Your Compassionate Self: What You Came to Create
By Jennifer Paros
“If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.”
When I used to think of compassion, I often thought of those who really deserved compassion – someone like a malnourished child in Africa – the kind shown in UNICEF commercials. Someone clearly innocent and victimized seemed like the best and most appropriate recipient for my compassion. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that often what people are enduring or suffering is invisible to me. They don’t always appear afraid, crying and sad, sickly, starving, or bleeding. In fact, they might appear obnoxious, stubborn, angry, difficult; they might take something from me; they might hurt me; they might even be yelling right at me. Over time I’ve come to believe that authentic compassion means compassion withheld from no one – including me.
Self-directed compassion is less likely to occur than self-pity, but feeling sorry for ourselves has neither the value nor the transformative powers of compassion. True compassion takes our inner power into account as well as our human pain – an understanding that lights our way forward.
In third grade, I became frightened of going to my new school. Each morning I sat in the kitchen staring at the little clock in the stove, awaiting the moment I’d have to leave. I’d try to soothe myself with how much time I had, then inevitably become tortured with how little time was left. Internally it was all very dramatic. I soldiered through – making myself do something to which I had a remarkable amount of resistance. I felt anxious anticipating going and anxious while there. The belief I was not okay at school became so chronic and crippling it got to the point where I finally could no longer make myself go.
At the time, I had no compassion for myself, though I did feel plenty bad for me. The problem with the make yourself do it model is it insists on movement while we remain stuck mentally and emotionally. It’s sort of like insisting a car move with no gas in it. You can push it but that’s not the way it’s meant to work or works best. As humans we move forward most easily with compassion, which helps us open ourselves to life and to our own creative power.
“I stopped waiting for the world to give me what I wanted; I started giving it to myself.”
In an interview for the Archive of American Television, writer and producer David Lee talks of his experience writing on Cheers. It seemed to him that he and his partner had been at the “kindergarten level of writing” and were now suddenly asked to do “college level work.” He found the hours challenging and felt stressed trying to produce the quality of writing he believed was expected. He and his partner were so convinced they were doing a bad job, they went to Les and Glen Charles (the show’s creators) and offered to be let go. They explained there would be no hard feelings as they understood they were not up to the task.
The Charles brothers were surprised and told them they thought they’d been doing a great job. David Lee said that that moment changed everything for him. The belief he wasn’t doing a “good enough job” was the cause of all his distress. The minute that thought was refuted, he had no desire to leave. Though the Charles brothers helped to dispel his thinking, he also could have done so for himself.
David Lee didn’t actually know he wasn’t doing a good job, but never thought to question his own belief. Though his mind had come up with an exit strategy (quitting) to get some relief, there was nothing he needed to do to end his stress other than to acknowledge and accept that he was doing fine. Acknowledging his own abilities and offering himself some kindness qualifies as a basic act of self-compassion.
Compassion doesn’t just recognize our pain, it knows our power; it soothes and also puts us in a position of readiness to go forward. Feeling sorry for ourselves closes us in where we are. When we create – when we write or make anything – it’s an act of opening up. Energy then comes in, takes form as ideas, and compels us to take the best next step. This is why we don’t need to soldier on or force ourselves to do things. The gentleness compassion instills in us and its recognition of our power to create what we want, makes it natural for us to open up, feel the call forward, and want to go.
Jennifer Paros is a writer, illustrator, and author of Violet Bing and the Grand House (Viking, 2007). She lives in Seattle. Please visit her website.