How compassion is protective . . .

To love a child, to parent them, is to walk around with the terror of loss just beneath your skin. Most of us manage it well, letting them climb trees and go on air planes and drive in cars.

But, be careful not to manage it so well that you cannot find it in an instant. Let the risk of being alive, and loving, be something you can access with each breath.

I don’t want us to have to see our child in another in order to feel for them. I don’t want us to have to imagine our own excruciating scream to be motivated to act. We do not need to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. Our love, our terror, our intimacy with the risk- that should be enough. We should recognize it in the hand that cradles, in eyes of shock, and soft curve of a jaw line passed through generations and tended in growth of all stages. We shouldn’t need to feel our own world destroyed to be moved. We do not need to do that. That is not empathy. Empathy is to feel ANOTHER’s feelings in your body as you feel your own. To feel the emotion in OUR collective body. This feeling your own feelings about someone else’s situation is something different than empathy. It has a place, an important place in your process. But it’s essential to separate the two. Because if we are not careful, entangling our own experience about someone else’s emotions can lead to the codependent empathy cycle rather than the compassion circuit.

The codependent empathy cycle leads to more separation, exhaustion, overwhelm and fear.

The compassion circuit nourishes us with energy for action, mends separation, offers clarity and courage.

Cultivating the capacity of our individual compassion circuits is protective.  The more bonded we are to each other, the less harm we will allow. The more solutions we will find. The more potent we can be.

We can barely imagine what would be possible, we have to go there to find out. We must cultivate those hearts to know their wisdom. To know that future.

Compassion or Codependence?

Compassion is a circuit within us. When we fulfill the compassion circuit, we have energy. In a state of compassion we can think with clarity and focus and have capacity for relevant action. It’s not just for extreme situations, this circuit is for every day living.

Empathy is the sensation that initiates the circuit ( empathy is feeling for another this means joy, anger, confusion - not only pain). Empathy has two pathways, it can move along the compassion circuit or along a codependency circuit. The codependency circuit runs more like a treadmill. It requires energy, depleting our reserves and impeding our ability to think and feel clearly. From this place our actions rarely address authentic needs but instead aim to control various situations and scenarios (usually, not joyfully).

In a state of compassion it’s hard to separate us from each other, in a state of codependence it’s rather easy. In a state of compassion we have access to our fullness and the full experience of life, aware of the inherent risks. In a state of codependency we are always seeking a sense of complete safety that does not exist.

When we experience sensations of codependent empathetic activation, we might feel a prompting to hurry towards a solution or to “finish” a feeling. We may be distracted and feel a lack of presence. Maybe we become overly focused on a problem or we bypass the problem entirely. Whatever the case there is a sense of anxiety beneath our actions.

One simple way to disrupt this process and rejoin the compassion circuit is to take a moment between tasks. A literal breath, maybe place your hand on your heart. Take a breath and say clearly to yourself what task you are setting down and which you are picking up. This little moment allows your breath, body, and mind an opportunity to realign. The more our breath, body, and mind remain interwoven, the greater our ability to stay on the compassion circuit. This circuit organically supports our individual and collective wellbeing.

What risks are we willing to accept?

The Grail Maiden is a card I pull often. “ The Grail Maiden guides all who go in search of the vessel, offering them to drink.” That sounds simple enough. Lovely, right? How helpful and kind. But, let me draw your attention to the little word after guides, “all.” The Grail Maiden guides ALL who go in search of the well, offering them to drink. She does not only guide those she chooses, or those who are nice to her, or those who understand. She does not only guide those who respect boundaries. And so, often, she risks having her boundaries crossed. In the legends, the grail maidens are raped and otherwise mistreated by King Amangons and his men.

It’s interesting that in our cultural context, someone is considered strong in their compassion until someone else hurts them. Or they “allow” someone else to hurt them. And, then, sometimes we admire the fortitude and ability of those who can keep their hearts tender and loving while in distress, however, we don’t seem inspired to place any cultural priority on developing this skill.

Did you think the Maiden’s kindness was misplaced when you heard it put her in a vulnerable position? Think back, what was your inner dialog and internal response when you realized harm came to her through her open-heart?

When we talk about boundaries there is a lot of confusion, as if having “good boundaries” means you will not be mistreated. This isn’t the case. Having good boundaries means you will be more respectful of the organic boundaries that exist in the world. These boundaries don’t “belong” to anyone, they grow organically around needs. They are disrespected when we neglect elemental needs like life and the components of life, including loving-ness. They are neglected when we choose convenience over the Earth, when we choose our own comfort over another’s access, when bombs drop on families. Every war that has ever waged, every displacement of people, every employer who took more while their employees had less. Every system concerned more with bottom lines than wellbeing. Every bomb that drops on families. These things are all connected by so many tightly woven fibers, and through all of them runs a thread of disrespected boundaries. It is not the responsibility of an individual to protect themselves from harm, it is the responsibility of an individual to try not to harm. The entity with poor respect for boundaries is the one causing harm, not the one being harmed.

When we work with learning to be more respectful of boundaries, we are not working to control others so they will not harm us. This is impossible. We are working to understand, to feel out, where the needs are and how to attend to them in the context available. The Grail Maiden is a beautiful example of this in action. She was not protected from physical harm, however, she also did not forsake her spirit to protect her body.

Now, remember, not to slip into binary thinking here. I am not advocating that we not try avoid being physical harmed. I’m asking us to consider what we are willing to do, what actions are available to us, and to place priority on protecting our spirit. If the actions I must take to protect my body sever me from myself, they were not valuable. They are disrespectful to my own innate boundaries that grow around the need to be true and whole and connected to myself. If I must become a tool of oppression in order to protect my personal body, but not my spirit or the body of humanity, what is the point? Have I not already lost all I sought to protect?

Non-violence and compassionate action are about fidelity to our spirit so that it can maintain its connection with the whole. When we activate from a place of compassion we are engaging a promise to remain connected to our spirit while facing risk or danger.

The faith claim that joins me in serving individuals and communities is that connection and attachment are protective. We, humans, are tethered by these attachments to self, others, Earth, and Divinity so that they provide the optimal environment for us. When we maintain connection and attachment, we can navigate barriers or issues from a place of optimal well- being. These attachments do not resolve or prevent all problems, however, they make the risk of being alive easier to accept and navigate without falling into the trap of disconnection, disassociation, severance. I hear the call of this severing, it is like a searing scream, and I answer that call from individuals and the collective because Us collectively living without a deep sense of connections and attachment to self, each other, Earth, and Divinity feels (physically in my body) like an unraveling of all that holds everything in the universe together. It feels urgent that we attend to those disconnections as we would attend to someone who was not breathing.

If we really want a more compassionate world, we need to figure out how to be as concerned about the spirit of a person being unable to “breath” as we are about physical harm. We need to develop the capacity to take physical risks for the protection of our spirits. For generations we have been taught that we can protect our bodies at the cost of our spirits. And this simply isn’t true.

Celebrating in times of great sadness . . .

Maybe you are feeling less festive this year. That would make sense. The human world has been perpetuating particularly awful atrocities and we have borne witness to many of them. Some of us have struggled to bring an end to this human-on-human violence and our struggles continue, and will, for a very long time. We live in a polyconflict era. Really, we humans have been pushing the conflicts through the generations for some time. Pushing troubles into the future, and now, many of them ( ecological, political, social, economic) are too big to push further. And, its been years of these conflicts disrupting the lives. Lives we had become accustomed to living with these conflicts simmering rather than boiling over. These boiling-overs, though, have captured more of our collective attention. And, now we are more aware. We collectively see suffering where before we had not. More of us are committing to be a part of making the world a better place.

And, while it can feel weird to be festive and celebratory while holding such deep suffering for the world, I encourage you to stay with and explore that feeling.

Maybe it is valid. Maybe you have realized you were celebrating something not in alignment with who you were, or who you are becoming. That is very valuable to investigate. Rather than not celebrating when we feel this discomfort, lets find out what it is all about.

When we look closely, celebration is not about the exclusion of suffering, it’s inclusive of it. Inclusive of the risk inherent with life. In honor of it. And it recognizes that there are many barriers to peace.

In the late fall long nights, as I celebrate my festival of light, it is not about some perfect joy or some perfect magic. It is about honoring the difficult tasks that have been accomplished to prepare for winter. These celebrations honor that there are barriers to peace. What we celebrate is the light within us that recognizes peace and Love. We celebrate the desire to protect them. Here in the longest nights of the year, we know the winter is coming with its worst still ahead. We prepare ourselves to enter into that worst courageously. Prepare to meet spring again on the other side.

We humans can find so many answers to our own problems by remembering we are part of the greater world, not alone on this planet. The seasons, the plants, the stars, animals, and sea- they all have gifted us so much wisdom. The best way to honor nature in our spirituality is to accept our belonging, that we are part of these wisdoms. It is not just the seasons that are changing, it is us. It is not only the snow and fiercest winds that are coming, it is us again.

Even if your spirituality is not aligned with nature, even if you belong to a more formal religion, it is true that celebrations are about honoring what is good and what is hard. Authentic festivity comes from the embracing and participating in this risk of being alive. We see this in holidays, weddings, birth and death rituals. In all of these we humans, across religions and cultures, find ways to highlight love and its ability to soften the barriers to peace. We know life is hard, but in all these celebrations we recommit to doing the hard things together.

When we listen deeply, we find the meaning within each of these rituals.

They are about our ability to overcome the challenges. And I need more of that every year.

I’ve attached the Intentional Traditions planner below, it is designed to support us in finding intentional and meaningful ways to celebrate what is important to us. May we all have a season that supports us in bringing about more light and interconnection.

Intentional Traditions Planner