For me. living with compassion is an ongoing practice. When I slip into judgment, I tell myself, “I have compassion for…” and then mentally explore how and why I could have compassion in the situation. I do this before taking “compassionate action” – a blend of empathy and reason.
For instance, I often have a graduate student present a story / excuse about turning in a late Assignment. Perhaps they’re overloaded at work, or have a situation too embarrassing to discuss with me. Perhaps they were punished as a child for poor school performance leading to anxiety. After reviewing possible scenarios and shifting my feelings / energy, I move on to compassionate action – a blend of empathy and reason.
Keeping in mind forgiveness and compassion are not about abandoning consequences, I validate their concern about losing points on the assignment. However, they are getting the late penalty / loss of points because giving them full points is not fair to the students whose assignments are on time. And I may add my leadership philosophy about NOT punishing the performers and NOT rewarding the non-performers.
After LOTS of practice, I am able to take this compassionate action without being negative or critical or judgmental or spiteful. The student action is their responsibility, and my compassionate reaction is my responsibility.
Our greatest teacher and model for this practice is the Dalai Lama, leader of the Tibetan Buddhist community, who has been speaking and writing about it for decades. He won me over when he demonstrated compassion for the Chinese — who drove him from his homeland, massacred and tortured thousands of the Tibetan people, obliterated the symbols the Tibetan culture, and absorbed Tibet into China. I can’t imagine a more powerful role model for compassion!
About the 3 levels of compassion, the Dalai Lama says:
1. Empathy – imagine how you would feel in someone else’s shoes.
2. Practice Compassion Before Pleasure – put another’s needs above your temporary pleasure. This is the most difficult stage and requires determination and perseverance.
3. Have the Continual Presence of Great Compassion – this begins to come automatically when the foundation is in place and the practice is unremitting.
The Foundation: Two foundational elements are Self Love and Inner Peace and they are interrelated. It is important to take care of yourself before you help others. As the airplane emergency procedure states: put your own oxygen mask on before trying to help others. It is also important to
have your own inner peace before you help others. Once you have inner peace, then you can start helping others from that calm place. And helping others makes your inner peace stronger.
Love Yourself. It is essential to love ourselves. If we do not love ourselves, how can we extend that love to others? The compassion we have for others is an extension of the compassion we have for ourselves.
Personally, I came up against this while creating a Change Your Mind script / recording called Love Yourself. My process when creating a script is to research, draft, test, repeat the process. My usual time frame is about 1.5 to 2 years to complete a script that proves effective. Love Yourself took over a decade! Every time I listened to a “final” script, it brought up more subtle levels of NON-loving. My test groups had the same experiences, and I was continually “going back to the drawing board” for script expansion and refinement.
Once a script is written / tested / proven, I go to a musician to compose the background music for it. The process is for them to read and process the script and then match their music to the script theme. For this recording, I needed music that felt like LOVE.
At the time, I was recording in Oman Ken’s home studio. For each different recording, we would listen to the submitted music samples together and choose a “fit”. But after months of listening to numerous samples submitted for Love Yourself, we consistently agreed we didn’t have it. We were both frustrated with the ongoing delay producing the recording, and I spoke out in frustration, pleading with him to HELP ME!
Oman was a gifted composer himself, and I had tried for many years to persuade him to compose music for me, but he had politely and consistently deferred. Demonstrating his own self love, Oman refused to create music for others. He was as busy as he wanted to be – with his own projects, as music director for the Sedona Unity Church, and as my sound technician (we recorded about 50 products together). He lived a simple life with adequate income and did not desire more: he was committed to BEING over DOING.
For this project, Oman ultimately agreed to create the music. As he lived in a state of love most of the time: he created love music automatically and effortlessly. When Love Yourself was released, I got numerous requests for a recording of the music alone- it was so powerful! I am grateful to Oman for both the LOVE music and the SELF LOVE modeling.
