Compassion: Together, we endure.
It’s the one thing I need the most right now.
The healing tonic, after thousands of hours of turmoil, I come to realize I need. It’s this realization I encounter time and time again, after sitting with my discomfort. Which often shows up in the form of anxious distraction or a need to keep moving. I know that when I am restless in my body, there is something underneath it, waiting for me to sit long enough to be acknowledged. This is what happened this morning. I had to set a timer on my phone so as not to be tempted to check the clock or quit early. I would sit with whatever wandering thoughts would arise and do my best not to make judgements or “run with the train” of thoughts flying by. My practice was: to observe from a distance, cultivating my ‘witness’. Simply noticing and observing my thoughts without attachment helped me to see the fear and sadness present in my body. What came to light in the form of a faint whisper (which is often how I perceive the voice of my higher self aka inner wisdom), was the need for more compassion. Self compassion to enter my home and the spaces I inhabit was my morning prayer. I then journaled, a practice I find to be exponentially insightful and healing. I wrote a sweet letter to my younger self, during a time of my life when I was most destructive and lost. I call this time in my life a “rock bottom”. I was numbing my self loathing with: drugs, alcohol, and only choosing men that would treat me like shit. I was in a lot of pain and I was tuning out the one person I could count on, myself. What I needed more than anything at that time was COMPASSION. Compassion for where I was, and what I had been through. Of course, hind site is 20/20. What I needed most was the hardest thing to do because of the disdain for myself.
Any change I wish to see, as Ghandi states, starts with me (“Be the change you wish to see”). I am the host for compassion and it starts with self-compassion. To recognize and name all that I am experiencing and feeling is a powerful act(this is why it is often the practice I begin with in Building Resilience). Kindness should never be underestimated. I have to remind myself of this on the daily. The world is going through so much change. My country, America, so much civil unrest. All of our shadows are rising. The Individual and the Collective are intertwined. What needs to be healed is showing up in the form of rage, grief and violence. Through my journey as a teacher and student of Off The Mat Into The World, and my years of working with Yoga in the field of Trauma Resilience, I am seeing all too clear the effects of a society that has been through so much Trauma. Trauma growing up (in the home & the culture) inter-generational trauma and vicarious traumas (being exposed to difficult or disturbing images and stories second-hand.).
The mind- body has the hardware to manage high levels of stress for our survival. Many of you now know what the phrases ‘fight or flight’ and ‘freeze and collapse’ mean. Most of us think these settings only go off in the midst of something traumatic or when we are traumatized. But the nervous system is an integral part of every body. Which means these settings can go off even when you are not facing a life threatening situation. This means, even if you have not been diagnosed with PTSD or the like, you can still experience the effects from this wiring. Our brains process high levels of stress in the same way we would if we were being charged by a bear (a life threat). Hence the phrase,”I felt attacked”. The level of stress hormones released in your body depend on a combination of, your personal history and genetic make up. Self-preservation manifests itself in many forms. It’s hard to know in the moment if you’re life is not being threatened and it’s even harder to gain a clear sense of reality. Everything becomes distorted and narrow. This is due to the fact that parts of your brain have quite literally “turned off”.
This is where mindfulness practices become the guiding light in helping us navigating the storms that arise after we’ve been triggered or overloaded. Compassion comes in to support us in approaching this confrontational and sometimes overwhelming practice.
I think it’s important to note the root meaning of the word compassion to gain insight into it’s intentional meaning. The first three letters of the word make up com- French for together. Passion, I was surprised to find out, was originally latin’s passionem, which means to suffer or endure (passion is said to dominate it’s subject, hence the association for suffering).
So compassion quite literally means: to endure together or Together we endure.
See etymology translations:
Unearthing this new found connection to the word, compassion, reminds me that we are in this together. That I/you/we, are not alone. That in order to heal what’s hurting, we need to first turn in towards our hearts and then seek support and camaraderie towards the trusted other. In other words, to heal our world we need to first, heal ourselves. We are the world.
This is the very reason I created a weekly class for cultivating resilience. I wanted to carve out a space for seekers to come together, in support of each others’ growth and evolution towards freedom and awakening. Together we are stronger.
I’ll end this moment of exploration with an excerpt from David Whyte’s reflections:
ANGER is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.
In the comments below please share with us your practices for compassion and what this word means to you.
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- Raquel
Photo by: Abbey Drucker