Compassion
For self and others…
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Albert Einstein
Today, I read a few excellent pieces worth sharing on the benefits of meditation and mindfulness, that prompted me to write a short piece. We are often told about the benefits of taking 5 minutes of our busyness and go thoughtless. The science of meditation is well-reported and research on this topic is ever-expanding and ongoing. However, my personal views from the neuroscience in me have turned into more of a philosophy and way of life. Which is what any form of meditation was set out to be when it was first written in the Vedas some 1500 BCE: a part of life, a part of living, to help us live with simplicity, humility, love and compassion.
Meditation teaches us the ability to develop many intangible skills, I would say, but are these skills? Are happiness, self-love and self-compassion skills, or states of being? Is happiness a luxury or a natural state of being, that the modern world turned into a commodity? When a baby is born, she expresses her happiness and unhappiness with her cries, simply put she shows her emotions and parents tend to her, and her needs. We feed her, she becomes settled and happy again, we forget to change her nappy, she shows her displeasure with her cries. It takes very little for her to feel happy and yet she shows us her love and her inner happiness, regardless. There is no transaction, it is just a state of being.
Modern society, I feel has become fairly transactional if I may be bluntly honest as we are taught and told how to love, how to feel, how not to feel, how to react and how not to react. What to do to expect love. It feels that we are navigating through life with manuals and textbooks on “How to live a life full of joy and happiness” when most of us often feel void on the inside. I think there is more to this if we just stopped overthinking for a minute and soak in the atmosphere, and just meditate. If we just stopped on focusing on our lacks and create some space for self-love and self-compassion, perhaps perspectives would change and simply put, we could aim to be less transactional as we learn to unlearn our formats and deconstruct our past beliefs.
Perhaps the world will be a just that bit better when we create beauty around us as we look at each other with compassionate eyes and open hearts full of love. I do admit, as I write I feel a bit like a hippie attending Woodstock in the 60s. But what if we can bring out our inner hippie, would that be such a harmful crime? As we learn the benefits of taking some time out of our busyness to meditate, we learn the many scientific benefits of strengthening parts of our brains whilst reducing our stress pathways (I shall refrain to go all “sciency” here). I would invite the newbies to grow their practices to explore the philosophy of meditation, to develop this innate ability of compassion and love, which have been too often marginalised in the modern world.
The irony is that the Latin root for the word ‘Compassion’ is pati which means to suffer, and the prefix com- means with. In other words, ‘Compassion’ means ‘to suffer with’. I say irony as the essence of Buddhism is to learn to live with no suffering. My humble interpretation is perhaps meditation can help us with our own sufferings so that we can learn to help others: by being aware and comfortable with our pain we can just help the others to alleviate their burden. By simply developing self-compassion, we learn to develop compassion for others, rather than objectifying and using rational logic or thinking. We allow others to simply be without any judgement, but offer our loving help should choose to take it.
An act of compassion can simply be a thought or a blessing. After all love and compassion are blessings, not transactions
