Com + Passion
I was reading a book last night in which the author mentioned the following,
The only way to enhance one’s power in the world is by increasing ones integrity, understanding and capacity for compassion.
It made me wonder. Compassion. What the hell is compassion? And more specifically, what is the how of compassion?
I like etymologies and so I usually start there assuming that there is some wisdom in the first people who felt like they needed a word for this kind of thing. Compassion’s etymology isn’t a complicated one. It derives from Latin. The “co” slash “com” that’s common in a lot of words means “together” or “with.” Passion, which colloquially means something different to us in everyday speaking originally meant “to suffer.”
Compassion, then is suffering together. Writ a bit more generally, I see it as a “feeling” together. And writ even a bit more largely, I see it as experiencing together. Where does that leave us if compassion is experiencing/feeling/suffering together? More specifically, if the compassion that’s needed is for our own selfs?
We’d need to experience, feel, suffer with ourselves? That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Our self needs to co-experience, co-feel, co-suffer with our… self? We know how this makes sense to us. Something about it rings true. But. It is pretty confusing. It’s confusing because there are not two of us. Compassion is easier to understand when we’re speaking about “doing” it for or with other people/living things. But when it comes to ourselves what does it mean? How do we do it?
For me the answer lies in transcending the plane of doing altogether. If you assume a paradigm of focus on three planes, having, doing and being then the how of self-compassion is in being. You start to think about phrases like, presence, actually feeling your feelings, actually experiencing moment to moment… experience. These phrases point to other associations like, breathing, focusing on one’s sensations, “meditating”, stretching.
These are all great and, I think, 100% necessary for self-compassion. However, there is a spirit of it that is somehow missing. At least in terms of what we typically mean these days when we talk about compassion. One subtle way of capturing it is by saying whatever we’re experiencing is OK. There is a total unconditional acceptance of the experience, feeling or suffering. It’s OK. When we talk about compassion there is meant to be a lack of judgement. A lack of pushing the experience, the feeling, the suffering away. Resisting it. The how of compassion for your self lies somewhere, then in actually experiencing any given experience and just letting it be without any judgement or resistance to it.
Compassion sounds hard.
