Yoga and Compassion

I have just come out of co-facilitating a five-day, silent meditation retreat. It’s always a very rich time balancing the duties of facilitation, helping to create a safe container, and practice. During this retreat, I reflected on the word compassion as it kept arising again and again in relation to compassionate breath, compassion to self and compassion to others.
 
Compassion literally means, “to suffer together.” I love the word because we can also break it down into two root words:

• Com = with; and
• Passion = any intense emotion

To be compassionate is to suffer together and be with any intense emotion either with oneself or another.
 
This is why I believe contemplative practices like Yoga are so beneficial. They can reveal to us where we are not so compassionate and what we are not willing to acknowledge, hold or look at in ourselves and others.
 
But this is at the very heart of the practice; get to know yourself and how you move through the world. Alchemize, and digest all the disparate and conflicting parts of you. When you can do this, you can become elixir for someone else.  Thich Nhat Hanh says something to the effect of, your understanding of your own suffering can be medicine for another. It’s like offering spring flowers or fresh air to someone. When you understand your own suffering, you can honestly understand the suffering of another and that is true compassion.
 
Often when we go on retreat, silent or otherwise, I think somewhere in us we hope it will be all love and light and smooth sailing – finally we’ve found the silver bullet that will solve all our unresolved problems. However, surprise!!! When we get quiet any number of things can arrive that we can no longer avoid. To name a few, we are often faced with agitation, some old resentment, extreme fatigue, and deep grief. And because we are not ostriches and can’t stick our head in the sand, in retreat we are compelled and invited to face whatever arrives head on and learn to stay with “what is” rather than using practice to run away or hide from ourselves any longer.
 
Pema Chodron offers that “acknowledging that we are all churned up is the first and most difficult step in any practice. Without compassionate recognition that we are stuck, it’s impossible to liberate ourselves from confusion,” if we don’t do something that interrupts our habit of hiding or indulging our emotions. So, in retreat we learn to bear witness to and sit with what is uncomfortable and sometimes even scary. It’s another way of saying “you can run, but you can’t hide.” For the earnest Yoga practitioner, at some point in our lives, if we are to make any significant changes in steadying the mind, the compassionate thing to do for ourselves and others is to take this mission.
 
We have great tools to assist us on our journey of steadying and even ridding the mind of conscious and unconscious, habitual patterns of thinking. The breath and mantra (a repeated word (OM) or phrase such as, Ham, Sah. Ham = I, Sah = That. I am that) can be helpful anchors. When the mind wanders off to something that it thinks is more interesting, more dramatic, more… you fill in the blank, than the present moment and we notice, there is an anchor to gently draw it back so we can become present and grounded once again. It’s in the noticing that the mind has wandered that is the great blessing – an instant of present moment awareness. What a celebration!
 
Our practice can be the place where we get to know and befriend our mind however it shows up. We notice the thoughts coming and going and let them pass. If there is some change that needs to be made in the thinking mind or otherwise, we can do that too. I like to think of this as the gut of practice. This is where we can digest it all. Take the time to sit with and deeply understand your suffering! In my humblest opinion, this is at the heart of healing.
 
OM, I wish you success in your practice.