I've Been Thinking...

It was dark when I woke up. I made my coffee in silence, then sat down to do my morning meditation. I’ve come to notice that it’s in these early hours when it’s still that I can feel the most. I'm able to make sense of life for a bit when it’s quiet. The stillness allows me to just be.

As soon as I closed my eyes the other morning, the tears started to flow. They came slowly at first, then picked up steam. Within moments, I felt overcome. 

I felt overcome with the heaviness of what is happening an ocean away. Overcome by the heartbreak, the sadness, and the brutality of what we have been witnessing. Every image has pierced my heart. Every story has brought me to silence. Watching women my age and older walk for miles in the freezing cold, holding their purses, falling and getting back up, and charging ahead as they fight back tears. Watching children hold their parents’ hands with looks of confusion, fear, and sadness on their faces. Watching men put their hands up to train windows as they say goodbye to their families leaving, while they stay home and fight to defend their country. Watching loved ones cradle those who lost their lives—weeping and wailing with emotion.

Do You Care?

The Practice:
Have compassion.

Why?

Compassion is essentially the wish that beings do not suffer – from subtle physical and emotional discomfort to agony and anguish – combined with feelings of sympathetic concern.

The body sometimes assists the soul’s journey with quite dramatic insistence. After I completed a third chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer, my body let my doctors know very clearly that it had reached its limit. I had allergic reactions in the form of an inflamed rash/bumps all over my body, edema (fluid retention), and breakthrough bleeding beneath the skin (to name just a few). Treatment 4 was cancelled. This particular segment of my spiritual “firewalk” was complete.  My body is now being given time to reestablish equilibrium and prepare for radiation in a few weeks.

A quality much needed in a divided world but not often encountered is compassion. Compassion is a way of connecting the love and self-awareness within yourself to another person. Compassion is more than kindness, then. It’s a natural expression of kindness and understanding when you love yourself. Without a sense of love inside, compassion has no foundation in consciousness.

There is a path to loving compassion, as with any spiritual quality.  The path has a beginning, middle, and end. Let me describe them to give you an idea of how the path unfolds.

Beginning: You see yourself as wanting and needing love, usually more than you are receiving. You may feel insecure about being lovable, and so you love others according to how much they love you or appeal to your sense of romance, sexuality, and compatibility. Relationships involve a constant negotiation between what you want and what your partner wants. The words that apply to love at this stage include passion, attachment, dependency, romance, mutual need, liking, and compatibility. The seed of compassion remains a seed.

I have read that patients hear everything that is said or felt in the hospital room even when sedated or unconscious. Anita Moorjani writes of watching and hearing the doctors and nurses and her family members from “above” and seeing the connections between everything as she went through a near-death experience. I have always believed this to be true. Recently, I had my own experience of something similar, though not at the edge of death. I was sedated for a breast cancer operation, and as I came out of sedation after surgery, I had the vivid experience of writing a very detailed letter describing how extraordinarily kind everyone was in the operating and recovery rooms. I lay there feeling it all intensely as I slowly returned to conscious awareness within the “real world.” But I ask you, “What is real here?” There was no doubt in my fully conscious mind that I was remembering what I experienced during surgery and immediately after. I had felt surrounded by Bodhisattvas.*

An alcoholic demanded to return home from a treatment center. His wife felt that being home where she could take care of him was a good thing even though the staff at the center strongly advised otherwise. Once she had assisted with his return, she did her best, as she had over their years together, to love him with tenderness, encourage him to stop drinking, create distractions, and generally try to make him feel good about himself, or at least better. She appealed to his reason (this didn’t work when he was drunk), and addressed the needs of the most frightened parts of his personality when they were active. For example, he would say, “No one cares for me,” and she would say, “Of course people love you.” He would say “I am washed up,” and she would say, “You have so much to give.” He would say, “I can’t start again,” and she would say, “When the going gets tough the tough get going.”

He feared experiencing the emotional pain that years of drinking no longer masked (which is what the center would have required him to do). His wife feared his rage, mood swings, irrationality, and drinking. Three months after his return home, he drowned in his vomit in bed, too incoherent or weak to prevent his death. There was no compassion in this picture. Neighbors may have thought the wife was compassionate, but what would they think if they realized that her choices assisted his death? Her fears and his fears prevented them from listening to professionals who know about alcoholism.

“In order for me to become a vessel, to be used, I had to have my attachments broken. You can’t be a true vessel if you’re attached. You have to be emptied out.”—Julia Butterfly Hill

---

The idea of becoming a vessel, or conduit, for selfless love to flow through you into the world is part of many spiritual teachings. To be of service in this way can become one of the highest aspirations for those on a deeply committed spiritual path. Julia Butterfly Hill, who spent two years living in the branches of a 1500-year-old redwood tree to prevent it from being cut down, has described her own preparation for this dedicated act of service. She let go of all physical attachments in terms of possessions, but then Mother Nature emptied her of everything else in a fierce wind/rain storm that brought her face to face with the possibility of her own death. She was “emptied out” for the task ahead.