Did you know that your heart doesn’t hurt because it’s too open? It hurts when overwhelmed by the pain of the world that you don’t know how to help. Mainly because we have been conditioned to view help as making something stop, instead of offering the companionship that reminds ourselves and others that we are never alone. Even just by lovingly holding yourself through the pain you cannot avoid or deny, you are equally sending love to all hearts to remind each person how safe it is to open up and let love in.
All For Love.
FEATURED TEACHING
Remembering Compassion
Compassion is an awareness of empathy. While it doesn’t ask or require you to take on another person’s pain, by being compassionately aware of the suffering in others, you are able to understand the deepest motivations behind anyone’s desire or tendency to lash out, shut down, avoid, abandon, attack or neglect. Such compassionate empathy should never be confused with enabling anyone to take their pain out on you, nor should it negate the importance of bringing criminal behavior to justice.
Instead, it is through a heart-centered awareness of how deeply every person hurts that you find your own pain being worked out in the bodies of others through a wide spectrum of expressions– no matter how much pain, how little suffering, how often it’s denied, how infrequently it surfaces, and to what degree anyone is aware of suffering and the role it plays in helping each human become aware of their healing journey.
Just because you can find reflections
of your pain in others, doesn’t mean you are
the cause of their despair.
Equally so, the pain noticed in others suggests no added healing work for you to do. Rather it is more of a simple unwavering recognition of the suffering others may not have taken the time to process or might be afraid to face– the same intensity of terror, regret, apprehension, overwhelm, sadness, and despair you have faced or are equally processing. Through the law of oneness, dare to meet each person the way you have wanted to be consoled through pain, no matter how up close or far away your empathic awareness and blessings of compassion need to be.
May you remember compassion. Even offering compassion to the people and parts of yourself that may forget when mesmerized by the stresses of life, a desire to fit in, the pain of feeling left out, or the isolation felt when loneliness surfaces. By remembering compassion, you are never alone but are one with the light surfacing in all through each stage of healing. When compassion is remembered, you are bonded in solidarity by the pain each person faces, endures, and survives as wondrous colors each inner artist uses to express their individuality upon the canvas of the cosmos. Maybe this is why you can’t spell paint without the word pain– as if paint is a metaphorical material your inner artist uses, where “T” is for the transformation inspired when allowing pain to be met, processed, and expressed into the artistry you were born to create.
As pain is met through compassionate awareness offered to yourself and others, you heal to such a degree that you can connect without taking on pain and learn to choose what is right for you without anything else being judged. Even when the voice within says, “But how do I do this?”, it becomes a moment to offer self-compassion by remembering what is already being done, with your role being the one who chooses to receive healing by staying the course of your journey.
While overwhelm is caused by how often the pain of self or others is avoided or denied, the more often you are aware of anyone’s hurt, the deeper your healing goes. On this day, throughout this new year and in each moment, may you remember compassion and the work of art your life is becoming, no matter the mess anyone’s life may seem to be.
**By Matt Khan
**Source