In the Presence of Difficulty
By Maria Khalifé
“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” ~HH, the Dalai Lama
Compassion is a strong feeling of recognition between ourselves and others. It’s saying “Brother, I can feel what you are feeling.” To practice compassion is to recognize that we are all in this grand human adventure together, and if you hurt, I hurt. If you celebrate, I celebrate.
Compassion celebrates our intrinsic connectedness: we are all Mind, thinking, processing, solving, reasoning, and expressing a myriad of emotions. Compassion allows us to see these activities in both ourselves and others and to know that by extending our minds to the other, we support him.
In order to extend compassion for others, we have to unfold the ability to quit thinking only of ourselves, to stop being concerned only about our own problems and to entertain concern for our fellow man. We get better at this when difficulty arises, and as painful as this might be, it seems the more difficulty, the more compassion we unfold.
Our daylight hours are filled with opportunities to extend compassion to others. We may not always know what motivates that other to cut you off in traffic; to speak sharply to you; to behave offensively in front of you to a waiter, but we can exercise compassion by simply asking ourselves one question:
What might be their good reason for that behavior?
If you try to provide reasons for their behavior, you will at the same time be extending compassion to them. This will get you outside of your own, somewhat parochial existence and move into that living stream called the brotherhood of mankind. You will be helping others and yourself simultaneously with the extending of this compassion and you will love the growing it affords you. It allows you to Be the Change from the inside out!
I can assure you that if these kinds of experiences – the sort that make you extend forgiveness when you feel irritated; that make you look deeply inside yourself for the answers to our Key Question – then you are ready to practice compassion, because your life will not ask anything of you until you are ready to supply what is asked.
You can bloom where you are currently planted if you add the fertilizer called compassion to what is already unfolding in your heart and mind. You can shine some sun into your own heart, connecting you to the hearts of your brother man with the pure gift of compassion. And we each make this world a better place with each such event.
