Saturday, September 14, 2013

What Doesn't Kill You....

Compassion is a tricky bit of business. For it to have its greatest value, it must be heart-felt, never self-serving. And it reaches its zenith when offered to those who wish us ill. Once for the value it extends us directly by helping free us from the attachment to the person (and the falsehoods told by them) who harms or wishes harm to us; and again for the opening it offers to that other person to reconsider their own bitterness and spite.


It is a sad statement that there are out there people who bully, humiliate, blame and laugh at others with difabilities of all kinds. This is even more sad when it comes from family and others once considered friends. To be asked to have compassion for such people often seems the height of insanity - why should we feel compassion for someone who should know better, have greater understanding, and are family on top of it all? To be honest, I am not completely sure how to answer such a question, but I do have one possible answer.


Compassion must first and foremost be about one's self - about letting go of one's own attachment to the lies another tells about one's self. When we let these sorts of hateful words alter our own equilibrium, allow ourselves to be lowered in our own eyes by the falsehoods uttered by another, we are in a sense granting that person control of our own inner peace. We therefor suffer damage not by the acts and words of the other, but by our own acceptance that those acts and words might in some sense, even if we cannot just now understand why, have real truth. Compassion therefor must first be for yourself, for your own sense of what is true and just, by not allowing those false realities to become your own. Until and unless another walks in your shoes - quite literally in the case of us clubbies - they speak from their own fears, and not from any true knowledge or wisdom.


There is an easy practice that helps with this. Whenever another speaks falsely about you - what you do or do not feel or experience without them having a clue about you, or clearly only wanting to hurt you, say first to yourself, and then to the other party, that their words are not who you are. Their words are who they are. Their words are a sign of their own fears, and you do not accept their fear.


This takes practice, yes, and sometimes will get more negatives from those same people. But sooner or later, if you continue this response, with compassion, the others will begin to realize that you are not being affected by their falsehoods, and will eventually stop this behavior. You must be patient.


And most importantly, you must be true to yourself.

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