The Antidote

The other day I was sharing my view of compassionate practice, and speaking about my choice to cultivate compassion for everyone, including extremely difficult people, not just people know or people I like or people who I think deserve compassion. I was asked why I’d taken on this level of practice and the question has been hanging about with me ever since, niggling in my brain. Mostly because responding to it involves explaining so much about what I’ve learned, and am continuing to learn, about happiness, compassion, suffering and humanity.

I’ve largely avoided sharing details of this practice, or even divulging that it’s something I do, because uncompromising compassionate aspiration seems to threaten people.

Amanda Palmer wrote a poem following the Boston Marathon bombing and published it to her blog. Her expression of compassion is met with such vitriol that she wrote, in her song Bigger on the Inside, “You’d think I’d shot their children…”

The quote ‘If you kill your enemies, they win’ is attributed to Justin Trudeau by his critics — as if such a statement is sentimental folly, foolish and naive, and by claiming he said it, they can discredit him.

Martin Luther King is shot, assassinated for speaking out for compassion, for seeing shared humanity and creating a society that recognises and protects human rights.

I’ve been doing this practice for years and intend to continue doing it for the rest of my life because I know it’s a slippery slope back the other way if I don’t habituate myself to it. And I want to habituate myself to it because the result feels good for my heart. After eight years of it I have an ability to remain open-hearted that I certainly didn’t have before, and that open-heartedness makes me happy.

Besides feeling good, being less irritated with other people, not carrying around anger or hatred, I can also see how incredibly powerful it is. We will never find anyone who single-mindedly agrees with us, so as long as we see our differences as a threat, we will always have enemies. If we genuinely want to eliminate a sense of threat, of ‘other’, we must learn to see our shared humanity — how we are interdependent and our very survival is reliant on recognising that we all just want to be happy and to not suffer.

“No one does anything because they want to feel worse”

-Pema Chodron

The permeating belief that anyone who seeks a peaceful solution is operating with a level of naïveté is now spurring me on, because this mis-informed belief that compassion is ‘soft’ denies our interconnectedness and that everything we do matters.

I’m spurred on because I see the benefit of taking care of each other, of looking beyond the individual to the bigger picture of what is the greatest benefit for everyone. And I know this sounds radical, to me it sounds radical, but I can genuinely wish for Donald Trump to be happy — not happiness as external gratification but happiness as the ability to relax and be open to the fundamental ambiguity of life. When someone is happy, genuinely happy, they don’t cause harm to others. Fear, the need to protect ‘me’ and ‘mine’, the mentality of not having enough, these are the much bigger problems that lead an individual to make harmful choices, choices that have a much wider impact than they realise.

I find it ironic that, the very same people who think a peaceful approach of negotiation, cultivating compassion and engaging in discussion is naive, will also state that our inability to learn from history makes us doomed to repeat it. History is one long time-line of retaliatory aggression ad infinitum. Just looking in our most recent history of the last hundred plus years: World War I led to World War II which cascaded into the cold war, which led to the rise of communism, which led to the occupation of Afghanistan, which led to the Taliban, which led to Daesh, which leads to where we are right now with Syrian refugees being treated like criminals, the rise of nationalism in the UK and USA, and governments justifying bombing with drones — their motivation and intention no different than the person who straps a bomb to themselves and detonates it in a crowded subway or concert hall. It is a constant thread of age-old grudges and for every ‘enemy’ killed on all sides, more enemies are created.

This is how it goes and in this way, aggression has never resolved anything.

When we look at compassion we must understand that it is not about being ‘nice’. It’s not about dismissing the harm people cause one another. It is not condoning bad behaviour. Compassion is an act of being one with, it’s a relationship between equals, it is seeing our shared humanity as well as our interconnectedness. I think Sharon Salzberg defines it beautifully when she says of compassion:

“…it simply means we are relating to the other as a person and not as a symbol, a concept, a label, or an adversary.”

It is not a person that makes us pull back, but our thoughts and judgements about them. And the person is rarely the problem. Compassion sees that the root of suffering is much bigger than individual action and wants what’s best for everyone because we are a global community whether we acknowledge that or not.

Compassion sees human suffering, rather than ‘my’ suffering. Compassion understands how anger or hate are masks for fear. Compassion recognises that violence is not a default, but a place where any person can go when they feel threatened, or like they aren’t being seen.

I practice compassion, and want to genuinely feel it for everyone, because I recognise that every single act of terrorism, of genocide and of war is a human act. I practice compassion in this way because I know, without a doubt, that under the same circumstances, I could just as easily have been a person who could justify killing 49 people in a night club, or a person who recruits child soldiers, or a person who hits the button to drop a bomb on a city.

I see that human beings are equally capable of causing pain as they are of showing kindness and I want to do everything I can to ensure I’m not contributing to animosity, apathy and the ‘othering’ of my fellow human beings.

I practice compassion because I want to expand my sense of ‘us’ until there is no ‘them’, to get in touch with my human tendencies for narcissism, aggression and fear in order to understand the whole human experience better.

I practice compassion as a way to contribute to a world where we don’t rank human suffering.

I practice compassion because I want to live in a world where we put the same kind of value on caregiving as we currently put on being aggressive.

I practice compassion because aggression has gotten us nowhere.

I practice compassion because I want it to be my default.