The Dalai Lama said in the book The Art of Happiness, “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”
Sounds easy right?
And he looks pretty happy… (lots of practice of course!)
Sometimes compassion is misunderstood as being a somewhat passive attitude of acceptance and being nice.
It can also be confused with offering ’sympathy’ or ‘empathy’.
Kindness is definitely related, though there’s a lot of mistrust of kindness in society, many suspect ulterior motives. (That’s for another day!)
Sharon Salzberg offers a definition of compassion which probably gives the closest felt sense of ‘how’ compassion can be experienced.
‘Compassion is a response to suffering in others while staying open and resilient.’
Doesn’t sound so passive does it?
Certainly resilience requires an ability to expand and contract, to be versatile and to understand one’s limits.
Maybe there’s more to this than yoga, candles and a warm bath….
So what does it actually mean to ‘have compassion’?
Exploring the other responses compassion sometimes gets mixed up with might be helpful…
✨ ’Sympathy’ is defined as a reaction to another person’s situation that is often based on pity and limited understanding.
✨ ‘Empathy’ is a sense of having awareness of the other’s emotional experiences. This can lead to a re-experiencing of the others’ pain, in one’s own body.
✨ ‘Compassion’ however, is a desire to take action to help another, an active demonstration of engaging with the other’s emotional experiences.
Stepping into this kind of compassionate engagement with another human and their emotional experience, is an active step, some even say it’s akin to activism.
It requires being with the experience of someone else’s suffering, of their pain or discomfort, holding space for it, and walking alongside without trying to change it. It is the act of compassion itself that can make the difference…
Some find compassion comes naturally with an immediate circle of friends or family – and perhaps we might recognise compassion where it appears more visibly in religious or charitable spaces but also with groups or individuals in wider society, through working towards social change.
Sadly western culture isn’t big on self-compassion. Its focus on individualism and autonomy flies in the face of the collective spirit found in self-compassion. So with so few of us shown how to have compassion for ourselves, the path to interconnectedness can be a little more bumpy.
It can be a contemplation to consider how you speak to yourself and reflect on whether, if you spoke to someone you care about in the same way, your relationship might be jeopardised.
In Buddhist practice a loving kindness or Metta meditation begins with ‘May I be happy,’ and concludes with ‘May all beings be happy.’ Goodwill for all starts with a valuing of self.
Here at Ochre House, compassion underpins all our work. Stepping into compassion takes daily practice and energy and this requires courage every day – from our practitioners, from our clients – and also from you, the wider community.
It is what creates happiness, generates resilience and what wider social change is slowly and steadily built upon.
