September 11, 2011

   Thinking about Compassion on the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, I feel a great mixture of things ranging from the least compassionate: “Great, another day of national scab picking” to a more compassionate response of: “It’s good that people can get together and offer each other support in their healing after such great loss.”

   The part of me that is jaded looks at the government’s response to 9/11 – the death of so many soldiers and Afghan and Iraqi civilians, and the amount of money spent to support these deaths – which I understand is an unhealed and hurting part of me.

   The part of me that is able to acknowledge and celebrate the spirit of these memorials is the part of me that has experienced the healing grace of shared Compassion Space, and understands that each person takes a different path through their suffering.

   Writing about compassion is thought to be one way to develop compassion, after understanding what compassion means to the individual. After spending this past summer reading a couple hundred different research articles on compassion, I feel comfortable with the idea of beginning to write regularly about the subject.

   The first part of any discussion or writing about compassion is to have a definition that I can keep coming back to, as sort of a touchstone. The consensus definition of compassion that I feel comfortable with is: Being able to recognize another’s suffering, and feeling moved to relieve that suffering.

   That definition works for me because it does involve the necessary component of action (akin to John’s “faith without works is dead”), but it also allows that sometimes I may not be able to do anything to relieve another’s suffering, except to “feel moved”.

   Such is the case with the suffering embodied in the 10th anniversary of 9/11. There is so much suffering – still – 10 years after the event, a part of me feels paralyzed and unable to even look at the pain. Yet another part of me aches and sobs for all the kids growing up without a parent, and all the military spouses who welcome home a brain-injured partner.

   But I have learned through sitting in the Compassion Space, whether alone or with another person, that no suffering, no pain, is too bad to walk through and therefore get past. The greatest blocks to getting past suffering are the thoughts and fears about the suffering.

   In fact, I have found the experience of actually walking into the suffering is somewhat anticlimactic.

   I found I actually spent most of my time building up the thoughts of how bad the pain was going to be, or how terrible my suffering was going to be, or how miserable the grief was going to be. I created great chasms of fear, and I would stand at the edge and devote long periods of time staring blindly into that great unknowable abyss that was just my fear.

   It wasn’t the pain, it wasn’t the suffering, it wasn’t the grief – it was my fear of feeling these things that was the greatest obstacle.

   But when someone sat with me, sharing compassion – an unconditional concern for me, coupled with a desire to help relieve my suffering – I saw that my fears, pain, grief, and suffering were just so many boulders in the road, around which I could walk and move past.

   And that is the gift of compassion: to sit with another, to listen to another’s concerns, to acknowledge that
another being is suffering, and to offer compassion as a means and end to itself to help relieve that suffering.

~*~

To learn more about Compassion, Compassion Space, and practicing Compassion, go to: www.CompassionSpace.com.