Sunday Reflections — Embracing compassion
This week, Sunday Reflections walks the path of compassion:
“Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other and empathize with each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike.” ~ Maycoa Angelou
“Compassion has its roots in a deep respect for others…Compassion sees the other as equal. Compassion happens when we care for another person enough to make his or her problems our own.” ~ Matt Litton
“That is what compassion does. It challenges our assumptions, our sense of self-limitation, worthlessness, of not having a place in the world. As we develop compassion, our hearts open.” ~ Sharon Salzberg
“Compassion is the tender opening of our hearts to pain and suffering. When compassion arises in us, we see and acknowledge what we often push away — away — the parts of life that cause us sadness, anger, or outrage.” ~ Ram Dass
“So compassion means “I’m actually not suffering right now, you are, I see your suffering, and I want to help you.” That’s what compassion is. And what underlies compassion is the virtual courage, the courage to be able to sit with and witness somebody else’s pain without inhabiting it yourself so much that you become another person who is suffering and now, there are no helpers. And it takes an enormous amount of courage to be able to watch that without diving into it and joining it and becoming sick yourself.” ~ Elizabeth Gilbert
“The water, the glorious water everywhere, has taught me that we are more than what we reflect or love. This is the work of compassion: to embrace everything clearly without imposing who we are and without losing who we are.” ~ Mark Nepo
“Nothing helps us build our perspective more than developing compassion for others. Compassion is a sympathetic feeling. It involves the willingness to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, to take the focus off yourself and to imagine what it’s like to be in someone else’s predicament, and simultaneously, to feel love for that person. It’s the recognition that other people’s problems, their pain and frustrations, are every bit as real as our own-often far worse. In recognizing this fact and trying to offer some assistance, we open our own hearts and greatly enhance our sense of gratitude.” ~ Richard Carlson
“Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.” ~ Henri Nouwen
