November 2020 - Compassion Group Notes
Humor
"Humor and laughter are not necessarily the same thing. Humor permits us to see into life from a fresh and gracious perspective. We learn to take ourselves more lightly in the presence of good humor. Humor gives us the strength to bear what cannot be changed, and the sight to see the human under the pompous."
~Joan Chittister
Check out this link for more on perspective - https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgxwKjKppWxXXxrNgxNxhptvSKbjq
Resistance
When I was a teenager, working in Harare Central Hospital, I encountered horrific physical suffering. One of the worst was with little children that were brought in with deep burns – third and fourth degree burns that had gone through all the layers of skin into the underlying flesh. Very often small children would fall into open fires in their homes or be scalded with boiling water that was cooking on these fires. The agony of these wounds was incredibly hard to witness and tend to. They were so bad that the children would be wrapped in Vaseline gauze with antiseptic and ice and it would take weeks for the wounds to start healing and a thin layer of skin to form. Removing the sterile gauze and cleaning the wounds is one of my worst memories.
Comfort or Compassion
Comfort that is offered to shut down feelings is not loving. The only way to work through a feeling, understand it deeply and integrate it is to open it up - and this is compassionate. When we seek to “comfort another or ourself,” it is because feelings make us anxious. We cannot be present to fear and shame because their existence makes us feel fear and shame and so we seek to immediately shut them down with comfort, in complete unawareness of the motivation. Compassion, on the other hand, seeks to open up the feelings, go deeper into the feelings, understand the feelings and embrace the feeling state in awareness, with presence and deep listening. This is the ultimate comfort - it results in resolution, awareness and integration.
Consider how you “stuff your feelings,” “eat your feelings,” “drink away your sorrows,” “cannot stomach them,” in very basic and visceral ways that are young ways of comforting yourself. Consider how you “distract away from feelings in busyness, achievement, doing things, buying things, spa days etc.
Decide now if you want short term alleviation or long term freedom. It is not WHAT you do, it is WHY you do it.
Read this as a pledge to yourself, to be as god to yourself
What is Prayer and to whom do we Pray?
Prayer is another word for relationship with God. We bring every aspect of our being and our awareness to relationships and so too with our relationship to God.
The way in which you have relationship with yourself and other people tells you everything about the kind of relationship you have with “God,” and your understanding of “God.” Your understanding of God has everything to do with your early relationship to your parents. It is here that we learn about whether God is loving, attentive, meeting our needs and caring about our feelings. Whether this evokes in us a deep response of surrender and trust, intimacy and connection.
