Twice this week I had the opportunity to deepen my understanding of compassion: what it is, why it is so important, and what it requires of us.
While leading a group coaching conversation, there was someone in the group that I was having a hard time finding compassion for. The person was saying things that I fundamentally disagree with, that I experience as hurtful, and that I think are patently untrue. As the group leader my job was to support this person, to be present for them. And, my job was to model for this person and the entire group how to support and make space for a person I disagree with while also not allowing their untrue and hurtful comments to be accepted as gospel. As I sat there, listening to this person passionately claim things from a perspective that was entirely foreign to the way I see and understand the world, wondering how I was going to respond, how I was going to engage in this conversation without turning it into a fruitless debate about facts, I started to think about what compassion would ask of me in this moment.
Compassion asks me to hear what this person is saying from their point of view, from their experience, from their pain, from their fear. Compassion tells me that I cannot judge someone from a place of my experience, of my sensibilities, my orientation, my social and emotional maturity. Compassion reminds me that I cannot dismiss someone just because I think they are wrong, just because I cannot understand how it is that they have come to think and believe what they have come to think and believe. Compassion calls upon me to offer grace even to a person who is not offering it back. Compassion is not a transactional quality, it is not something to withhold simply because it cannot be returned. It may in fact be the case that the moments when compassion cannot be returned are the most important moments to offer it.
So I listened, I heard their pain, I felt their fear, I understood what they were and were not going to be able to hear from me, and I responded in a way that honored their humanity without agreeing with their statements, without accepting their assumptions. I found a parcel of a truth that I could agree with, acknowledged that truth, and I offered a gentle challenge and a broader perspective. I certainly did not change this person’s mind but I did give them space to feel heard, I did offer them a window into a different way of thinking, and I have to hope that in doing so I could help loosen the grip that their fear held them so tightly inside of.
Perhaps I was so easily able to call on my compassion in this moment because I had been practicing it all week, because I had already confronted those parts of myself that are most resistant to offering compassion, because I had already been in conversation with the things that make compassion so difficult for me.
Earlier this week I spent time reconnecting with a past partner. It had been several years since our separation and the time that had passed, as well as the healing work that we each had done, allowed us to enter into conversations that were not available to us during our time together. One of the things we talked about was the way that each of us carried heartbreak in the aftermath of our relationship.
This conversation challenged a set of assumptions that I carried for most of the time since our separation. How could she be heartbroken about us not being together when I had wanted us to be together and she was not choosing it? For most of the intervening years I did not have space to acknowledge her heartbreak because I was so consumed with my own. In my mind there was a simple truth: if she was feeling heartbroken about us not being together then she could just choose for us to be together, and if she wasn’t choosing that, then she didn’t get to be heartbroken about us not being together.
But compassion demands that I step out of my own experience and see the experience of the other person. Compassion demands that I understand that even if something feels very simple to me, that doesn’t mean that it is simple to someone else. Compassion demands that I release my story, my version of reality, and accept that someone else might be experiencing our shared reality differently, might even be experiencing our shared reality from inside of a different paradigm than my own.
I truly did not understand how she could feel rejected by me because, in my reality, I was clearly stating that what I wanted was for us to be together. In the reality I was operating from, being together was the pinnacle of connection, so to me when I would say, “I want to be with you but if you don’t want to be with me then I can’t have you in my life because it would be too painful for me”, there was no rejection in that statement. It was I who was being rejected because in the paradigm I was inside of there was choosing to be together or there was rejection. In her paradigm, knowing that she was loved and would be loved no matter what was the pinnacle of connection, so if being loved felt at stake, then rejection was also at stake. To her when I said, “I want to be with you but if you don’t want to be with me then I can’t have you in my life because it would be too painful for me”, it felt like an ultimatum, it felt like rejection.
In realizing this, in seeing that we were operating from different paradigms of love and relationship, paradigms that understand connection and rejection differently, I was able to loosen the grip I had been holding on my own pain, on my version of the story, on my need to be right and righteous. Or perhaps it was the loosening of my grip on those things that allowed me to have the space for this realization, that allowed me to have the space to see the difference in the paradigms that we were operating in, that allowed me the space to have compassion.
If I am to have compassion then I have to let go of my pain, I have to let go of the preciousness of my story, of my own victimhood. Compassion demands that I put my own experience aside so that I might see, feel, and understand what another person might be experiencing. And even if I cannot see, feel, or understand, compassion demands that I imagine, that I try. Compassion demands that I believe that there is truth in what another person says even if, and especially when, it is a truth that I do not see or cannot understand.