Making a Case for COMPASSION
More smiling, less worrying. More compassion, less judgment. More blessed, less stressed. More love, less hate. — Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
I once worked for an Artistic Director who hated me. It was in the subtle digs to my character and sometimes a repugnant snarl at my very presence. I often wondered why he hired me when he clearly demonstrated such vehemence toward my very existence. It was early in the season and of course, there was never a shortage of qualified female dancers. That may have been the rub— there are never enough classically trained Black ballet dancers, even now. Anyway, I was caught between expressing balletic poise and artistic excellence in the dance space (that was my job) and yet, receiving disdain from the person who held my contract.
Some days I could rise above the lower energy by focusing on the work at hand, but not always. That was before I had any understanding of frequency and heart resonance and all that higher consciousness stuff. Sweet comfort came on those days when I could dismiss his taunts and emotional abuse by doing my work (the art of dance) with integrity and precision thus fulfilling my part of the contract and perhaps raising the entire studio space to a higher energetic frequency. However, not knowing how that was happening, most of the time I would find myself at the mercy of his unkindness and lower energy.
It took constant attention and I would say, now, quite of bit of energetic presence, to not react to the arrows and surly demeanor and at the same time developing ways to not let him know that his immaturity, whatever its roots did not affect me. The effort of staying present took almost as much work as dancing itself!
Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
—Thomas Merton
Expressing a little compassion might have been helpful. You know humans actually have an organ for compassion. It’s implanted in the center of our bodies.
It’s the heart! Let me say that again. The heart is the organ of compassion inside each one of us.
Imagine the genius of it all, the mystery is right inside our bodies. Everyone has a heart with breath to accompany its ongoing functioning.
And these days when we are living in the midst of unleashed cruelty and hatred, it seems that some parts of humanity are without hearts, defying that concept. The truth is that everyone has a heart that is attuned to spirit, something much greater than any of us. It’s our choice and free will to live outside that light and refuse to stay attuned to the presence, love, compassion, goodness, and forgiveness generated from higher qualities.
It’s no doubt that negative attitudes and its accompanying behaviors of anger, aggression, and retribution can have debilitating effects on us all. But it is also the reverse, according to the originators of HeartMath©:
“an easy way to maintain a higher vibration is to interweave the qualities of our heart in our connections and interactions. These heart qualities include love, care, compassion, kindness, appreciation, forgiveness and more.
Raising our vibration is not all that hard. We just have to be aware and present and breathe from our heart.
Do it now. Focus on your heart and breathe from there for a few minutes. If it helps to stay centered rest one hand or both hands on your heart.
Almost instantaneously, a shift occurs with the focus on that area of our bodies. And of course, it is so simple that the process is often dismissed. Again, with practice, breathing from the heart can become an invaluable practice—a way of life. An almost stress-free way of life. A life in alignment with the divine. Imagine that!
Dr. David R. Hawkins (1927-2012) in his calibration of consciousness identifies compassion on the higher end of the his spectrum of consciousness. That’s already been tested. We don’t need to try to prove it; because through his research we already know it works.
Walter Brugguemann (1923-2025), Old Testament scholar and author speaks deeply to what intuitively I sense in my heart:
Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural, but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition of humanness.
Apparently, we have to feel the suffering of others in us in order to express our humanity. The compassion and love does the healing; the divine work. But, I also think that this idea has gotten misconstrued. The suffering we bear on behalf of others is not a burden, to be dragged around and complained about, we are to transmute the “abnormal and unacceptable” into higher frequencies.
To further substantiate Brugguemann’s wise words read the thoughts of John Connolly:
The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another’s pain as one’s own, and to act to take that pain away. There is nobility, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness.
Maybe, throughout the day we need to pause, take deep breaths feeling our hearts; and keep doing it again and again, until it feels natural. That is an act for which we can be responsible, a reminder that we are breathing in and breathing out in resonance with and on behalf of others. It may not seem like a lot, but I’m beginning to think that the small things that go unrecognized are really valuable and serve on a much larger scale than we will ever understand.
James Baldwin (1924-1987) said even more about the virtue of the little contributions we can make for positive change when things look hopeless:
The world changes according to the way we see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.
So much wisdom here. I’m ever learning to root into Divine Compassion so as not to make compassion my work, but more of a natural alignment with the Great Loving that sustains us.