Wow - Compassion is Real and Incredibly Powerful

I had an interesting experience a couple weeks ago.  I was meditating, specifically on a situation where someone said something that made me hurt and feel unimportant and rejected.  When I say I was “meditating” on this experience, I need to be very clear about what I was actually doing.  I was NOT replaying the comment over and over in my head, nor fantasizing about what I could say back to the person.  I was NOT wallowing in the hurt, letting the feelings wash over me, again and again.  Instead I was using a strategy to try to get distance, and perhaps some perspective and peace with, my inner thoughts and feelings around this situation.  So I would focus on just the thoughts that I could “hear” – the mental talk.  Maybe her voice, or my voice interpreting her comments.  Each time I could detect an auditory thought, I would gently label it “Hear” and then use my awareness to look again in my mind for the next thought.  Then, I would switch strategies, and focus only on the visual thoughts – the images or videos associated with this incident.  Again, each time I would notice an image, I would gently label it “See” and then look again for the next one that might pop up.  And finally, I dropped those strategies, and focused just on my body, noticing any sensations that felt emotional – the pang of hurt in my stomach, the tension around my eyes, the subtle sense of “shrinking” in my whole body in response to feeling rejected.  I would label each of these sensations “Feel,” let them move or stay, whatever they were going to do, and widen my awareness to notice any other sensations in my body that felt emotional.

The purpose of this type of “divide and conquer” strategy is to divorce the thoughts from the feelings.  These essentially separate processes almost always feed one another.  You all know the experience: “Why did she say that?” (auditory thought); “Does she really not value me?” (auditory thought); image of you as small (visual thought); feeling of hurt (feeling); feeling of sadness (feeling); not liking this feeling (feeling); “She’s so selfish, never thinks of anyone else!” (auditory thought); feeling of blood pumping (feeling)… and on and on it goes.  We get caught in these cycles, what, a dozen, two dozen, times a day?! 

By focusing on each individual thought and feeling, we can achieve a sense of separation from them.  They become less charged.  We then become less charged.  And we can think clearly about whether we want to address the issue in some way, or let it go.

This is generally a good way to work with charged interactions, but I was dissatisfied after my meditation.  It still hurt!  And I wondered what, if anything, I could/should say or do to make my feelings known to the person who inadvertently hurt me.  What was stuck in my craw was this: my ego was bruised. 

This is not to say that I, (or you) should never express ourselves and our feelings to the person who hurt us.  Often this is very helpful, IF we do it with the intention of repairing the break in the relationship, and NOT just to make the other person feel bad or make ourselves feel better.  In this case with me, however, I didn’t feel it was going to be very productive to let this person know she’d hurt me.

So, I puttered around the house for a bit, washed the dishes, put away some stray clothes, dissatisfied, stilling feeling a vague sense of hurt.  I sat down to meditate again, this time using a different technique.  I didn’t have an explicit goal of “getting rid of the hurt.”  (Although, who knows?  Maybe that was there in an unconscious way.  Who likes feeling hurt?)  Either way, I was doing a “turn back” technique where every time I noticed a thought or feeling arise, I would “turn my attention back” to the source of the thought or feeling.  Sometimes, asking the question, “Who thinks?  Who feels?” helps this process.  (Don’t worry if you aren’t familiar with this technique.)  When I do this type of meditation, I often experience an expansive sense of nothing or nobody that to me, is very pleasant.  There is “no one” thinking!  There is just this body, this mass of cells, that feels!  It gives me a distance on the usual sense of ego that we walk around in all the time. 

So I was sitting there “turning back” to the nothingness each time a thought or feeling arose.  Of course the content of those thoughts and feelings were largely about the hurtful situation I’d been working with all day. 

All of the sudden, I noticed a spontaneous sense of compassion for “this mass of cells that feels,” and “this brain that spews out and churns around thoughts.”  I felt a sense of SELF-COMPASSION, but not for me, Georgia, but for this fragile, vulnerable, sweet body and mind that is just trying to do the best it can.  It was the most authentic and powerful sense of self-compassion I’ve ever experienced.  I wanted to hug this body, and cry for the hurt it endured.  My eyes got a little teary.

This pure compassion was infused with a sweetness that I don’t normally allow myself.  I’m tough and I can handle shit.  I don’t often show my tender underbelly, sometimes not even to myself.  This is an aspect of my ego getting in my own way, denying the truth of those moments when I am just another quivering mass of beautiful humanity, like us all. 

I believe that by doing the “turn back” techniques, my ego dissipated for a bit.  And with that clearing in the fog, without the mental talk and feelings feeding each other, and my weary brain figuring out how to stand up for myself and restore my sense of dignity, I could just simply and purely feel.  And then this compassion came out of nowhere, literally nowhere, holding me, understanding me, comforting me, feeling the hurt with me.

This is the type of compassion that for many of us is easy to feel for our clients, for children, even for animals.  For those we truly love and see as innocent.  Feeling that pure compassion for ourselves, who we know all too well are NOT wholly innocent, and who, sometimes we don’t love, is much harder.

But wow – the power of that compassion cannot be overstated.  It is what healed me that day.  And I hope to be able to turn to it more regularly, now that I know it’s real, and available.  This will no doubt be an important part of my personal evolution.

And here’s another step: how can I access that type of compassion for those who cause harm?  Those who I judge as “evil?”  Those who I don’t respect? 

As has been stated over and over recently, this country is at a crossroads.  There is so much division, vitriol and violence that we either throw ourselves into the WORK of healing, or we continue to destroy ourselves.  This is hard for me.  I’m susceptible to the divisive, “right and wrong” way of thinking.  Drumming up compassion for those I see as enemies is hard; as I know it is for those who see me as the enemy.  But this must be the foundation.  I wonder if there is a way to separate my ego from the process of judging and interacting with those with whom I disagree?

I will continue to ponder this, and seek guidance.  As I discover things, I’ll share them with you!  Compassion is so healing, so powerful.  It must be the foundation of everything.