WTF Compassion

Compassion is rarely understood the way it should be. Sometimes we think compassion means that everything is okay, that we should just accept everything exactly as it is and no change should be made. That’s a small sliver of the whole picture.

Equinimity v Compassion

The first step is distinguishing between equanimity and compassion. Equanimity means it's okay to feel anything I'm feeling. I can accept my present moment experience exactly as it is without changing anything. This is about the internal experience—allowing an experience to arise inside without rejecting it or trying to create change in the world because of internal discomfort.

When we try to change the world based on our own discomfort, we often adapt the world to our own pathology. We adapt the world so we don't have to change. The ways we would change to make our own discomfort okay would actually be more beautiful.

Sometimes equanimity looks like knowing I'm safe even though I may not feel safe. If someone says something making me uncomfortable—not physical danger, but perhaps "you forgot to do the dishes"—can I be with that discomfort? Can I survive it? Is it okay that I'm feeling this?

The action that follows might be just feeling the feeling, or saying "I'm sorry, I forgot," or even noting "you don't do dishes most nights either, so we can call it even." Compassion means making space inside yourself for your experience so action comes from discernment rather than reactivity.

Idiot Compassion v Spiritual Compassion

The second layer of compassion is understanding the difference between "idiot compassion" and true compassion. Gabrielle Roth, a wonderful dancer who created a dance form integrating emotional and somatic processes (ecstatic dance is a generic offshoot of her more specified work), said that compassion is whatever gets someone to the next step of their spiritual journey.

This is radical. Often we think compassion means being nice or kind. But saying compassion is whatever gets us to the next step of our journey is extreme. Many difficult experiences get us to the next step of our journey. This doesn't mean we should create terrible things, but sometimes moving forward on our journey is more important than feeling good or comfortable.

There's also a distinction between being nice and being kind in everyday English. Being nice is usually more superficial—you don't know what's happening beneath the surface. Being kind can sometimes not seem nice because kindness involves honesty.

One of my favorite ideas from the book Difficult Conversations is that you can be 100% kind and 100% honest. In my mind, there had always been a trade-off—either kind or honest, but not both. Holding onto the possibility of being kind while honest, or honest while kind, opened up a huge space of possibility for me. It doesn't have to be a trade-off between honesty and kindness.

So we have equanimity and compassion—how to allow yourself to feel while also taking action. We have idiot compassion and true compassion.

Idiot compassion is being nice, saying "Everything's okay, that's all good. We'll just flow with it. We can include anything." And then at some point, weird things start happening, and there's a sense of "No, that's not okay, actually."

What’s the Goal?

This is the point where it becomes really important to be clear about your objectives and what you're trying to build or where you're trying to get. Without that clarity, all the default patterns of trying to be socially acceptable stay in play. It's only when we feel the pain of what those patterns create, or we feel the beauty of what we want to create, that we stop being willing to adjust these patterns.

If your goal is having a healthy relationship, you're not going to say "anything goes," because I don't know anyone at a level of spiritual accomplishment who could actually be okay with anything. Even to say that would be a level of spiritual accomplishment somehow misplaces what spirituality is, especially in relation to psychology.

In the Zen tradition, teachers are very strict—the opposite of the new age Western acceptance that burgeoned in the 70s and 80s. It's more in the sense of "No, you cannot do that. That's not okay. Here is exactly how you'll do everything."

To me, that's the balance to many places we've ended up in current Western spirituality: this idea of radical openness or the sense that you ought to be open, that being open is good and being closed is bad.

We have a real opportunity to be honest about what we want to create and then pragmatic about what actually gets us there. There are ways we delude ourselves, saying "This will get me there" or "That won't get me there" or "This isn't a problem." But when we look at or ride the wave of that long-term eventuality, we find out whether or not it got us where we hoped it would.

Join me for spicy relational practice weekly online or explore a 1:1 coaching series with me. Let’s connect—book a free 30-minute call to explore what might be right for you!