Tag: compassion

Learning Differently

Rachel Henry1 Comment

The world is getting better by a number of measurements—less poverty, less violence, fewer child deaths, to name a few, but we don’t see this reality unless we back up far enough to take in the whole picture.

Sometimes learning from our own lives requires a similar step back. I recently made a mistake I have made multiple times before. I’ve even set up a system to prevent this particular mistake—a system that unfortunately relies on me for implementation.

After a period of despairing over my inability to change, it occurred to me that maybe the lesson wasn’t what I thought it as was. When I expanded my viewpoint, a number of other possible lessons popped into view.

First, as long as a human is running something, there will be mistakes, and that goes for me as well as all the other humans.

This concept does not seem revolutionary, but we don’t really believe it—I certainly didn’t. We approach our lives as if a constant upward trajectory were possible, as if once we solidified a rung in the ladder we never stepped down onto it again.

Second, I realized that I put much more mental and emotional focus on my mistakes than on my accomplishments. We don’t recognize the world is becoming a kinder and more comfortable place to live for a number of reasons, including our tendencies to focus on what we’ve just heard or experienced and to respond more strongly to bad news. In a similar way, shame or guilt over a moment of selfishness might erase in our minds the generosity we’ve shown at other times.

A humane response to our humanity is to practice great compassion with ourselves and others regardless of the circumstances. Richard Rohr says God never leads through guilt or shame, and God knows us more intimately than we know ourselves.

Note: I was most recently reminded of these numbers in a presentation by Allan Rossman, who cited the data from Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now.

 

 

Compassion All Around

Rachel Henry3 Comments

This week, noticing the convolutions of my interior life, I thought to myself, God, what a mess. Happily, the thought didn’t carry its usual load of self-judgment. Instead, it came with a smile and a good deal of compassion for myself.

The next day I saw how people who cause untold suffering for other people must have incredibly messy interiors. Living inside their skin must be excruciating. This isn’t news, but after experiencing compassion for myself, I was able to feel the same toward those I usually condemn. Paradoxically, at the same time, the tragedies caused by their actions came into sharper focus.

In The Book of Joy, the Dalai Lama tells the story of a monk in a Chinese prison camp in which many Tibetans died. After the monk escapes to India and is telling his story he says, “I was in real danger.” The Dalai Lama thinks he means he was in danger of losing his life. The monk says, “I was in danger of losing my compassion for my Chinese guards.”

I think the first step in cultivating this kind of compassion is to extend it to ourselves. In my interior landscape, I often approach myself as if I weren’t trustworthy, as if I’m just waiting for the rules holding me in check to let down their guard so that I can do something truly terrible. Like what? I have no idea, but the inner messages make out as if it’s along the lines of clubbing baby seals.

There may be better ways to approach one’s own humanity with loving kindness. We will make a lot of mistakes, but everyone reading this blog stepped out into the world with the intention of doing good today and is likely succeeding at least eighty percent of the time.

Richard Rohr says suffering that is not redeemed is passed on. Jim Finley says when you touch suffering with love, it dissolves. We will not end suffering in the world by staying at home and loving those who cause it. At the same time, we cannot cause lasting change if we act without compassion toward ourselves and all the world.

Nothing Less than Love

Rachel Henry1 Comment

This week I learned something from the source of all ancient wisdom: Facebook. Well OK, from a quote from the Tao Te Ching that my mom posted. The part that jumped out at me said,

Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.

That’s a gigantic claim. Using definitions from dictionary.com, it means, approximately, “Having deep sympathy for yourself and a strong desire to alleviate your own suffering, you can bring all beings in the world into harmony.”

How does that work? I stop getting down on myself for not doing the dishes and suddenly there’s a ceasefire in Syria? Sounds preposterous.

A couple of days later, I saw this quote from Jim Finley that I’d written on an envelope: “refusal to let anything less than love define who you are.” Ah-ha, instructions on how to be compassionate toward yourself.

We generally define ourselves by our internal judgments — by what we think we have and haven’t done well — or by others’ opinions of us, both of which are much, much less than love and will never lead to reconciliation. They’re designed to do just the opposite, to keep us off balance so that we’ll continue to lean on them for support. The problem is, they can’t bear our weight.

Love, on the other hand, is freeing and freely given. It doesn’t reserve itself until we’ve reached some self-defined and non-existent perfection. It is always and only present, always giving itself away as our lives, as Finley would say. When we let Love define us, when we admit that love is what we are, we can see it accompanying us through our suffering, we can have compassion.

But there’s still that bit about reconciling all beings. Looking with the eyes of love, we can see that preposterous things happen every day: a woman gives half of her last tortilla to a child traveling alone to escape violence, an alcoholic stops drinking, the Berlin Wall comes down. This whole compassion thing might be worth a try.

 

Be Kind, Be Kind, Be Kind

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I voted today. Tomorrow, or tonight if you stay up late enough, almost everyone will have a reason to despair because of the results of a local or national election.

I believe, however, that neither politics nor economics ultimately decides the quality of our lives. I am not saying these systems don’t affect us. A leader’s decision to go to war, for example, changes lives forever. I am saying that there are other, more powerful forces at play.

I base this conclusion on the version of history taught in American primary education, which is mostly if not exclusively politics and economics. If history consisted only of the events in the history books, I’m convinced the human race would have wiped itself out long ago because, according to the official version, very little good ever happens. People and nations in power attempt to retain or expand that power and harm or kill a lot of other people along the way. If nothing stood in opposition to that story, the world would be a much more dismal place than it is.

I think what keeps or doesn’t keep us going is how kind we are to one another. While trying to figure out the motivation of the characters in my novel, I wrote to a few friends and asked them what they wanted out of life and why. My former Chinese religion professor wrote back and said, “Be kind, be kind, be kind.”

At the time I thought, that is not an answer, but now I wonder if it might be the only one worth pursuing.

Much of life is beyond our control, even in a country where we get to choose our leaders and in certain cases our laws. Sometimes being kind is all we can do for another person and all we can do for ourselves.

I think we often see kindness as a small gesture and forget what a tremendous difference it can make. It can change the course of history.