Tag: compassion

Irrigating the Irritation

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“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” – Plato

Yesterday my friend John was trying to get a hold of my friend Eric and I was caught in the middle. Eric wasn’t answering so John called me and left a voice mail. Eric’s phone had died and he was temporarily using another number so I texted him on his other phone that John was looking for him. Eric didn’t have John’s number stored in his temporary phone so Eric called me for it. I texted it to Eric and then John called me.

It seemed to go on and on. They called and texted me while I was working, picking up my son from school, out for ice cream, getting the kids ready for the bed. I was irritated. Then I found out John was calling because our friend Joanie was having to put her beloved 15-year-old golden retriever to sleep. My irritation evaporated instantly.

Compassion is such a powerful tool. For years I’ve said that doing meditation in the morning was irrigating my irritations. I hadn’t identified specifically that it was expanding my compassion for my self and others until I was reminded of this “Just Like Me” meditation from by Buddhist monk, Pema Chödrön:

”There’s a practice I like called ‘Just like me.’ You go to a public place and sit there and look around. Traffic jams are very good for this. You zero in on one person and say to yourself things such as Just like me, this person doesn’t want to feel uncomfortable. Just like me, this person loses it sometimes. Just like me, this person doesn’t want to be disliked. Just like me, this person wants to have friends and intimacy.’

“We can’t presume to know exactly what someone else is feeling and thinking, but still we do know a lot about each other. We know that people want to be cared about and don’t want to be hated. We know that most of us are hard on ourselves, that we often get emotionally triggered, but that we want to be of help in some way. We know that, at the most basic level, every living being desires happiness and doesn’t want to suffer.”

Welcoming the Unwelcome by Pema Chödrön

When we do suffer, it is eased by the compassion of others. I remember talking with Joanie after my golden retriever died and because she knew the depth of the heartache, it was of great comfort to me. I am sending that compassion back to her now so the spirit of love, warmth and understanding continues to ripple out. My daughter wants to make a card for Joanie. She suggested a message of “You are the best even though you only have two dogs and one died.” I love the idea but we might fiddle with the wording…

The Power of Curiosity

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“If you see the soul in every living being, you see truly.” – The Bhagavad Gita

My five-year-old daughter kills snails. Let me pause here and say that it’s not a serial-killer-in-training kind of thing where she tortures and then decapitates them or something like that. It’s very well-intentioned interference in their life where she builds these very elaborate snail houses with pools and vegetation and then stocks them with snails. But then she’ll put them directly in the sun or forget to refill the water and oops, another snail is dead. One of my friends gave her a Bug Hotel terrarium and she put so many unfortunate snails in there that I started to call it the Bates Motel.

I have a friend who does a similar thing with humans (the help thing, not the killing thing). She doles out well-intentioned help to people that she believes need an upgrade in their circumstances. Unfortunately it sometimes backfires when people feel like they are projects and don’t absorb the help they are given.

I recently listened to this Dare to Lead podcast with Brene Brown and Michael Bungay Stanier that talked about the pitfalls of giving advice – the person with a problem may not accurately know what the problem is, any solution that you offer might not solve the root issue and even if you have the perfect solution, it can undercut their ownership of solving the problem themselves. Michael Stanier’s advice was to stay curious a little bit longer.

This seems to be a common theme in the content I’m listening to and reading these days – the power of curiosity. Asking open-ended questions like “how can I help?” and “what makes you think that?” and “say more” changes the nature of the conversation. Curiosity brings the power of mindfulness to an interaction and is a gateway for openness, an antidote to judgment. If we believe that we don’t have enough time to have these conversations, think about how much time it takes to solve problems again and again because we didn’t get it right the first time.

I’m finding curiosity a great tool for parenting because kids have so much of it. I could continue to slip out at night and free the snails or I can flat out tell her not to capture them but both of those solutions undermine her ability to see the soul in everything. Because of course this is not just about my daughter and snails, it’s about our agency in this world and learning not to destroy it. I’m hopeful as we research about whether snails grow out of their shells, what leaves they like best and how long they usually live that we can connect more deeply with compassion for others and retire the Bates Motel.

Self Compassion

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“You must transform and transcend your unconscious habit of pitying yourself and having feelings of inferiority if you want to grow and feel the experience of your mind reaching into infinity.” – Yogi Bhajan

This past Sunday I loaded up my stroller with all the things we’d need for a morning outing – picnic blanket, food, coats, masks, map for a scavenger hunt we were doing and took my kids down to a local wading pool that is empty this time of year and a great place for my daughter to practice with the new roller skates we’d gotten at a garage sale. We’d been there a few minutes when a dad arrived with three kids, his stroller similarly loaded and all of them riding bikes/trikes. I was idly watching him as he engaged with his kids – 6 yrs, 3 yrs and 18 months. At one point the 3 year old was upset and the dad got down on the ground right in front of the strider bike the kid was riding and talked it out with him. Then the dad turned to me and started talking about being exhausted. The story almost just tumbled out of him – his wife is considerably younger, in grad school and he doesn’t want to spend what could be the last decade of his life exhausted. Although he didn’t look that old to me, I appreciated his candor and his quest to find a way to enjoy this phase of life.

For anyone that is living this part of life with young children or remembers it, you know there is a lot of caretaking to happen. Bathing, toileting, eating, cleaning, reading, planning, communicating, entertaining, regulating emotion – none of these happen for my little people very proficiently quite yet. I had these kids late in life and so intentionally, that there are many days I don’t even question why I spend an 13 straight hours of a weekend day so focused on someone else’s care. I remember the time before I had children when I just had myself and my dog, Biscuit, to care for and I was so incredibly tired of just thinking about myself. I’m delighted to have these bright lights in my life and when it’s so clear that their needs outweigh my own, doesn’t it just make sense to focus on them?

But the balance has possibly tipped too far towards the kids, sometimes just simply as a practical matter. Why wear clean clothes when they will be dirty in 10 minutes? How can I brush my hair properly with one hand while I hold the baby with the other? Do I bother to prepare myself food that I is good for me if no one else will eat? And finally there’s the question of how to work out for my own benefit when I’m already exhausted from exercising my patience.

In my determination to make sure my children are taken care of, I’ve lost regard for myself. That is to say, I don’t even make the list as one of the key people to take care of. I think there is a price to be paid for losing your self-regard, even if it happens only as a practical matter. The consequence of never thinking I am worthy of care is that I start to believe it. In holding them up, I’ve let myself down.

Listening to this dad last weekend, I felt so much compassion for everything on his plate and it was in having his story laid out before me that allowed me to see that I need to extend the same compassion for myself. I’ve been falsely believing that it’s a dichotomy of my kids needs or my needs instead of expanding my pool of compassion to see that we all need care and that includes me.

As we talked and our kids played, a van from the city’s parks and recreation department pulled up with a bunch of toys for the kids to play with – pogo sticks, balls, noodles, the corn hole game and more. It was such a gift to have an hour free from being the entertainment director and a good start to relaxing into compassion for myself. Now I just need a clean shirt and some healthy food.