Compassion Practice
Let me begin sharing what is compassion as a thought experiment, then move into the practice. Compassion has to factors:
Feeling someone else’s experience in your own body.
Addressing/supporting this experience (often pain, suffering, traumatic event, etc).
So let’s imagine two bodies— body one has pain and body two has compassion. Body one makes their experience of pain available (within themselves) for body two to be able to experience, and body two makes their compassion available so they can feel and address the experience.
The process is described this way:
When pain meets compassion it finds a new channel to flow through, like a water channel that has been blocked by waste or debris and finding a new stream/path to continue its motion. So injuries and pain are the waste, the debris, that block the natural flow, motion, from continuing and as long as it is blocked, it is not only stagnant but also creating more and more settlements which in our case, present themselves as illnesses, pains, stuck emotions, behavioral patterns, harmful relationships and more, and compassion is the ingredient that allows this dam to open and for the body to begin to heal and regenerate itself. So the meeting point of pain, injury or trauma and compassion is like a confluence— the meeting point of two rivers— that by meeting only increase their vitality and flow. So compassion is the ignition factor for this photosynthesis process. Yet it is not singular because nothing ever is and for this to work we need to make ourselves and our compassion available and flowing, as much as the other needs to make their pain or injury available and flowing, because our compassion can be blocked and unavailable inside of ourselves like the pain, injury or trauma can be blocked and unavailable in the other.
So one’s pain helps ignite the other’s compassion and this opening of compassion helps make the other’s pain available, open, and flowing and together they flow in and out of each other cleansing, releasing, regenerating, expanding one another and becoming one natural ever-going, ever-flowing, process— like photosynthesis. Pain supports the circulation of compassion and compassion supports the circulation of pain. So pain is the igniting factor for compassion (when felt in the other’s body) and compassion is the burning material of pain, injuries and trauma— it evaporates them like heat evaporates water— and as long as they can flow freely through our bodies, we both heal and when we both heal together and with each other, there is no way we will ever again try to harm or kill one another which is why this is the foundation of Peace Work. So it is not about resolving conflicts but about making the compassion in you available and flowing, so the pain in me can become available and flowing and vice versa. So peace is the byproduct of the activation and meeting point of pain and compassion, in a similar way that oxygen is the byproduct of photosynthesis. Peace Work is healing work, and healing work is the work of compassion.
Practice:
To practice, ask another person to join you (it can also be an animal, plant or soil— any living being/organism). Sit together in a comfortable way, like you’ll sit for a meditation. Take a few good moments to relax and soften into the space. Then decide between you who will share their pain and who will share their compassion. The one who shares the pain is focused on making the pain available within themselves for the other and the one who shares compassion is focused on feeling the experience in their own body and finding a way to address, support and nurture that pain from within themselves. And to continue this motion, flow of pain into compassion and compassion into pain. You can do it for 15-30 or more minutes, as long as you are comfortable and have the capacity for. This is not speech therapy, the practice is done in silence and the focus is on working within yourself without any physical action.
