Cultivating Compassion
A sweet lady pointed out to me recently that I had a wonderfully diverse set of people on my Facebook friend’s list. That may not have been the words she used in the moment, as the phrase rude seems to ring a bell. Nonetheless I heard her clearly and smiled back saying that it helped me to practice cultivating compassion. 🙂 I do believe there is a great gift when we work on loving kindness, not only for our family, facebook-and-beyond-community. but for our Self and our own peaceful presence. I told a friend last week that I don’t do anything that isn’t self-serving. Which for some could be misconstrued as Machiavellian, but in Truth is more about realizing that even our most altruistic motives are also benefiting us in some borrowed fashion.
When we see so much in our surroundings as an insult to our inner being we amp up our reptilian brain into the primitive fight or flight response. We carry our soap box of judgement and dismay with a pocket full of there is a better way speeches which we realize fall too often upon deaf ears. However our body DOES listen. And each time we pick-a-fight even if only in our mind with the nemesis in the classroom of our life’s lesson, we hijack the amygdala and begin to loose our ability to find peace in the pieces of our fractured focus.
In this state of hyper-vigilance, we feel an increasing need to control our surroundings, the people we interact with and the circumstances that we encounter. Because at each bend in the road we anticipate we will face the dragon. So we keep our sword clutched in our fist, ready to fight at the first meme that strays from our own dogma and we engage in a battle of words, metaphors or blog rebuttals. And though we may think we have won the first round, the toll that it takes on our internal garden is greater than we may realize.
Soon, the rich soil in which we plant our happiness roots becomes acidic and depleted of nutrients and we find it harder to grow even a small sprout. Our trust and tolerance shrivels like a grape left on a dying vine. The raisin in the sun becomes bitter and tight and we may barely remember a time when our heart was open and we could breathe easily and exhale fully.
I was blessed to see an email last week that my estranged mother wrote to my eldest daughter last summer. My daughter had tried to reach out to Mom in one last attempt to see if she could bring her back into the family circle, citing a difficult period in my own life and making the request to her grandmother that I would welcome hearing from her. True to form, Mom wrote a terse note back with her own bubblegum guru trites about life being hard and recommending that my daughter not get caught up in my troubles. But at the essence was the hard and fast belief that I had to “do this” on my own and that she could not be a part of it. To which my daughter of course could not begin to comprehend, because she and all of my children share a compassionate open heart and the thought of cutting someone off, or out for any reason seemed foreign. Which of course my daughter explained to her grandmother with grace and style.
But is it not easy to see how when we hold on to any rigid ways and means that we loose the flexibility to bend with the wind? We dig our self deep into the mud of our mind and find we are unable to take a step forward. If we can not embrace that we are All One, we ultimately find our self sitting ALONE.
Tolerating each other’s differences, doesn’t mean we turn the other cheek or a blind eye to prejudice or other forms of social bullies. But as we use our words wisely and with an open heart we continue to breathe all of it in, realizing that even the manure in life has a place in our garden. And in doing so, we can experience happiness even when we see the dragon standing in the middle of the road and instead of reaching for our sword, we invite it to tea. Not because we expect the dragon to stop breathing fire, but because we are unwilling to burn our bridges for one day we may need to walk that path in order to find our way Home.
