"What is the relationship between hurt, truth and compassion? Compassion is a kind of healing agent that helps us tolerate the hurt of seeing the truth. The point of compassion is not to eliminate suffering, but to lead a person to the truth so that she will be able to live the life of truth.” - A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book One, pg. 92
Compassion is necessary to live a life that is truly authentic. This essential quality of our nature, inherent to everyone, enables us to be with the truth of our experience and arises most explicitly when we are encountering painful challenges. Being present with our pain opens the doorway to the presence of the compassionate heart. This natural response to suffering helps us to develop trust, allows us to be vulnerable and transforms our pain into the presence of gentle loving kindness. This is a central quality for the practice of inquiry that opens us to ever deepening truths of our nature and ourselves.
Exploration Session: Your Relationship to Compassion
This exploration will help you clarify your own relationship to compassion, and how it affects your life and spiritual journey.
Explore your experiences of compassion. Have they been oriented toward moving away from pain, or toward its truth? Is your attitude friendly, kind, gentle and open? Or is it closed, resistant, or rejecting toward what is arising? Explore the ways you cover or avoid your pain and hurt. Specifically, how do you avoid your pain and what keeps you from moving toward the truth of your experience when suffering? Include in that the relative absence or presence of kindness toward yourself and your process. What causes the limitations in kindness to yourself? Do you believe compassion is important, and do you feel the need for it or not? If not, why not?
This reflection on compassion is shared from Nancee Soboyna, one of the teachers for the upcoming weekend Compassion and the Way of Truth, September 15-16 in Berkeley, CA, USA.