The Healing of Compassion
Before we can begin to be curious about what we are experiencing and bring it the healing of compassion, which is the doorway to our freedom, we need to realize that our challenges are not here because we have done something wrong.
The belief that we are wrong is so deeply entrenched in our psyches that at first it may be difficult to recognize that our challenges are here because they are tailor-made to bring us to awakening. I am not saying that we haven’t done unskillful things in our lives—we all have. But we have a choice in how we relate to our unskillfulness. To judge ourselves keeps us caught in an ongoing prison of struggle. To bring understanding and compassion opens us to the freedom of connection and to joy.
In order to make this shift, we need to understand that everyone makes mistakes, and everyone judges themselves for doing so. I have worked with people for over 20 years and have never met anyone, including internationally known teachers, who don’t have to work with the feeling that they have done things wrong, and thus are wrong. The more I awaken, the more I realize the truth in the Grateful Dead song Scarlet Begonias, “I have seldom been right, but I have never been wrong.” Or, as I like to say it, “With all of the mistakes you have made, you have never made a mistake.”
How can this be true? In Lynn Andrews’ Medicine Woman series, Agnes Whistling Elk says, “Everything begins with a circle of motion. Without the positive and negative poles, there would be no movement and no creation. Without your shadow side, your beauty would not exist!”
For years I couldn’t allow this truth to penetrate. I couldn’t accept that I was made of both darkness and light, strengths and weaknesses. I believed that I had done wrong and thus I was wrong. It also appeared to me that everyone else had it together and I did not. It was like an oozing wound inside of me that kept being re-opened by my judgment and shame. When I finally saw that I was wounding myself where I was the most wounded, I began slowly opening my tender but bruised heart.
For just this moment, allow yourself the mercy of realizing that at every step of the way, you have done the best you knew how to do. Let go of “I should have done better,” and let the healing of compassion come to you. We are all wounded in some way or another. And when these wounds are brought close to the surface through the ups and downs of life, we all react in unskillful ways.
The way out of this morass is to let go of blame.
As we discover a more compassionate relationship with both our strengths and our weaknesses, the storms of struggle will calm down enough for us to hear our inner voices of wisdom, leading us along the path to the healing for which we long.