362. So Much Suffering

As our awareness expands, we begin to pay more attention to suffering. We see that there is suffering everywhere, not just in ourselves and the people we’re close to, but also in complete strangers.

Through attention to the suffering of others, we begin to feel more of what others feel. We experience not only our own suffering but also the suffering of other people through empathy. To feel overwhelmed by this experience is entirely normal. There is so much suffering and seemingly so little we can do to stop it.

But we need not surrender to despair. We can instead recognize that our awareness is still relatively narrow, which means the compassion we can muster is also relatively small. It’s not that we don’t want to be more compassionate, but rather that we first must see what is necessary and needed in order to be able to take more meaningful action.

Often our compassion will be so small that the only place we can meet need is in ourselves. This is far from a bad thing. The more compassion we receive (including from ourselves) the more we will be able to develop our awareness. With greater awareness, we’ll be able to see more and do more. Then our compassion will spill outside ourselves and towards the needs of others.

We might wonder where our compassion should be directed when there is so much need around us. But this worry arises because we think compassion can be misdirected, and this is never really the case. As long as we listen to the intuitions that arise from our awareness of need, we will act purposefully to do whatever is most needed and necessary.

Every act of compassion has immeasurable value, for it creates a cycle of greater awareness, compassion, and joy in ourselves and others. As our awareness expands, we begin to contend with suffering on a larger scale. Sometimes these efforts will unearth attachments that we didn’t know we had, which will in turn produce new suffering for us. For this reason, we cannot limit ourselves to addressing the suffering of others. We must also always offer our attention to our own suffering so that our compassion can continue to grow.