Finding Compassion

When I think about the challenges we are facing, not only here in the U.S., but globally, I wonder how we will go about developing our compassion. Economically, militarily, in healthcare, the environment, energy, religion, politics, and security, in our constitutional definitions of rights and who is allowed to have them, in our schools and prisons, houses of worship, and military bases, at our jobs, in our unions and corporations–at every age, educational and racial background, we seem to have real difficulty imagining how the other guy feels. Sometimes we aren't even interested in trying to imagine it.

We need some deep, collaborative thinking and cooperative action to bring about improvement in potentially very difficult circumstances. Our instinct may be to pull in tighter, to trust less, to give and listen less, and to hold onto our own. But that behavior only makes the crisis deeper and the pain more acute.

What is compassion, really? It is the ability to stand in another person's shoes, metaphorically speaking, and get a view of life from her perspective. It may reveal things we have not encountered and never considered.  It can stop us from minimizing another person's pain.

I was once in a class that explored evil as a phenomenon. The professor had worked with Holocaust survivors. I suggested that even the worst people chose evil behavior because of something they had experienced. The professor responded that such an idea would be perceived by some Holocaust survivors as a way of excusing evil. She said, in effect, that to try and understand was to minimize the suffering that these survivors had experienced.

I can summon only the palest glimpse of the devastation behind the rage, humiliation and grief of someone who lived through and witnessed that kind of abuse. Mustering all the respect and courage I can, I still believe that we must try to understand. Pain that is inflicted arises out of pain.

How can we prevent genocide–or any cruel, devastating abuse–if we have no idea where it came from? Hatred, prejudice and evil behavior don't arise on their own. They have a root. They have a beginning. What if we could discover what causes this emotional cancer and stop it before it takes over the thoughts, soul and spirit of a young person? 

Would we govern differently if we understood the full impact and cost of our global decisions? Would we parent differently if we felt the impact of our words and behavior on our children? Would we have more compassion for ourselves if we understood how the parenting and governance we have already experienced shaped the people we have become?

Today I attended the annual fund raising luncheon for Safe School Ambassadors, a program to reduce school violence, bullying, and isolation. Every day 160,000 kids from kindergarten through high school stay home from school. Not because they are physically sick, but because they are terrified of what will happen to them if they go to school. Every day they experience cruelty or humiliation. How long can a child feel daily terror and remain emotionally balanced?

SSA, a program of Community Matters, was begun after the Colombine High School shootings. It has begun to effectively change the culture in schools by working with young people who are natural leaders in their own circles at school, training them in intervention strategies the kids themselves can use in the moment. 

These kids are leaders in their own peer groups at school – athletes, geeks, gang members, academic whiz kids, "cool" kids – bringing them together and revealing their shared humanity through their own stories. As they discover they are not so different from one another, they begin to look out not only for their own friends with these new skills, but each other's friends as well. Little by little the culture of intimidation shifts in these schools.

A senior from a local high school sat at my table and told us how a good friend of his had been suicidal and had been helped through the skills he had learned through the SSA program. Without that practice, he said, he would not have had the courage to try and intervene, and his friend might have died. This is compassion and courage in action, expressed both by this young man and by SSA and the school. Together, they saved a life. What if that life had been the life of your child?

Emotional healing is directly related to compassion. What might happen in the world if adults could learn how to live more compassionately? Yes, we must be held accountable for our actions, regardless of our past. Perhaps we must also begin to be more accountable for our shared future, actively seeking out ways to strengthen our own courage and compassion.

Is Faith Naive in Challenging Times?

Whenever fear becomes the predominant theme in the media, and news looks bleak for the well-being of most of the population, it is almost possible to feel the pulse of the country quicken with worry. At times like these invoking faith in anything beyond what our senses tell us may seem naive and superstitious, particularly if we are listening to those who are certain their doubt, warnings and worry are the most important focus there can be.

When ridicule of faith is hip, those who have felt grounded in their own spiritual paths and practices during times of relative calm can feel shaken and begin to wonder if they really do have it all wrong.

Let me be clear, I'm not about to recommend you follow any particular spiritual path or endorse a specific belief.  And if agnosticism or atheism are serving you well, so be it.

My thoughts today, though, are directed toward those who do believe in something greater than what is seen, whatever their specific spiritual orientation.

It's not an easy task to accomplish the things that are worthwhile in our lives: parenting, building a business, completing a college degree, mastering a trade or career, saving for the future, or living from integrity, to name a few.  

Practicing our faith requires similar commitments over an extended period of time.  If we have been practicing during comfortable, easy times, we may have more to fall back on when trouble arises, but sometimes that's just when we lose our sense of connection to the Great Mystery.  If we have not been involved in any spiritual community for some time, a crisis can drive us toward one or cement our feelings of aloneness and isolation.

As I write this, financial institutions that have seemed dependable are shaky. Investments have lost some of their value, and many people are worried about losing their retirement savings or their kids' college funds.  Some are wondering if they will ever own a home again. Others are facing downsizing at work and losing sleep while worrying about losing their jobs. The situation looks troubling in a major way, not only personally, not only in the U.S., but globally.

Here's a question to consider: how much time do you spend every day watching or listening to the news? How much time do you spend talking about worrisome issues with others? To marinate ourselves in upset and concern every day is bound to infuse us with the national flavor and aroma of fear.

What is the approach to take as a person of faith? I could say prayer, which is a good suggestion, but more is necessary to rebuild our faith muscles now.

Are we spending an equivalent amount of time to that marinating in worry reminding ourselves of the abundant good we do have in our lives? Do we make time to immerse ourselves daily in inspiring information, reading, movies, TV and conversation? Do we seek out what is working? Do we consider in what innovative ways our challenges might be solved? Are we optimistic that our problems can be solved?

Fear sells products and attracts viewers and listeners and sometimes voters, but it doesn't bring us back, as people of faith, to what we believe most deeply. Balance can only be regained with effort and attention.

Remember watching the Olympic competitors on the balance beam? To right themselves when wobbly required focus, intention, and confidence. Yes, the competitor wobbled, but if she focused on worry about the wobble she was already lost. What helped her regain balance? Her practice before that moment created a foundation of confidence, and the practiced discipline of recovery of her mind and body moved her back into position.

Now is the time for us to practice what we say we believe; what we know to be true. Right now. Walk away from the computer and turn attention to finding your balance again. I'm going to do that right now myself.

Persistence is Magic

My grandson is almost 11 months old. When he was 9 months old he could tell what he wanted to grab was still there, even when my son's large hand was covering it. It's amazing–our human ability to identify what we want, reach for it, and persist in the face of obstacles, even when we have been here only a matter of months. 

It would seem these capacities are part of our nature. We may be taught that to ask for what we want is rude, to reach for what we want is selfish, to persist in trying to get it is unreasonable, yet we are coded to do these very things.

Some of our religious and cultural values have taught us that we should overcome these inclinations in order to become more spiritual or more selfless. It is essential we understand and act with awareness that our choices affect a larger circle of life than ourselves, but I think there is an essential goodness to the capacities we are endowed with. In fact, I think our spiritual development requires us to put away the intense self-doubt and self-denial that have accompanied our socialization. We need to behold ourselves in wonderment! We need to recognize our essential worthiness and the worthiness of our dreams and goals.

Most of us give up too easily as adults, but that's not how we started out as kids. Now that we have learned to value compassion and empathy it would be worthwhile to apply these to ourselves and rediscover our natural gifts, developing them from an adult's (hopefully) balanced perspective. 

It's time to banish the uglies in our self-talk and thought! Such painful, unfair criticisms. Such unnecessary self-limiting.

The gifts of knowing what we want and taking action to move toward it persistently have always been part of who we are. But they have been overlaid by years of conditioning and unlearning. This subdues our sensitivity to their urgings. We can learn to feel these and trust them again. We can allow ourselves to feel clarity and the motivation that propelled us much earlier in our lives. It is the conditioning that came in from the outside that is not native to our spirits, not the inborn abilities that we were created and born to use.

Talent is an amazing thing, but talent alone does not guarantee success. Education is an empowering privilege, but education does not assure that we will do well in life. Both of these can be undermined by that gatekeeping voice of self-doubt and criticism that keeps our efforts in check so that we give up before real results can begin to flow.

Persistence is magic. There is a familiar quote from Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew that is familiar to many of us: "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you." 

But there is an extended story that precedes this quote as it is presented in the book of Luke: "Suppose one of you has a friend, and goes to him at midnight and says to him, 'Friend, lend me three loaves; for a friend of mine has come to me from a journey, and I have nothing to set before him,' and from inside he answers and says, 'Do not bother me; the door has already been shut and my children and I are in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.' I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence he will get up and give him as much as he needs." And then Luke concludes with a similar version of the quote from Matthew after the story. This changes the nature of the advice. It shifts from encouragement to ask for what we want in Matthew, to encouragement to refuse to give up until we get what we are asking for in Luke. It is a message to persist until we get results.

And persistence does produce results like nothing else. Next time you're feeling down on yourself and discouraged, and you're about to give up on something you want, remember this and renew your efforts in a new way. Don't give up. Instead, imagine what you want as already successfully achieved and feel it as done. Imagine that you have accomplished it, deserve it, and are enjoying it. Imagine that this goodness you have brought into your experience blesses many others as well. Then get up and go for it again.

For more on persistence you can download a podcast of a talk I recently gave at Global Heart Spiritual Center in Santa Rosa, CA, "Persistence Trumps Talent."  Just click on the title of this article above to go to the download site.

Entering the Third Act

What does it mean to find ourselves living nearly 90 years these days?  There seems to be plenty of interest in discovering effective ways to provide initiation into adulthood for late teens and early twenties, but nothing that looks at initiations into the third act of the human life.

I suppose in some cultures people don't live as long, or the culture has long established the value and stages of the third act within its own boundaries.  But in western cultures that focus on the first and second acts of life–birth to age thirty and thirty to about sixty–those entering the third act become extraneous at best, or invisible at worst, particularly the women.  This is odd, since the women outnumber the men more and more as years go on.

I'm interested in discovering effective initiations into the third act of life.  I suspect that most of us have few role models for vibrant, happy, healthy, creative elders. When I was growing up aging was considered tragedy or worse, misery, yet I suspect that there are gems hidden to be mined that cannot be discovered at any earlier stage.  I want to know what they are and how we come by them.

Something tells me that this huge generation of Baby Boomers might be motivated to discover the real gold available to individuals in the third act of life, and in discovering it, to make immensely valuable contributions to humanity.

One of my mentors, Aftab Omer, President of the Institute of Imaginal Studies, says that the "Great Transmission" is lost to humanity from time to time, but that the dropped thread is found once again through the rediscovery or recreation of meaningful ritual.  I believe this is one clue to how people in the third act of life may begin to discover who they really are and how much their awareness of this can create new avenues to human wholeness.

I want to explore this idea in preparation for my sixtieth birthday.  I have only five more years to prepare for that movement into my own third act.  Thriving courageously, creating fearlessly, and leading with freshness and humor that go deeper that ever before.  Yep.  That's the direction I want to go.  I want to be surprised by how much richness and magic is there that I was never told about.  I know it's out there and I'm coming to get it.