316. Recognizing Compassion

Many of the things we regularly do are also acts of compassion. Listening attentively to the words of another person, finding a creative solution to a troubling problem, recognizing the beauty of nature, deepening a connection to a loved one, taking time to explore art or literature, helping a stranger in need, allowing a few minutes for quiet reflection — all of these are instances of compassionate action.

In many cases, the target of our compassion will be our own self. This might cause us to think that these actions are not genuinely compassionate because we are only helping ourselves. But self-compassion is always also compassion towards others and vice versa. When we act from compassion towards ourselves we help to meet our own needs and in doing so we enable future acts of compassion towards others. And when we act compassionately towards others, we help to ensure our own needs will be better met by others in the future.

We often do not recognize the compassion in our actions because we are not aware of what compassion itself is. We tend to rationalize the things we do as products of our desires or beliefs when we are actually acting from the intuition that something is both needed and necessary. We are sometimes more aware of ourselves and the world than we know. We can sometimes see the need for compassion towards ourselves and others even when our attention is mostly distracted by attachment.

While attachment does cause us to act less compassionately than we otherwise would, we still regularly perform compassionate acts. When we allow ourselves to pay closer attention to our existing compassion and its results, we discover that it is accompanied by joy. Joy both arises from compassion and causes us to return to compassion again and again. By forwarding compassion in our lives, we grant ourselves the opportunity to more regularly experience joy and to extend the reach of our compassion further into the world.