CHAPTER 1
LOVE AND FEAR
Before we can explore the Seven Compassions, we need to introduce our foundational belief that everything we do is motivated either by love or fear.
Ask one hundred people to describe love, and you will likely get one hundred different responses. Some will speak of feelings and emotions or affection and connection. Others will reference the religious doctrine to "love one another." Some will speak of its universality while others will talk of their difficulty attaining or maintaining it. Some say love is a noun, others, a verb. Many will reflect that we spend our whole life searching for it. If there is any consensus about love, perhaps it is this: love is complicated. Yet sometimes what seems complicated can really be quite simple, and this simplicity can be achieved once we realize we've been holding the answer all along. In fact, we are the answer.
Despite the differences in our values, beliefs, and perceptions, there exists one truth: we are made from, for, and of love. When our thoughts and actions come from love, we can be at peace with one another and ourselves. This love is infinite and always available to us. What is it then that causes love to feel out of our reach at times? How can it be that our very essence can feel so blocked and inaccessible?
It is fear that becomes a direct block to love. Fear can take many forms, including but not limited to, anger, hate, worry, anxiety, and resentment. Regardless of its manifestation, it is fear. Fear resides in our mind. We worry or stress about what might happen and become afraid of the possibilities. We are afraid of the unknown. We dwell on and replay the past and are afraid similar events will occur again and again. Fear is a reaction, a reactive state of being. Fear robs us of joy and happiness. When we are worried, distressed, preoccupied, and frustrated about the past or future, we are unable to enjoy the present moment — our lives.
When we are experiencing fear, we feel uncomfortable. This dissonance — this loss of the experience of well-being — serves an important purpose. It motivates us to move on and to not get stuck in fear. Fear can be productive when we use it as a teacher. We must come to recognize that the way we are is not how we want to be or feel. We dislike the negative state, so we seek wisdom and insight that help us learn how to find our way back to our authentic self, our true nature — love. Remember, we are made from, for, and of love. This is the place we belong.
Fear can be productive when it is a reaction to a real danger, such as encountering a bear. In this case, fear produces a physiological response. Our heart rate increases, hormones are released, and our thoughts are altered. We are now in a state where we must choose: fight, flee, or freeze. These are important self-preservation reactions.
Fear can also be a reaction to a perceived danger, such as hearing a bump in the night. While our reaction of fear of the unknown is different from our reaction of fear of a known danger, the fear itself is not. In both situations, the fear is experienced throughout the body in similar ways. Both situations can change our behavior in a way that causes us to self-protect. Whether or not the danger is real or perceived, we react. In both situations, fear is brought on by an outside or extrinsic source. It is important to note that fear reactions usually occur before anything is happening to us. In other words, we become afraid before we are actually under any sort of "attack." Fear lives in our thoughts, and our bodies respond to the thought that the danger is real — even if it is not.
The antidote to fear is love. When we choose to take care of our fear through understanding it, learning from it, and letting it go, we operate from love. How do we achieve something that seems so difficult when we think about how many forms our fear can take in our lives each day? Left to run wild and convince us of a story that may not even be true, our thoughts leave little room for us to feel loving and compassionate. The old Cherokee legend "Two Wolves" illustrates the need to feed love and choose love in order to grow love.
An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life.
"A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy. "It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil: he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.
"The other is good: he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you and inside every other person too."
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "But which wolf will win?"
The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."
Love is always there for us. Because it is within us, it is never out of our reach. It is our true nature. Being kind, doing something thoughtful for others, and intentionally seeking to bring happiness to others are some ways we operate from love. Bringing our focus to the goodness in our life, what we can find to be grateful for, and what "isn't wrong" can help move us in the direction of love.
Through practice of the Seven Compassions, we can feed our love what it needs to grow until not only do we feel it, it radiates out of us like much-needed sunlight for all. Just as we have learned to operate in fear through habitual patterns, so can we learn how to operate in love. Once motivated into action by love, our inner healing will begin. We will be an available light for others. It only takes one light to erase the darkness. Keep your love light on! The world needs the light of each and every one of us.
Every person has a wholly unique and individual collection of life experiences that have brought him or her to the present moment. While it is easy to see how diverse we are as individuals and how vast a range of backgrounds we come from, we have so much more in common than we might recognize at first glance. We all need to be connected; we need one another. We hunger for belonging. We long to love and be loved. We all do! Compassion practice teaches us how to remove the barriers to living in the full joy of love for self and others. Compassion practice is a journey taken one step at a time. Now is the time to begin!
Begin now. Be here now. Shed the past and the future, and take a deep breath. Look around. Soak up the truth of the present.
Breathe in — you are here now.
Breathe out — that is enough.
BE HERE NOW
Jen
Be happy for this moment.
This moment is your life.
— Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
We would rather be ruined than changed;
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
— W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety
Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be. — Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
The first of the Seven Compassions asks us to practice being in the present moment. So often, we are caught up in memories, resentments, or stories from our past or in worries, projections, or planning for our future that we miss out on the gifts of the present moment.
All of these mental entanglements — whether we are focused on the past or projecting the future — take us out of the here-and-now mind-set, therefore keeping us from being fully available to experience our lives.
This ability to plan ahead and have memories we revisit is part of what makes the human mind so extraordinary. Our minds just do it, and it is what helps us to solve problems, to set goals and achieve them, and to learn from our mistakes. The downside to looking forward and back is that we can get easily stuck there, especially if we are operating from fear. I work as a feelings teacher, a type of school social worker, in an elementary school. I teach my students this concept, what we call "getting stuck on the fear side."
Literature is full of characters who are trapped unhappily in the past or who worry their lives away only to "wake up" at the end with deep regret. This is not a new idea, but once you start to pay attention to this, you might be amazed at how much time you actually spend out of the moment and really checked out.
All we really have is this moment; there is no guarantee for more. When we squander it on habitual worry over things we can't control or focus on what-ifs, resentments, or glories of the past, we lose out. Those lost moments add up! We can wake up to find our lives have been spent in fantasy or memory. The point is to live. Meditation teacher and author Noah Levine calls this present-time awareness. To experience with deep awareness, the present moment is the essence of being here now.
Of course, we need to spend time to set a direction, intention, or goal. We also need to take time to share fond memories with loved ones and work on letting go of resentments so they don't hold us hostage. But when we become habitually out of the moment, we need to practice bringing our attention and awareness back to the present.
Young children are almost always in the moment, and anyone who has spent time around kids can notice when that starts to change. As we grow up and develop our sense of self (ego) based on life experiences and outside influences, we tend to be less and less in the moment and more in the story. As we get older, it can take practice to Be Here Now.
One way to bring our attention back to the present is to focus on one of our senses, such as tuning in to the sounds around us or taking a close look at our surroundings, especially in a natural environment. Just spending time in nature can also help us to practice present moment awareness.
A mindfulness practice helps train the mind to return to the present moment. There is a growing body of scientific research that supports the physical, mental, and emotional benefits of a sitting or mindfulness practice. Jon Kabat-Zinn, creator of Mind Body Stress Reduction (MBSR) technique along with the University of Massachusetts Medical School's Center for Mindfulness, has been researching the benefits of mindfulness practice for over thirty years. Dr. Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has also been researching the benefits of mindfulness for decades and has some fascinating findings. His book, The Emotional Life of Your Brain, is a wonderful resource for anyone looking to understand his or her own emotional style and ways to influence positive change in well-being. Dr. Richard Hanson, senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California at Berkeley, using the latest information available in neuroscience on the brain's capacity to change (neuroplasticity), says that we can "use the mind to change the brain to change the mind."
I have had some awareness of meditation or mindfulness since adolescence, but I didn't really start to practice until I got sober in the late 1980s. I started to explore my spiritual life while working a twelve-step program. I began to take some quiet time in the morning to set a positive tone for my day. I used AA-approved daily meditation readings and started a gratitude practice as well. I was lucky to get sober so young and early in my using. I know now that one of the reasons I used drugs and alcohol the way I did was because I had so few healthy coping skills. I didn't know how to manage all of the overwhelming feelings I had about the world and myself. I was deeply stuck on the fear side. Checking out seemed to be the only relief.
I had a number of experiences that helped me to literally wake up. One happened a couple of years before I got sober. I was sitting next to a gorge at a place called Sheep Rock in southern New Hampshire. All around me was beauty in nature. I heard the sound of the water dropping through a rock formation. I saw the sun sparkling on the water, the blue, blue sky, and the light filtering through the green leaves. I started to cry. I was overwhelmed with joy. It occurred to me at that moment that I had not truly seen anything in a very long time. I might have seen things in the mechanical way, but not in a way that touched my heart. At the same moment, I recognized why. I had been living in my mind, completely identified with my thoughts, trying to be cool, fit in, be okay. I knew my thinking was negative and reactive. I was very sarcastic; sarcasm was essential to the way my friends and I communicated. I also knew that my own negative thinking was really hurting me. I decided right then to stop being so negative about others (it took me many more years to realize how negative my thinking was about myself) and to try to see beauty around me more often, to get out of my head and look at the world. I didn't have the understanding I have today about being in the present moment and being aware of my thoughts, but that experience helped to plant seeds that grew with time.
Now I practice mindfulness regularly as a way to Be Here Now. Over the last fifteen years, it has taken on a deeper and more significant role in my daily routine after participating in meditation retreats with Jack Kornfield, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and others. I have used aspects of mindfulness practice with my elementary students at school over the years. Several years ago, I completed a year-long mindfulness in education program. Since then, I've started to teach mindfulness directly. I use Mindful Schools curriculum with my students along with my own Social and Emotional Learning curriculum based on the Seven Compassions.
I still find myself struggling when practicing meditation at times — my mind may race, my body itch and twitch, and I find myself lost in thought and out of the moment. But the beauty of an ongoing practice is that I can see and feel the benefits. That is not to say that I have monk-like qualities or the presence of a spiritually evolved person. It's just that I can smooth out the edges of stressful events as I experience them. I feel more grounded and less reactive. I remember to breathe when something happens that stresses me out. I come back to center and awareness faster than before. I also get a very joyful, connected feeling that is more than worth the time and work it takes to practice.
The last time I traveled by plane, I had real proof of the benefits of this practice. I went to the airport with a commitment to breathe through the lines; the security; the waiting and delays; the large, sweating, vomiting passenger sitting directly behind me; the lost bag; and all the joys of modern travel. Air travel had once left me feeling not only that I understood what it means to "go postal" but also that the idea had some merit. However, even though all the same stress was present on that last trip, I was able to remain smiling, at peace, and accepting of what was through breathing and dropping into a mindful state periodically through the trip. I don't always handle travel with such ease — just ask my family. That is why we practice the Seven Compassions over time ... like building muscle with repetition. My motto is "progress not perfection." When I am actively mindful, I feel better. I know that it has reduced my overall stress response and is great for my emotional and physical health.
I love what Jon Kabat-Zinn said at a retreat I attended. He said for human beings it is impossible to stop the thoughts ... to completely empty the mind. The goal of mindfulness practice is not to empty the mind but to become aware of what the mind is thinking ... to become the knower. In other words, we have an awareness of the thoughts and also we know we are not the thoughts ... we are the witness to the thoughts. When we can witness the thoughts without attachment or reaction, we have more peace, less struggle. We practice mindfulness to have that awareness and to work to quiet the mind so we can listen to the deeper inner self.
Being in the present moment and really experiencing life fully is a true gift. It is not always easy when modern life offers us so many ways to check out, but if we don't have present-time awareness and practice truly inhabiting this moment, we will miss out. I know that from personal experience. I was checking out because I was so overwhelmed by fear and self-doubt and anger and judgment. But I was truly missing out on my own life. Striving to Be Here Now was the first step to reclaiming my life and well-being.
