Developing Compassion in Action
The word Compassion evokes many ideas—some relatable, others unrealistic and most vague. The lack of definition renders it more an idea than an experience. It’s a word we equate with kindness and softness, but rarely with strength and resilience. Can it be all of the above?
I want to look at Compassion from an applied point of view. What is our experience? And how can we use that experience to remain strong in the critically turbulent experiences we face in our life. When we are frightened we often remove ourselves from experience and hide behind ideas.
This is because ideas are maps helpful in identifying an event, but they are separate from experiential reality. In Buddhism, we value experience over concept. And while it’s good to study the fullness of the teachings on Compassion, how does Compassion work in everyday life? If we look carefully at our mundane experience we might see that compassion kindness and love are available to us all the time. Petting a kitten, playing with a dog, holding a child—these are simple moments of goodness. In these moments, we are communicating with life itself.
Rooted in loving-kindness, these ordinary acts of kindness help heal our overtaxed nervous systems and reconnect us to the living world. However, we often don’t recognize the profundity of these moments because they seem too ordinary. In fact, compassion is happening all the time, everywhere, and—as the movie said—all at once. Every time a flower blooms, every time a tree sways, every time birds sing from their nests, nature is alive and communicating. Yet because we are conditioned to value negative experiences more than positive ones, it’s negativity that often colors our view of the world. When we face great difficulties, we assume we need greater remedies. This fire with fire approach keeps the aggression in our lives and our being fron of stage. But it is so easy to turn our mind to the accessible goodness in our life right now. Just breathing is not as sexy as wielding a hammer against injustice but we help no one if we can’t replenish ourselves with love. Birds on Leonard Cohen’s wire singing outside my window are an amazing and accessible reminder of the connection to life that is a healing experience when I care to listen.
However, singing birds are no antidote to the hatred and destruction of the violence we are faced with every day. The horrors of war, aggression, terror, and greed exist within the greater framework of this living, eternally nurturing planet with us. If we look to only one side of this equation we miss the big picture of life.
It would be a mistake to separate the good from the bad entirely. We live in a world that frightens us. We read about it in the news, and it frightens us further. To escape, we book a retreat upstate and cultivate compassion, kindness, and love for all beings. And for a moment, we feel relief. Then we return home, and within days the feeling wanes. Deep dives into self-care are a valid escape, but as life continues nonetheless, the relief of these escapes is unsustainable. A mud bath simply does not speak to the totality of our living experience. The healthiest and most practical approach may be to weave together the negative and the positive—to stay aware of the full picture of our existence. Seeing only the good is quite shallow and disregards the comparative privilege many of us enjoy. Seeing only the negative, can be a form of masochistic narcissism where we become addicted to the doomscroll and deplete ourselves into the computer screen. Neither extreme offers any real respite, and in fact limits our ability to remain joyful and positive in life. In either case, it is all about me, isn’t it? If we stop seeing “positive” and “negative” as absolute opposites and instead see them as energies—one promoting well-being, the other promoting disconnection—we can begin to use compassion to help heal both our personal suffering and the broader suffering of the world. The teachings on Compassion point toward a full realization of living by re-training the mind to see all things as inherently, fundamentally equal parts of the whole. The fact that we don’t like something, doesn’t make it evil. Do we have the hubris to attempt that determination? Humility lies at the core of the big view. Compassion encourages the humbleness to STFU and see it all.
We will never eradicate pain, suffering, or injustice entirely. But we can be voices for balance, comfort, kindness, and peace. And “peace,” in this case, doesn’t mean utopia. It means peace within turmoil. I love the audacity of John and Yoko’s ad campaign: “War is Over (If You Want It).” It wasn’t just a slogan—it was a vision, displayed boldly on billboards in Times Square in 1970. Can you imagine? However, as some readers will point out, Lennon was an aggressive, sometimes violent person. In response to claims he had been physical with his wife Cynthia and beaten up some of his friends, he said that because he was so violent he had come to understand the importance to peace. He had to do the work to develop peace within himself, by accepting his violence and vowing to move beyond that. His move to express the possibility of peace to his generation was an attempt to use his privilege to benefit the world.
The compassionate view isn’t that we can get rid of suffering, but that we can wake up and make conscious choices. We can show others what we’ve seen in ourselves: the underpinnings of cruelty within our own psychology, and the ways we’ve worked to transform beyond them. As the saying goes, 
compassion begins at home. It’s unrealistic to think we can heal a world in chaos if our personal life is full of turmoil and imbalance. However, it is dishonest to pretend we are perfect. In fact, our frailties can become our bridges. Because we all share pain, our struggles can help us connect. We need to align with principles of goodness, so that our lives lean more toward openness—and through that, more wisdom can shine into ourselves and radiate out to the world. But we need to do the work. Looking into ourselves and developing the humility to see the damage but also developing gratitude for all the goodness we have received. It is not a crime to notice the life and love everywhere around us.
If we let cruelty discourage us, our energy will deplete. But if we hold our seat and secure our own balance, until our windhorse and our inner strength is restored, then simply by being awake, alive, and available, we have the option to choose Compassion before we react in ignorance. When pause to heal ourselves we benefit our families, communities, and the world itself.
We don’t need to fix the world. It’s not on us to change the course of ignorance. But if we want to develop compassion it is on us not to contribute to the ignorance. The world has existed for over 4 billion years and will continue long after humanity has run its course. No matter how ignorant or greedy we become, we likely cannot kill the planet. However, we can certainly destroy our own lives. And even then, when ecosystems collapse, as they have five times before, life has always returned. It is resilient. It is eternal. It grows from rock, from ash, from mud. And we can see that heritage within ourselves. We are resilient. We can gain strength from the goodness of the world. We can tune into that growth. We can learn from it. We can become like seedlings pushing through the cracks in the asphalt, proud of our strength and capacity to grow and humble enough to take our place. And as we grow, we nourish the world around us simply by being part of life. And we can diminish the damage by diminishing our own self-importance and becoming part of it all.
We are not more special than anything else in nature. However, we have been given the gift of conscious choice. And we can use that choice wisely if we choose to remain conscious. We often turn our the gift of self-reflection into a weapon against ourselves and each other. Maybe if can stop using our burgeoning wisdom as a cudgel, we can work to develop true awareness—not self-centeredness, but self-knowledge that looks beyond itself and sees the fullness of life experience.
And, maybe we can learn to do the work to care for ourselves and be present in our lives a bit more.
I don’t know why I posted the picture below, except I love this lady. She makes me smile. And everytime I smile an angel in my brain gets wings. But also she’s inspiring. She’s fine with her looks and weight. She seems unbothered by the defensive skin she covered in. That’s her way, for a lot of her life will be hard. But at this moment, she doesn’t seem to mind. She just naturally does the next right thing. And loves her mother very much.
