The power of compassion
When you address suffering (including your own) directly, with compassionate understanding, you are engaging in the most powerful resistance available to us.
Oh, friends. It is hard, isn’t it, keeping up with the news. This week our country noted the loss of over nine-hundred-thousand lives to the pandemic, learned more about the attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election, watched the Olympics taking place in a context of dreadful human rights abuses, and tracked too many acts of violence. I scan the headlines, and, at times, experience powerful discouragement.
But you don’t need me to remind you of all that. If you’re here, reading, you already know the pain of our world. And you don’t need me to help you escape, because you know the remedy for all this pain is not escape, but engagement. You are among the folk who are looking, searching, for ways to keep up the work these difficult times call from us: the work of inclusion, of peace, of mindfulness, of compassionate understanding.
I offer these ideas, for you to take, borrow, ignore, or adapt, as you see fit.
Establish a rhythm of concrete action.
Once a day, a week, or a month, make a call, make a donation, send an email, stand on a street corner to support the causes most important to you. Action channels energy outward and helps transform it.
Invest in self-nurturing.
Hard times do, indeed, require sacrifice. In order to live up to the sacrifices that are necessary, replenish yourself as often and as deeply as you can.
Mourn your losses.
Grief is natural and essential, cyclical and ultimately uncontrollable. Our decision is whether to be gentle with ourselves or try to deny our grief. Choose gentleness, since denial is ultimately impossible anyway.
Refuse the dominant narrative of fear and violence.
Hold the suffering of all humans softly. Recognize that fear and violence replicate themselves, as do compassion and love.
Create something.
Make art, cook a meal, bake a cake, write a poem, sing a song. Remind your neural pathways of their tremendous capacity for creativity.
Experience nature.
If you can, go outside. Smell the way spring hovers just under and behind the frigid winter air. Listen to the birds as they excitedly find the last few seeds or shriveled fruits. See the slanted midwinter sun through bare branches, or compare the gray of the clouds to the hues of rock and stone. After all, we are of nature ourselves, despite all our efforts to hold ourselves as separate or superior.
Humanize everyone, relentlessly, including yourself.
Focus your vigilance on your own tendency to dehumanize those toward whom you feel anger or resentment. Remind yourself that they are living a life far bigger and more complex than the one you see, and are enacting their suffering in front of your eyes. This includes you: you are full, complex, and deserving of compassion.
Remember this: tyrants and authoritarians take hold when folk suffer and do not know any other way to escape their suffering. The less folk suffer, the less they need to dominate or be dominated by others. When you address suffering (including your own) directly, with compassionate understanding, you are engaging in the most powerful resistance available to us.
Be safe and well, be gentle, and hang on to one another. Spring is on the way.