassion. Indeed when we hold it as a principle of life, asks us not to discriminate at all. It does not mean that we step over transgressions, and allow and accept cruel, nasty, mean, callous actions and behaviour. But that when we do speak truth, we do so with compassion in our hearts and in service to other.

Often the path to finding compassion for others requires that we go through our own breakdown and dark night. That we drink from the cup of vinegar and taste the bitterness, betrayal, disappointment, grief of life. And what is the point? Only through experience are we able to give our open hearts to others in pain. Take their hand, offer a prayer, give blessings to. And in the giving, we too become heartfelt, and connected.

Paradoxically, within compassion lies great beauty. Pain is not always an ugly or bad place. Great beauty and peace is also found there. When I think and feel compassion, I am also connected to beauty.... or when I feel beauty around me, I have tapped into rivers of compassion. The two are twin flames.

One of my most favourite of all quotes is from The Course in Miracles.

“In my vulnerability I become invulnerable.”

For to show compassion requires us to be comfortable in our vulnerability. When we step into compassion we open our heart. Compassion is courage in action.

Great leadership springs from compassion. The impulse to lead for a Gandhi or Mandela is not about power, it is about love.

As Benjamin Disraeli said...Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.

The exquisite art of leadership brings compassion and truth together. The ability to speak truth to power from a well of eternal compassion.

Just imagine a world were compassion was the norm? Where all of our world religions spoke of compassion and care for all people? Where our courts and prison systems lived in compassion- not to step over - but to see beyond the ugly and the evil and the mean, to the truth. Justice dispensed with compassion. This requires great wisdom, and people who have transcended vengeance.

When Charles Carl Roberts shot and killed five Amish girls in Lancaster County Pennsylvania in October 2006, the response from the Amish community was forgiveness. They consoled the family of the murderer, who had lost a son, they attended the funeral of Charles Roberts. This, their response, compared to living for weeks, months, years, decades and centuries with vengeance in our hearts?

Paradoxically, if you have trouble finding compassion in your heart for others, you are probably harboring a lack of compassion for yourself (or vice versa). Compassion for our self means finding a place of forgiveness for our choices, our actions, our physical bodies, our strengths, weaknesses. In my last relationship it took me months to find compassion for making the choice I did...for saying yes to a relationship that I knew in the quiet places of myself was wrong. For months I cringed that I had been such a fool. So weak and needy. I know many people who have struggled with finding this level of compassion for themselves. 10 plus years after making a major mistake in their life...triggered by some unmet, or unconscious need, they are still persecuting themselves. Enough! Seek compassion within self.

When we accept that our humanness means that inside we are marshmallows... soft, weak, needy, full of longing to be loved, to be desired, to be needed, to be liked...only when we accept this part of ourselves can we really begin to transcend the neediness. It’s part of the mystery... that to move through something to the other side, we first have to embrace and accept it. I remember when I first really acknowledged the part of me that is/was so soft and vulnerable. It was a relief. I had tried for so long to project this image of being strong and able to take care of myself, by myself. Me..needy...no way! To let this illusion go, and to be in my full vulnerability was when I first started to become really strong. This is what I saw in Andre Agassi. The strength on the other side of his brokenness. The invulnerability in his vulnerability. This is compassion for self.

When we bring compassion into our selves, we can find room to bring it to others. Ultimately, compassion is being in truth. There is no hiding, there is no illusion. Our heart is open, exposed. Beauty and grace are present.

Take time today to be compassionate... and let me know what happens..

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