Compassion does just the opposite. It moves toward suffering, not away from it. It seeks connection, not distance. Compassion is what rouses the father who, without a moment’s thought, rushes toward his bloodied child after a playground accident, scooping her up in his arms to comfort her and attend to her wounds. It fuels the hospice volunteer, who reads poetry to the gentleman she met just last week who’s facing imminent death from colon cancer. It can move you to gently place your hand on a coworker’s arm, as you absorb her recounting of the difficulties her family is now enduring. Indeed, the latest evidence from studies of primates (both human and nonhuman) suggests that compassionate responding like this is just as natural, just as hardwired, and just as beneficial to our species as is our evolved instinct to recoil from burning sensations and other forms of physical pain.
Compassion is love. It flowers when you recognize some kind of physical or emotional pain within the other person. I dare say that no human experience is purely 100 percent good. Life experiences are instead virtually always some rich amalgam of good and bad. Think of it as a vibrant tapestry, in which the gilded threads of love and good fortune are interwoven among the darker threads of pain, sorrow, and loss.
Equally true, no human experience is purely 100 percent bad, nor need it be. Even the heaviest of human experiences—sudden grief or joblessness, natural or human-orchestrated disasters and other brushes with mortality—can be lightened appreciably when you recollect simple truths such as “this too shall pass” or “I’m not in this alone.” Indeed, such braiding of adversity with hope and love, of destructive with more reassuring emotions, is the secret to resilience. Resilient people are the ones who bend without breaking and who eventually bounce back from even the most difficult life challenges. Instinctually, they can see some form of light in the darkness they face. In study after study, my collaborators and I find that it is precisely this infusion of positive emotions into negative emotional terrain that drives resilient people to bounce back.
Perhaps you come by this sort of resilience naturally. For whatever reasons, you may have little trouble finding the value in difficult experiences, even if it’s only to discover the depths of your inner fortitude or your social support. But maybe resilience doesn’t come to you naturally. Maybe you flounder in the wake of upsets and struggle to regain your footing. Rest assured, people can and do become more resilient in time. All it takes is practice. With repeated practice, you can build new emotional habits that fuel a newfound and well-earned resilience. You, too, can bounce back from the many adversities you endure. And when you do, you’ll also discover a renewed capacity to offer positivity resonance to others, helping others to heal, grow, and bounce back as well. The place to start is with your own suffering.
Try This Micro-moment Practice: Use Your
Own Suffering as a Cue to Connect
Whenever pain, suffering, or any form of adversity weaves its way into your own experience, take that very moment as a cue to practice compassion, to take tender care of yourself. Depending on the exact nature of your circumstances, your self-care may be swift, like yanking your hand away from a burning hot surface, or slow, like taking time to read or write poetry when you feel lost, numb, or otherwise disoriented. In either case, bring your full awareness to your painful predicament, putting a metaphorical (or literal) hand on your own shoulder as you witness your experience of it. The kindness and awareness that you give yourself draws more of the gilded threads into the tapestry of your own experience. There’s no need to deny or suppress difficult feelings. Simply allow the good and the bad to sit side by side, so that they can inform and influence each other. In doing so you plant seeds of hope: Even as you fear the worse, you yearn for better.
Remind yourself that whatever painful predicament you now endure is—at this very moment—being faced by others as well. When it comes to suffering, after all, there’s scarcely anything new under the sun. While the particulars of your predicament may be unique, the bones of it are not. At one level or another, you’ll be able to recognize the shared elements in your difficult circumstances, whether it’s physical pain, social injustice, uncertainty about your own or another’s health, a crushing influx of demands, rejection, or a disorienting lack of direction. Take a step back from your own suffering and imagine yourself connected with others who suffer similarly. This is the first step toward compassion. No matter who or where these others may be, no matter whether you know them, you’re connected to them through your shared experience of this difficulty.
It’s only natural, when you suffer, to yearn for your distress to pass. Although this wish may already be intense, I suggest you make it larger still. Let that wish expand horizontally, to encompass both you as well as others who suffer similarly. As you do, articulate some version of the following wish to yourself:
May I, together with all those who suffer [this], find peace.
Experiment with self-compassion in this more encompassing manner and you coax yourself out of the narrowband focus that all but defines your own difficult passages. As your awareness expands, you become less self-absorbed, more open and attuned to the suffering of others. This broadened perspective often provides the toehold you need to reverse the downward spiral that threatens to drag you into despair or self-pity. It begins to lift you on the warm winds of an upward spiral. It also conditions your heart to become more oriented toward others, more attuned to their difficult passages. You are no longer alone.
With repeated practice, you un-numb yourself. Your awareness of others’ suffering grows sharper and clearer. Indeed, whenever you become aware that the other person with whom you connect suffers, love and compassion become one and the same. Given the ubiquity of suffering in this world, the appropriateness of compassion is widespread. Even so, when you can trust simple truths like “this too shall pass” and “we’re in this together,” you won’t be overcome by the weight of others’ suffering. You’re better able to offer a steady source of comfort to the suffering person you’re with.
In time, you can untether your awareness of another’s suffering from your own suffering. Knowing that you have suffered, or could suffer, similarly can be enough. This is the wisdom of sameness, of shared humanity. Let this be the foundation for your compassion. Resilience doesn’t just reside within people. It also resides within the vast web of our collective social connections. Each time you offer compassionate attention to another, you build up this resource, this resilience, not just in that very moment for that particular person, but also across your entire community, in enduring ways.
Compassion’s Aim
Your aim in offering compassion to others is modest. You simply offer an infusion of warmth and light, however small, into the chilly darkness that your companion is now facing. You don’t pretend to be an alchemist, magically turning his or her entire tapestry into gold. You simply offer up a single gilded strand, a single warm gesture. Indeed, an alchemist’s bravado would surely backfire, leaving your companion wounded by the added harm that comes from having the grave realities of his or her current circumstances ignored. Difficult experiences, most often, can’t simply be erased. They can only be met with the respect of openness and the warmth of goodwill.
As you practice compassion, maintain an awareness of your own current resources. Take in and take on only as much of another’s pain as you can responsibly hold. Becoming more open to pain is a process, often a difficult one. So don’t force it. Take baby steps. Know that even a small increase in your openness to another’s pain changes both your own heart and the situation the other faces for the better. Opening too far to pain, or too fast, can push you beyond that sweet spot of positivity resonance that you seek. When that happens, you altogether miss your intended aim of simply being with the other through this difficult passage. You instead collapse under the weight of your own pain, losing your ability to offer support to others. Although “Be open” can be a great motto in many circumstances, like any piece of good advice, it can al
so be taken too far.
You’ll soon find that when you connect with those who suffer, when you sit beside them with kindness, clear eyes, and acceptance, you’ll quite naturally be drawn to care, help, or give. The warm and tender feelings in your heart inspire you to do whatever you can to relieve the other person’s suffering. Put another way, compassion doesn’t just sit there. It motivates action. Those actions may be seemingly small—like listening attentively or taking over a chore—or more heroic—like hosting a fund-raiser or taking on a position of leadership to advocate on behalf of those less fortunate. Let your new appreciation for the other’s predicament guide you in selecting the wisest course of action, knowing that—as with alternative medicine—the smallest interventions sometimes have the biggest effects.
Compassion, then, meets the negativity of suffering with the positivity of love, acceptance, and concern. When love moves toward suffering in this way, it raises the ratios of positivity to negativity for all involved. These newly raised positivity ratios spur on healing, growth, and resilience when and where it’s needed most.
Laura’s Story
My friend Laura works as a doula. Pregnant women hire her to support them during labor and childbirth, and into their postpartum stages. While other professionals who attend a birth focus primarily on a safe childbirth, a doula’s aim is to “mother the mother,” continuously offering her timely information, emotional support, and physical assistance throughout that miraculous and often tumultuous journey, helping her to feel safer, and more comfortable and confident. Studies show that the continuous support that a doula provides can improve health outcomes for both the mother and the baby.
More than a decade ago, Laura’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy. At that time, she had declined the recommended courses of radiation and chemotherapy, even though she was informed that without them she might live only months. Because Laura’s mom had defied medical expectations by living well year after year, Laura “never knew what to expect” and “learned to adopt an ‘in the moment’ mind-set.” She knew that especially with respect to her mother’s life expectancy, “it did little good to plan.” So when, about a dozen years after the mastectomy, she learned that her mother’s cancer had spread to her bones and was terminal, Laura continued to address her mother’s dying one moment at a time. As her mom’s physical limitations increased, Laura made a room for her in her own small apartment so that she could better care for her. Eventually, with help from her sister, hospice workers, and countless others, Laura was piecing together round-the-clock care for her dying mom. Laura had attended countless home births over the years. This was her first home death. She’d made a career out of caring for mothers while they faced difficult passages, and here she was doing the same for her very own mom, albeit for a very different kind of passage.
Toward the end, her mother’s pain, confusion, and frailty intensified to the point where she’d wake up terrified, hallucinating, unsure whether she was dead or alive. To meet the challenge of caring for her mother during these difficult weeks, Laura drew on many of the same resources she used in her doula work, which she said are “hard to describe, because they don’t come from words.” A first step, she shared, is to know that “you can’t fix someone else’s pain” but can only “be fully present with it, with awareness and calm.” Laura’s caring for her mom before she died translated into sleeping at her mother’s side while holding her hand. That way, Laura could meet the first signs of her mother’s agitation with “total presence and reassurance.” Just as in her doula work, she knew it was important “not to get swept up in another person’s issues” but instead to simply “be present” and “stable in yourself” and let them know they’re “not in this alone.” This can take courage, especially when the other person is experiencing fear as well as pain. Being present in this way during the difficult transitions of labor and childbirth often calls on Laura to be bold. As she put it, she may need to “get in her face,” which can mean getting down on the floor so that she can position her own face just inches from the birthing mother’s face. From this close range she gently insists, “Open your eyes and look at me. Breathe with me. I’m here with you.” She drew on similar courage in caring for her mother, often reminding her that she could “talk later, for now, just breathe with me.” Laura has found that to connect and be helpful to someone in dire emotional or physical pain requires that she “be fully present, one moment at a time, which can at times stretch into hours.” When the suffering eventually subsides, as it always does, the ensuing shared sense of calm—or in the case of childbirth—success, can be “beautiful,” even “exhilarating.”
Laura’s descriptions underscore the importance of connection. True compassion, just like positivity resonance more generally, demands the physical copresence of bodies. For Laura, touch, eye contact, and “breathing together with the other” have been “huge” resources. They can be for you, too, when you wish to connect with someone who’s suffering. As Laura put it, compassion like this “doesn’t come from words.” It comes instead from being physically and emotionally present, concerned and grounded. That’s the stance from which you can most readily turn toward pain, rather than away from it, while offering up one more gilded strand for the other to weave into the dark tapestry of the trying time they now face. When compassion flowers, you’re not simply giving of yourself to another, you are also stretching open your own heart. A positivity resonance emerges that changes you both.
Try This Meditation Practice:
Compassionate Love
Retreat to a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. Sit comfortably, with both of your feet flat on the floor. Straighten your spine, bringing the top of your skull skyward and your shoulder blades down and together, creating room in your rib cage for your heart and lungs to expand more readily.
Take a few slow and deep breaths. Bring your awareness to the subtle rocking of your heart with each in-breath and each out-breath. Call forth your intention for this practice session. Perhaps it’s to slow your pace and soften your heart so that you can be a true friend to someone who suffers, a source of comfort and reassurance. Know that all people, everywhere, suffer adversity from time to time. Just as all people yearn to be free of suffering. In this moment, as you sit relatively free from your own suffering, you yearn to be a ready resource to others.
Throughout this session, keep bringing your awareness to your heart. Witness how this practice affects your body. Know that your body sensations deserve your awareness as much as the phrases or thoughts that emerge from your mind.
Gently call forth an image of someone who is currently facing ill fortune or otherwise suffering. Without getting mired in these difficulties, explore their scope. Then, lightly remind yourself of this person’s good qualities, and how much you would wish to ease his or her pain or lighten his or her load. Say the following classic phrases, or your own versions of them, slowly and from your heart.
May you find safety, even in the midst of pain (or misfortune, difficulties).
May you find peace, even in the midst of pain.
May you find strength, even in the midst of pain.
May you find ease, even in the midst of pain.
Repeat these ancient wishes one by one, with each breath you take. Let each phrase infuse and soften your heart. Visualize yourself simply standing beside this person, recognizing his or her courage in the face of whatever difficulty life now delivers.
As your practice deepens, experiment with new ways to soften and expand your heart’s capacity. Shift your focus to new people who are suffering, whether they’re people you know well or not. Keep in mind that your aim is not to make this or any other person’s pain or adversity magically disappear. Rather your aim is to condition your own heart to move in toward others’ suffering when you see it, to open up to it a bit more, so that you may offer comfort and strength, rather than to turn away in self-protection.
If you find that the wor
ds of this practice stand in the way of your ability to call forth true tenderness, try simplifying your focus. Draw on images. Visualize before you the difficulty that this other person faces, whether it’s physical or emotional pain or uncertainty. Imagine what this difficulty might look like. Give it a color and a shape. Where do you see it in relation to the person on whom you focus? Next, visualize your own heart as it yearns to be compassionate. Imagine that this is your well of healing positivity. Imagine its color, shape, and movements. Is it bright or golden? How much does it expand? Now, with these visual details painted in your mind’s eye, imagine that as you breathe in, you inhale the other person’s ill fortune, lifting a portion of it away from him or her. As you inhale, let this ill-fortune enter in and be transformed by your steady, loving heart, pausing for just a moment before you exhale to witness this change. Then, as you breathe out, imagine that you are giving some thread, however small, of good fortune to this person, relief from his or her pain or suffering. Visualize this process of hope and change with each breath you take. Breathe in pain. Add your own compassionate wishes to the mix, and breathe out a small infusion of comfort. Breathe in threats, softening them by adding your love into the mix, and breathe out safety. Breathe in despair; breathe out peace. Breathe in feelings of being overcome, and breathe out strength. Breathe in the suffering person’s difficulties, and breathe out ease.
Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become Page 15
