Compassion is the ability to love with power. It is the ability to feel for another living being and resonate with someone else’s pain or suffering. It is love without judgement, with total acceptance and understanding. We are all practicing how to have compassion and truly hit the mark of pure love. It is the ability to understand someone else’s suffering and even experience their shadow side, and still see their good.
Decades of clinical research has focused and shed light on the psychology of human suffering. That suffering, as unpleasant as it is, often has a bright side to which research has paid less attention. We are beginning to understand that there is value in suffering and that after metabolizing the pain, it deepens our capacity for a more purified form of love. Suffering actually helps us to develop the gift of compassion.
Our individual pain becomes our teacher and helps us develop this gift of unconditional love. Compassion is the opposite of pity or sympathy and literally means to love with power. Yes, we can feel what someone might be feeling, but it doesn’t mean we absorb the other person’s pain or try to take it away from them. It means to feel what the other person is feeling and rather than offering them pity, compassion allows us to see them as strong and capable. It means that yes, we feel their pain and yes, we can step in and help carry their burdens to make those lighter, but it also means that we allow them to struggle, knowing that it is in the struggle that their personal growth takes place.
It’s the story of the chick coming out of the shell, or the butterfly pushing its wings out of the cocoon. If assistance is given too soon too much, the strength that the chick or the butterfly needs to survive is not accessible. Stepping in and rescuing too soon could cripple or hobble the development or growth of the chick or the butterfly, which can result in death.
Accessing compassion can help us heal dysfunctional patterns of codependency, which in the past revealed a need to rescue others from themselves or from their pain. Here at IHA we are working to generate a culture of compassion, and yet balancing that with a deep level of trust in other’s individual strengths and gifts. Exercising belief and faith in the ability of each individual to learn from their experiences and in the end rescue themselves.
We cannot do the work for someone else. We can gently encourage and reflect back our trust and faith in them, but in the end, they are responsible for their own chaos and confusion and then healing their own dysfunction. They get to take responsibility for their own lives. We can offer service and compassion as long we allow them to take responsibility for themselves.
Let us work to resist the old attitude of: “I need to see you weak so I can appear strong.” Let us strive to see others as strong and capable. In the end, no matter our motive about service in the past, service helps purify our ability to love. We can still offer service and give where and when it is needed, we just can’t carry their woundedness. Seeing the other as ultimately responsible for their life helps us walk that fine line between showing true compassion and codependency.
As we continue to heal our own personal patterns of codependency there is a mature sense of insight that develops, even wisdom about when to give and when not to. This Thanksgiving season let’s look for those opportunities to truly serve and give from a place of compassion without the chains of codependency. Let’s continue to grow the “Gift of Compassion”, to love from a more pure place, and help lift those in need at the same time.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Loves always,
Pam
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