256. The Joy Of Compassion

When I’m aware of my needs and the needs of the people around me, it feels necessary for me to take action to meet those needs. This is the action of compassion, which arises directly from awareness of need, and which works to reduce unnecessary pain and suffering.

When I take compassionate action, I help to meet my own needs and the needs of others. Having one of my own needs met can be a source of joy, for it gives me both fulfillment and release from concern over that need. Helping to meet the needs of another person can be sometimes even more joyful, as it grants me a sense of purpose and value.

The joy I feel from taking compassionate action can be accompanied by the whole spectrum of emotional experience, including feelings of excitement, pleasure, frustration, sadness, and sometimes even pain. But joy is powerful and it supplies the fuel to continue acting from compassion regardless of the problems I face.

One of the biggest problems is meeting the enormous need for awareness. We all need awareness in order to bring an end to our own suffering, but when our attachments are strong we are in the grip of suffering and expanding our awareness will be difficult.

To be compassionate, I need to apply all of my intelligence and creativity towards developing means to greater awareness in myself and others. This activity is also profoundly purposeful and thus a further source of joy. Helping others towards awareness means showing them something new and encouraging their own curiosity to drive them deeper into an investigation of their own experience.

As the awareness of the people around me expands, they begin to act more compassionately towards others, and so compassion itself grows. Incredible joy can be realized by helping others become involved in the compassionate effort to solve the problems of need that we all face together.