On Compassion

Sometimes I worry about this word 'compassion.' It's a tricky word, and one that I fear is often conflated with some sort of super-saccharin sweetness. To be compassionate, perhaps I have to only ever have good feelings about everything and everyone. I have to creatively visualize everyone I know in a giant pink bubble of loving-kindness, and there are rainbows there. And unicorns.

But that ain't it.

Affirming to ourselves that we are good and kind and happy, when the reality of our inner experience is anything but, is not only an ineffective way to improve our mental state; it will actually make us feel worse. Disconfirming what we know to be true (that we are annoyed, tired, angry, sad) with affirmations to the contrary (that we are calm, alert, all-loving, elated) can provoke anxiety and add to our feelings of discomfort, because false affirmations suggest that there is something 'off' in our self-perceptions, and something 'wrong' with our shitty feelings.

A friend of mine recently e-mailed me the link to a great blog about mindfulness in which the author gives the following definition of compassion:

the ability to be with the suffering of others or ourselves, without a need to change or fix.

This is a good operational definition for the type of compassion we learn in meditation. When we sit, we're not seeking to change our thoughts and feelings, but rather to change our relationship to these thoughts. This doesn't happen overnight, but slowly, as we continue to sit, the thoughts and experiences we once thought were us become just interesting passing phenomena; we become observers of our inner experience. A friend of mine used to say “The heart beats, and the mind wanders.” Conflating our sense of self with the mind is, we slowly begin to see, as absurd as believing that we are our heartbeat, or our earlobe, or our eyelashes.

When we begin to see this, it becomes much easier to practice compassion. We are no longer trying to mold our thoughts and feelings (or the thoughts and feelings of others) into 'acceptable' forms, because these thoughts and feelings aren't us. They don't need to be denied or defended so that we can look better to others, or feel better about ourselves.

So the next time you get annoyed when someone tells you about their super-saccharin practice of pink, bubbly, unicorny compassion toward others, practice just watching yourself get annoyed. Be curious about the experience of irritation, (the way it manifests in your body, in your mind, the way it arises and passes away) without the need to change or fix a thing.

-Amanda