COMPASSION I

A person who does not feel compassion is a person who is not alive with the seasons, alive with the planting, or alive with the reaping of life’s wonders. To live life with an uncompassionate nature is not to live life fully at all, but to skim the Earth and not really feel the holy soil that we walk upon.

The higher ego must come into the compassionate heart, for to be compassionate you must work on yourself and be spontaneous of heart. Opening your heart may come from a moment of remembering: perhaps a memory that rides high on the waves of your life, or for others who have had a life that was filled with pain, a memory of that pain. You can become compassionate simply because you don’t want others to go through what you went through.

There is another, lesser kind of compassion called idiot compassion. In this case, you really don’t want to go near it because it hurts another person. We end up using this type of compassion to escape from the truth. We fall into the illusion that we are being compassionate, but all we are truly doing is enabling others.

You may be born with a compassionate heart, but it can become filled with clouds of illusion. You put in your mind that you have just enough compassion and love to do just enough with your day. You must understand there is a huge amount of the flowing waters of compassion, and that unless it is given away, it stagnates. Because the nature of a human being is kindness and compassion, you turn on yourself when you don’t express compassion toward others.

To have and practice compassion requires that you always speak to the part of someone that is half-full. Never speak to the half-empty; be aware of the half-empty, but never, ever speak to it.

Ma Jaya

Ma Jaya's sacred art: abstract series