The Circle of Compassion

Field Notes on the Compassionate Life : A Search for the Soul of Kindness
by Marc Ian Barasch

Chapter 1

If one completes the journey to one's own heart,
one will find oneself in the heart of everyone else.

—Father Thomas Keating

When I was in my twenties, my Buddhist teacher tricked me into taking a vow of universal compassion. Using some spiritual sleight-of-hand I've yet to unravel, he made it seem I could aspire to a tender concern for everybody, even putting their welfare before my own.

Fat chance, I'd thought. But in his wily way, he had framed this vow—the bodhisattva's promise to live for others—as a case of enlightened self-interest. It was not, he told me, a matter of wearing a one-size-fits-all hair shirt. I was taking the vow for my own good. It would give me some leverage to pry loose, finger by finger, the claustrophobic monkey-grip of ego; give the heart a little breathing room. By treating others generously, I might find them responding in kind. I felt I was being made privy to an ancient secret: To attain your own human potential, be mindful of everyone else's.

At some point in my vow ceremony, a deceptively casual affair held in a rocky field, it had seemed as if my vision suddenly cleared. I'd glimpsed, like a sky swept clean of clouds, everyone's innate okay-ness. Years later, I still marveled at the spiritual chutzpah of the liturgy: However innumerable are beings, I vow to save them all. It was vintage Buddhist bravado—a pledge to empty all the world's oceans using only an eyedropper. Hardly knowing what I was doing, I'd planted myself in a millenia-old tradition that claims you can love all without preconditions, exclusionary clauses, or bottom lines; that says life isn't quid pro quo, but quid pro bono.

To my surprise, the vow hadn't made me feel obligated, but liberated from my own suffocating strictures, from the narrowness of my concerns. It was as if I'd been waiting for a signal, a green light to step onto the crosswalk to the opposite curb; some goad to be compassionate not out of blind craving for virtue, but because it seemed the only genuinely interesting thing to do with my life.

Just forming the intention to make myself useful felt salutary, like some fast-acting antivenin to my snakebit business-as-usual. I had assumed life was about magnifying myself (for the greater good, of course), but now that seemed like the wrong end of the telescope: It made everyone else look small. I soon took a job running a residential therapeutic community in exchange for room and board, surprised at my ability to care for the walking wounded. I stopped thinking so much about how others had let me down, broken my heart, failed to anticipate my needs or take my oh-so-unique sensitivities into account. I began striving to see—and even nourish—other people's possibilities, receiving in return those surprise concoctions that the human spirit dishes out when it feels accepted and at its ease.

But there came a point on my journey when I'd stumbled badly and fell far: a dire illness, an interminable recovery, penury, loneliness, full-on despair. Friends clucked in sympathy but stepped gingerly over the body. Family didn't do much better. I had a soul-curdling realization: The people you love (and who ostensibly love you) may not be there when you need them most. I got through it—the kindness of strangers and all—but I was soon back to squinting at people through my cool fisheye, seeing their preening vanity, their intellectual shortfalls, their ethical squishiness. It took time to realize such shortsightedness takes a toll—let alone that there was anything I could do about it.

Finding my way back to meditation helped. Nothing like getting a good, long look at myself (and funny how much I looked like everyone else). I noticed how often my social trade-offs were more about getting than giving; how many of my thoughts revolved in geosynchronous orbit around Planet Numero Uno. Inner work is a warts-and-all proposition; it gets harder to kid yourself. Still, my teacher had insisted one thing was certain: Despite seeing all the ego's pitfalls and pratfalls, real bodhisattvas make friends with themselves. Everyone, he said, possessed some worth past quantifying or qualifying, some value beyond judgment or fine-tuning—and that included oneself.

To love our neighbor as ourselves, after all, is the great injunction of every religion. But what does loving yourself mean? It's one thing to say it; another to know it in your bones. Do I talk to the mirror, whispering sweet nothings? tenderly imagine a little homunculus inside and pet it, tickle it, scratch it behind the ears? The spiritual consensus seems to be it's like learning to love anyone: You start by getting to know them. The side-benefit to this, compassionwise, is that to know yourself is also to know the person sitting next to you, and the one halfway around the world. "Read thyself," wrote philosopher Thomas Hobbes. "Whosoever looketh into himself... shall know what are the thoughts and passions of all other men."

Still, having looketh'd into myself, I can't say I loveth all I see. I have read myself, and there in oversize type it says: petty, suspicious, greedy, vain, jealous, lazy, stingy, dull (and that's just on the page; there's more between the lines). That I also reckon myself to be magnanimous, conscientious, loyal, thrifty, brave, and intermittently humble is beside the point. It's not enough to offset scourging self-judgment with a roll-call of compensatory pluses. We have to take ourselves (and each other) whole. The Dalai Lama points out that the Tibetan term for compassion, tsewa, generally means love of others, but "one can have that feeling toward oneself as well. It is a state of mind where you extend how you relate to yourself toward others." If it's true that what goes around comes around, compassion is about nothing if not love's tendency to circulate.

And radiate. Alexander Pope (poet of the "eternal sunshine of the spotless mind") envisioned compassion as a series of concentric circles rippling outward:

"... Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake;
... Friend, parent, neighbor, first it will embrace;
His country next; and next all human race."

It sounds great. It is great. But for many of us, there's a nagging doubt that this whole compassion routine could edge into self-effacement— into loving others instead of ourselves, giving away the store until the shelves are bare. The usual formula is first to stockpile some extra self-esteem—then you can afford to be generous. That isn't quite how the nineteenth-century religious philosopher Søren Kierkegaard saw it. The command to love thy neighbor, he wrote, had but one purpose: "as with a pick, [to] wrench open the lock of self-love and wrest it away from a person." (He said it approvingly, but... oh, great, now compassion will burglarize us.) What about looking out for number one? Isn't it prudent to follow that flight attendant's advisory: First place the mask over your own nose and mouth, tightening the straps to begin the flow of oxygen? We're of no use to anyone if we're passed out in our seat from hypoxia.

It's a hard balance to strike. If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am only for myself, what am I? There is a growing sense in our society, left, right, and center, that the balance has woozily tipped; that our obsession with seamless self-contentment ("What I love about Subway is it's all about me!") has occluded our ability to love each other. Our cultural default setting has become "get your own needs met." Our psychosocial mean temperature, suggested one recent article, is "people-friendly narcissism." Our therapeutic model focuses so much on strengthening the ego-self that it omits what some dissident psychologists call the self-in-relation. One group of mostly female psychologists has proposed "openness to mutual influence" as a more reliable barometer of mental health than self-esteem.

But self-esteem remains our all-purpose buzzword, a stock phrase in therapists' offices, corporate training modules, even elementary school curricula. This is fine on the face of it: After all, what's the alternative—self-loathing? Psychologist Abraham Maslow coined the term itself in 1940 after observing a monkey colony in a Madison, Wisconsin zoo. He was fascinated by the cockiness of the troupe's dominant alphas and the social benefits they accrued, so reminiscent of socially successful people. His concept of self-esteem had its origin, then, not as simple self-affirmation, but as the alpha's great cry of triumphal self-love: I Am Somebody—and You're Not. (Maslow's first stab at terminology was "dominance-feeling.") This self-esteem was more akin to that sense of self that made Sinatra sing how swell it was to be king of the hill.

What Maslow failed to stress was the social dimension. Even in a primate colony—especially so—no ape is an island: Modern primatologists point out that an alpha animal, contrary to its reputation as solitary lord of all it surveys, is thickly enmeshed in a social webbing, dependent on the reciprocities of group life. Maslow's paragon of the "self-actualized" person ("authentic, individuated, productive," with "a surprising amount of detachment from people in general") begins to sound less like a social creature than a self-pollinating flower.

Taking potshots at Maslow may be a little unfair. At a time when psychology was obsessed with what goes wrong in the psyche, Maslow championed the things that go right. He was an exuberant advocate of human potential when most shrinks spent their fifty-minute hours chronicling pathology. And he did posit that self-actualization would inevitably lead to responsibility for others. But his emphasis on personal growth as the be-all helped spawn a national cottage industry devoted to building a better me, some enhanced self-to-the-tenth-power with its full entitlement of psychospiritual fabulousness. Not such an awful idea, I suppose, but as the song goes, Is that all there is?

I dropped in on a human potential workshop recently. Plenty of talk about self-empowerment and self-realization, self-efficacy and peak performance, but compassion didn't rate a second billing on the marquee. It made me wonder what sort of selfhood we're seeking: the self that "gets its needs met" but is never fufilled? or the self that abundantly gives yet is never emptied? Instead of self-discovery, what about other-discovery, our real terra incognita?

I wonder, too (as a pragmatic question, not a moral one), if this pedal-to-the-metal pursuit of happiness really does make us any happier, or if we have the whole thing backwards. "The American way is to first feel good about yourself, and then feel good about others," notes the Benedictine monk Thomas Keating. "But spiritual traditions say it's the other way around—that you develop a sense of goodness by giving of yourself."

I've been an Audrey Hepburn fan since I was a boy with my first major movie-star crush, all the more when I discovered that the adorable, to-die-for gamine of Breakfast at Tiffany's was also a great humanitarian. I once came across a lost nugget of her philosophy while waiting in the dentist's office. A fashion magazine had asked her for her beauty tips, and she'd written back:

"For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.
For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
For poise, walk with the knowledge you never walk alone.
If you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one
at the end of each of your arms."

This homily, a sort of St. Francis Prayer for the Maybelline Set, is a graceful rebuttal to the fetish of self-improvement. Instead of being all about me, it's about us; instead of getting and having, it's about giving and then giving some more. St. Francis himself went beyond mere charity. The son of a rich clothier, he gave up wealth and privilege to dress in rags and hang out with lepers. This was taking kindness to an extreme few of us would find attainable, let alone remotely appealing. But compassion has a certain down-and-dirty quality and a more than casual familiarity with the soul's darker, draftier labyrinths.

At its root meaning of "to suffer with," compassion challenges our tendency to flinch away from life's too-tender parts. I know this much: When I acknowledge my own pain, I am much less squeamish about drawing nearer to yours. I seem to acquire my compassion piecemeal, hurt by hurt. After a bad sprain and time spent on crutches, I became more sympathetic to the locomotion-impaired—the lame and the wheelchair-bound, those who hobbled on canes and walkers.

Perhaps Thomas Aquinas was not so far off when he claimed, "No one becomes compassionate unless he suffers." I take this less as a mandate for medieval masochism than an indecorous call to embrace our own authentic experience. If we're not at home with the depth of our feelings, we're likely to skirt the deep feelings of others. Do we love ourselves/others only when we/they are feeling fine? (Or as a rural proverb has it, "Do you only care about your cow when it's giving you milk?") I've become suspicious of the unblemished life. Maybe the heart must be broken, like a child's prize honeycomb, for the real sweetness to come out. Although something inside us yearns to walk on air, never touching the ground, compassion brings us down to earth. It has been likened to the lotus, whose exquisite, fragrant blossom grows out of the muck and mire.

The Buddha, the jewel in the lotus himself, didn't start out in the mud. He was raised like a hothouse flower, living the cosseted life of a pampered young prince. His royal parents, fearing a prophecy that he would grow up to become a spiritual teacher instead of a king, confined him within high castle walls, surrounded by every luxury in a kind of Hindu 90210. The lame, the sick, and the down-and-out were banished from sight. It wasn't that his parents were afraid their son would be shocked by the sight of suffering (after all, he was to be a battle-hardened feudal monarch), but that he would respond to it. They were afraid, in other words, that their son might become compassionate.

One day the prince secretly ventured outside. He stumbled first upon a diseased beggar, then a dead man. The walls that had separated him from the world-as-it-is crumbled. Indeed, the castle might be thought of as a sort of metaphorical ego-structure: Don't we often try to secure happiness by fortifying ourselves against imperfection? When the Buddha proclaimed his First Noble Truth, dukha ("dissatisfactoriness"), he was pointing to the dissatisfaction of this ego-driven existence. A traditional image from the Sanskrit is an oxcart wheel that wobbles because its axle is out of kilter: To be self-centered is to be off center from life itself. In the end, the Buddha's enlightenment was to accept everything and everyone as they are; to sit down, as it were, for the full meal, and stop trying to eat around the broccoli.

Though his teachings acquired an aura of detachment in the Western mind (my own included), the image of some solitary quest for higher consciousness misses the point. When I first took my vows and embarked on the Path, I assumed that after X years of diligent meditation, I'd be a wise man with a small secret smile, wafting clear and calm through my own inner space, in some permanent altered state. Lovingkindness would be a spin-off technology from my private moon shot, like Tang or Teflon. But after some time spent trying to attain escape velocity, I noticed that most spiritual teachings regard compassion as the main event—the path to enlightenment, the way to slice through self-deception, the means and the motive to relinquish small thoughts for Big Mind. "Spiritual practice is not just about feeling peaceful and happy," a Buddhist lama once told me, "but being willing to give up your own comfort to help someone else. Unless there's some sacrifice for others, it's just meditation by remote control!"

Copyright © 2005 Marc Ian Barasch

About the Author

Marc Ian Barasch's most recent book, Healing Dreams, was hailed by the Washington Post as “lucid, courageous, trailblazing.” His other books include the award-winning classic The Healing Path, and the national bestseller Remarkable Recovery. He is a former editor at Psychology Today, Natural Health, and New Age Journal (which won a National Magazine Award under his tenure). He was a founding member of the Naropa University psychology department and he is an Emmy Award-nominated documentary film producer and writer whose work has been broadcast worldwide. He lives in the Colorado Rockies.