You seem to be you
and I seem to be me.
My sorrows are no greater
than your sorrows.
Thou art beautiful,
o my loves,
as tears are. – Terrance Keenan
We held our Monthly Meditation & Communi-Tea practice at Yoga Bliss. One Sunday a month we will offer students more time to go a little deeper and make new friends. We’re drawing inspiration from Karen Armstrong’s “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life”. Ms. Armstrong is a best selling author and TED Prize Winner who created and launched the Charter for Compassion.
During our first meeting we focused on the 1step: learning about compassion. The following month’s 2nd step involved taking a deep hearted look at the world around us and focusing on how we can actualize compassion within our family, workplace and nation. Last month’s 3rd step explored extending compassion toward ourselves. Why bother? Today, we explored the 4th Step: empathy and beyond.
We contemplated some of one my favorite writers, Rebecca Solnit‘s, observations:
“Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we’re taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it’s home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, ‘Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self,’: but empathy, solidarity, allegiance – the nerves that run out into the world – expand the self beyond its physical bounds.”
Students shared several situations in which they were drawn beyond the “boundaries of self” by allowing their hearts to be touched by people near to them and people they didn’t know. Transformation started with their willingness to feel. One student was able to feel her own pain of having to accept a family member’s truth that strongly challenged her former beliefs. Another student shared her experiences of really seeing homeless people and responding to their ask for help.
The feelings of empathy – deeply resonating with an other’s pain takes a precious willingness. I think it’s precious because it’s like a window that can get blown shut very quickly when we feel overwhelmed. If we can stay with it, our imaginations can take us beyond pain to the much more spacious understanding of compassion. Compassion motivates us to help. Moving into action profoundly changes our understanding. The more we incline ourselves to care, the more likely we are to act.
As I’m writing this afternoon Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is assembling teams from many locations to rush to the aid of earthquake and avalanche survivors in Nepal. We hear of so many natural and man made disasters that we can easily become numb. Using the tools Karen Armstrong draws from the Buddhist wisdom tradition we can take very pragmatic steps toward compassionate action. Just begin with the Four Immeasurable Minds of Love meditation expanded to include the people struggling in Nepal. Spending twenty minutes considering their plight will likely incline you to help in whatever way you can. In addition to MSF, Public Radio International posted a listing of 7 vetted charities doing relief work following the earthquake.
We spoke of the way art in it’s many forms, the Greek tragedies, paintings, films, writing, can help us realize our shared humanity. You can hear moving stories of personal service at the Moth Radio Hour’s recent podcast Farms, Fish Banks and an Iron Roof. Beauty in the natural world often touches us with its living demonstrations of impermanence – it’s all so fleeting. Taking in nature in its many forms helps us get in touch with how relatively small we are as individuals yet how inter-dependent we are together with all creation. You can explore this poignant sense of life in this amazing time-lapse film of Iceland’s land and waterways.
You can find some practice suggestions and resources at: