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The Art of Compassion: A book in progress

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The Art of Compassion

Dr. Pinkie Feinstein

Chapter 1: The Healthy Nature

I would like to begin with a question that may sound reasonable, yet at the same time may also arouse a certain sense of wonder simply by the fact that it is being asked.
Why do we need to learn about compassion?
This question immediately leads to further questions.
Do we really know what compassion is? Do we truly recognize it within ourselves? Or is it perhaps one more element we like to attribute to ourselves, or would like to attribute to ourselves, without having a clear understanding of what it actually is? Or maybe we have a little of it, and a little of the opposite?

I believe there are many different answers to the question why it is worthwhile, appropriate, important and essential, both on a personal level and on a collective and cultural level, to study compassion, to deepen our understanding of it, to challenge ourselves regarding our knowledge and our abilities, and to understand that it is an art. Art in the sense that one practices it, improves through it, refines through it, becomes better and more advanced through it, and rises through it. We will speak about this further on. For now we will look at only one aspect, which is the most practical one. Very practical.

We live in a culture that succeeds in investing enormous amounts of resources in every possible form of progress. Taller buildings, faster cars, more sophisticated devices, faster and more immediate communication technologies. Everything is faster, shinier, and in the eyes of many even smarter. And all of this stands in sharp contrast to the profound difficulty we have as human beings in relating to one another in the right way, in taking care not to hurt, not to cause pain, not to harm unintentionally. Furthermore, the gap between technological development and emotional ignorance regarding what may happen when we lack compassion is nothing short of astonishing. This was true in the Second World War, and it is true today as well.

One part of human consciousness is drawn enthusiastically toward development and progress, toward more and more devices, shortcuts and technological capabilities. A television you can talk to, a car without a driver, artificial intelligence, different kinds of interventions in the genetic material. And yet, from all of these and many more, in actual interpersonal dynamics, many people are hurt. Very painful things take place in the world, and they are all connected to one thing, the absence of compassion.

The absence of compassion may be the greatest danger to civilization. And an even greater problem is that it is easy for us to ignore this. Very easy to ignore. At the end of the Second World War the Nuremberg Codes were formulated, impressive and awe inspiring codes that were intended to protect human beings from being harmed by other human beings, and to ensure that atrocities of experiments on human beings without supervision, without permission, with coercion and with injury, would not recur. And yet, despite all this, we find ourselves returning to a similar place. The rules are stated, but it seems that no one is truly paying attention. It is very easy to bypass them. There appears to be no fear that there will be a price to pay. I am not speaking here on the legal level, but on the level of feeling and of human responsibility. In those places where compassion is supposed to be present, we discover that something has gone wrong.

The medical system has lost parts of its compassion. Public systems sometimes behave as if they exist in a world without compassion. Not because this is always the case, but because under certain conditions, under certain manipulations and pressures, this can easily happen. This fact testifies that our culture is not sufficiently skilled in compassion. Perhaps there is compassion in certain conditions, in certain places, at certain times, but it does not have the degree of compassion that can withstand challenges. And the reason for this is simple. We do not study compassion. We do not understand compassion. We do not deepen our relationship with compassion. We do not challenge ourselves around compassion. We do not learn to recognize the places where we are weak in compassion and we do not work on them. We do not know that it is possible to learn compassion. We do not know that it is possible to practice compassion.

This is precisely why we are here. To take care of the place in which we live. To discover within ourselves this precious muscle, to train it, not to take it for granted, to recognize the places where we struggle and to improve them. And also to see how we can help others to improve.

We will begin from one basic recognition. We do not have a clear idea of what compassion is. We may think we know, but the deep inner familiarity with compassion is not something that can be taken for granted. We can say that compassion is an emotion. A special emotion that awakens in a human being in the presence of the pain of another person. Compassion is the ability to see a person in a moment of pain without judgment and without closing off, with an embracing and loving presence, from an inner knowing that within that person there is an element of humanity that is not so different from my own. Compassion helps me to see my connection with the other person and brings me closer to them. It is what enables me to move beyond the sense of separateness that leads to judgment and at times even to hatred. When I am in compassion, I am inwardly embracing the other person.

And if this person has hurt me, and if this is a person toward whom I am setting boundaries, there is still no contradiction with compassion. We will speak about this later on. Even then, from a distance, I can imagine that person as a hurt child or as a frightened human being, to see their pain and to offer an internal embrace. And it is not easy to be in compassion. We are here precisely in order to explore and to learn these difficult places. Not in order to be hurt, but on the contrary, in order to learn to protect ourselves through the highest qualities that the deep human spirit has given us.

This chapter is called the Healthy Nature Principle. This principle is not connected only to compassion, but to everything we will learn within the framework of inner leadership. The principle says that we possess a long line of natural abilities. Even if we cannot always explain them in words, they exist within us. The Healthy Nature Principle says that we are born with elevated qualities such as creativity, the ability to love, the ability to create, the ability to be in compassion, the capacity for passion, the ability for self healing and many other qualities. All of these are born with us.

These qualities always stand before two possibilities. Cultivation or constriction. Cultivation is the path by which these qualities develop, flourish, take up space and become an essential part of who we are. Constriction, whether consciously or unconsciously, or constriction that is imposed upon us due to our early life circumstances, leads us to forget these qualities and to think that they do not truly exist. Just like a muscle, only that here we are speaking about a mental and emotional muscle.

When we enter the journey of the Art of Compassion, we are in fact entering a process of remembering. Remembering an existing knowledge, a natural quality that lives inside us. We are called to awaken it, to cultivate it, to strengthen it through attention, awareness, wondering, self inquiry, recognition of the places where we are weak, and also recognition of the places where at this moment it feels impossible for us to be in compassion. The very awareness of this is already part of the healthy nature we can return to.

Before we end this chapter I would like to add one more thing. Every such quality is a quality we must also apply toward ourselves. Therefore, in the next chapter, we will connect the word art with the word compassion and deepen the definition of the Art of Compassion. In the meantime I invite you to ask yourself what is the degree of self compassion you have at this moment, and what might happen if this degree of self compassion were to rise by thirty or forty percent.

Thus we have set out on our way.

Questions for practice
(to be answered in your own handwriting for yourself, or shared in a practice group)

  1. With which abilities or talents is it clear to you that you arrived in this world?

  2. In what ways does compassion appear naturally in you?

  3. Which elements of your natural compassion do you feel you have somewhat forgotten over the years?

  4. Why, in your opinion, is compassion a natural and inborn capacity, and how would you explain this possibility?

  5. Which facts and experiences show you that people, including yourself, have become very distant and are still becoming distant from their natural compassion?

Chapter 2: What Is Art and How Does It Connect to Compassion

In many ways we can say that compassion is not necessarily the most difficult action a person can face, yet it is certainly one of the more difficult ones. The difficulty arises from the conditions in which we live, from the things we are exposed to, from all that we absorb from other human beings and from the world and environment around us. All of these place us again and again in states of defense, frustration, anger and fear. At times a sense of a need for revenge arises, a need to win, to defeat someone or to pay them back. Each one of us carries personal memories from the past with the people, figures and objects that have hurt us in one way or another. Whether these were peers, family members, older people, authority figures, members of a group or any other human being who left an impact on us. People have experienced betrayal, lack of trust, disappointment and many situations in which other human beings were responsible for us finding ourselves in a very unpleasant, embarrassing or painful state. Sometimes that hurt stays with us for many years.

Even when we engage in processes of awareness, even when we tell ourselves that we have forgiven and released, there are still deep inner parts that have not completed the journey, that have not yet found the way to place those objects and those people in a place where we can truly activate full and final compassion toward them. This is not simple at all. That is why I say this is an art. I said it from the beginning and I am saying it again in this chapter. The question we are now seeking to clarify is what art actually is, and how it connects to compassion.

Art, in a certain sense, is something larger than life. It is perceived as something that exists beyond ordinary life. People whom we perceive as artists are people who do what most human beings are unable to do. They rise above life, at least for certain moments. I have also spoken about the fact that within every person there is an artist, and that in every person there is an ability to create reality, even if we are not fully aware of it.

When we look at the word compassion, it is appropriate to see it as a form of art, precisely because it is a relatively difficult process. Compassion requires us to meet higher parts within ourselves, pure parts within ourselves, and in practice we are not all that pure. Reality does not allow us to be as pure as we might wish. The responsibilities, the burdens, the struggles and the gaps between what we want and what is actually present, place us in a position that is often very far from compassion. And this is exactly why art exists in human life, to help the person remember or reconnect, even for a few moments, with the fact that he or she is more than who they are in their everyday functioning. Art enables a person to encounter a level of self that does not belong to the many hours of the day in which they are preoccupied with stimuli, pressures, difficulties and missed opportunities that are not always their fault. This is the reality in which we live, a reality that contains pain and fear, arbitrary decisions and mutual harm between human beings.

Within all of this we want to pour inner leadership that will allow us to change that reality. In order to change reality and to live inner leadership within it, we must remember that what we are doing here is a process of elevation. A process that asks us to move beyond what is familiar and known. We can see this in a simple example of a parent and a child. A parent has very deep feelings toward the child, feelings that may lead that parent to make very significant decisions for the sake of the child. There is a natural elevation here, an elevation that emerges from the relationship. Yet elevation is not easy. It is not something that happens by itself. If it were easy, there would be no need for practice, inner work and contemplation.

What we are doing here is the practice of an art. To see another human being through eyes of compassion is the practice of an art. Art takes life and turns it into something new and more advanced. Art is a kind of creative authority over life. It decides what will be, and does not allow life to decide everything by itself. The typical artist is often a rebellious figure. Such a person refuses to let the existing reality decide for them. They bring forth something different from within, in order to give life more taste and more meaning, in order to say something about their existence.

So it is with compassion. Compassion arises from elevation, and it invites the person to elevate. It reminds us that if we want to live here, within all the pain and suffering that exist, we have no choice but to find ways of elevation beyond what is present and familiar. In the end, to be in compassion is to encounter the divine within me as it is reflected toward the other. These are only words, yet behind them lies a very deep work that we wish to locate within ourselves.

This is a process that does not end after one round, not in personal study and not in group study. It is a very essential change. All over the world there are entire traditions that see compassion as a path of learning of many years. Still, before anything else, it is right to see compassion as a gift. A gift born out of investment, out of work, out of experience, and out of rising beyond what I usually am.

The great question is whether as an adult I can look at a stranger and feel toward them feelings that are similar to those I feel toward my little child. Can I reach that place. The answer is yes, when I elevate and meet the divine level within me. On the divine level all human beings are children of God. All human beings are infants of God. And we ourselves also need this compassion toward ourselves, from that same divine place within us, and if possible, also from others.

This is art. And from this moment on, you and I are seeking the artist within us. The artist of compassion. We need to remember that what is required of us is to be beyond who we usually are, and to understand that it is completely all right that we are not there yet. It is all right that even after we succeed we will fall again and forget compassion, because compassion is always beyond life. And what is beautiful in life is that they contain a very real possibility to be beyond life. A possibility that is embedded in the human structure, in our genetic material, in our ability to elevate and to create a new reality.

This is inner leadership. To be able to rise beyond what exists and to create my own special world, a world that contains magic and abilities that are usually not accessible through the external world. The external world always lags behind the inner world, and there is no need to be troubled by this. We are called to finally allow the inner to lead, because this is the correct order of things.

Questions for practice
(to be answered in your own handwriting for yourself, or shared in a practice group)

  1. What are the first associations that come to you with the word art?

  2. In what way, in your view, can compassion be a form of artistic activity, and what makes compassion such an art for you?

  3. Which shades and colors does compassion have in your awareness, if you were asked to describe it in a pictorial way, and what shapes would fit compassion for you?

  4. Are you well connected to the artist within you, and what are the things that this part in you used to love and still loves to do?

  5. How do you imagine your life will look when compassion becomes a more available art in your everyday life?

Chapter 3: To Rise Beyond Life Means To Truly Live

I have said this and I will continue to say it throughout the way. Not in order to weaken us, not to make the path complicated or impossible, but in order to place ourselves in the right position, in the correct proportions regarding what we are dealing with all the time, sometimes without noticing. The intention is to give ourselves a real chance to bring compassion into our lives, both toward ourselves and toward others. The thing I wish to say, and that I repeat again and again, is that compassion is not simple. Compassion is a task. It is a work that requires a person to meet pain. And most human beings, naturally, prefer not to meet their pains.

A large part of human life is built on different mechanisms of avoidance, which are in fact kinds of addictions whose purpose is to blur the real pains that accompany life. The very fact of being here, on planet Earth, means that there is no small amount of pain within us. Sometimes physical pain, and very often emotional pain. And in order to reach compassion, I must meet my pains. This is one of the central reasons that most human beings forget the healthy nature of the ability to be in compassion.

Compassion itself is natural. If it were not covered by layers of disturbance, screens, walls and misleading messages, it would burst forth from within us naturally. Because compassion is a delight. It benefits the one who feels compassion. It benefits the one who offers compassion and the one who receives it. Compassion is for us. We can even say that compassion is completely egoistic in the positive sense. It is good to be in compassion. It is better to be in compassion. It is more pleasant, more rewarding, more abundant, and it makes human life easier. It is easier to understand the complicated story of life on Earth through eyes of compassion.

But in order to reach the place where life indeed becomes easier, we need to practice compassion. Not for altruistic reasons, not out of a need to save the world, but because of the direct interest of each one of us. For you. For you. For your inner leadership. So that you may have a more harmonious experience of life. One day, I hope, more people will understand that it is worthwhile for them to live in compassion. That it is worthwhile to invest in it. That it is worthwhile to learn it. That it is worthwhile to become more skillful in it. They are not doing anyone a favor. They are not volunteering. They are not sacrificing anything. Compassion is simply the more correct way to live. A way that is more fitting, more courageous and in many respects even more profitable.

Yet the way we live today, together with the pains we absorb along the road, leads to the fact that activating the compassion muscle will always demand a meeting with pain. In order to be in compassion I must be willing to meet my pains. And this too has advantages, because when I meet my pain I have a greater chance to heal it. This is one of the central gifts of compassion. But since most people are used to making detours, to repress, to deny, to ignore, to become addicted to other things and to be very busy with dramas that distract them, all this in order not to meet their pain, they gradually lose the inner abilities that allow them to be in compassion.

Therefore I say again, compassion is not simple, for the reasons that I have mentioned. Yet it is exactly the place that is worthwhile to be in. The place that is more beneficial, more aware, the place that is connected to the emotional truth and allows that truth to undergo significant healing. Compassion includes within it the meeting with my pains, the ability to treat them with self compassion, to feel them, to pass through them and to allow them, slowly, to heal.

Chapter three deals with one deep sentence. To rise beyond life means to truly live. The human being is different from the other creatures of this planet. I say this without diminishing the value of the animals, their wisdom, their role and their contribution to human beings and to the world. Yet human beings are different beings. Beings whose role goes beyond what is known in the world of animals. And we forget this. We forget it very quickly, because we become enslaved to technology and to fast living. All of this, as I have already said, is no more than a way of fleeing from pain. And when we flee from pain we forget the essence.

The essence of human life, of every person, from every background, with any level of education, is to rise beyond life. In each person the elevation looks different. In one it appears on the interpersonal level, in another on the personal level, in a third it may be in the professional realm or in the field of personal development. Elevation is movement beyond what exists. And compassion is a form of elevation.

Compassion is that place in which I move beyond interpersonal drama, beyond accounts, beyond pain, beyond memories, beyond anger, beyond frustration, beyond desire for revenge, beyond hurt, beyond insult. I rise above all this and look at my fellow human beings from a higher perspective. An embracing perspective. This is not a perspective that erases what has been. It is not at the expense of self protection. It is not at the expense of boundaries. It is not at the expense of speaking the truth. It is in addition to all those. So that there will be a true meaning to life. So that I may meet the divine within me, not in some separate realm but within the interpersonal space.

This is the most important place. Also in the Jewish tradition relationships between one person and another are considered a central foundation. In order for us to be in good relationships with one another, we must recognize the meaning of our being together. The meaning is the ability to elevate. The meaning is that both I and my friend are capable of elevating above the local drama, above the pain, above the confusion, above the things that disturb our peace of mind.

Elevation is not a permanent state. It is a moment. A moment in which I breathe, rise a little and see things differently. I see with an embracing gaze. There are more aspects beyond this embracing gaze, but at this stage we will focus on it. Elevation does not make me better than others or above them. It makes me a person who is fulfilling his or her unique humanity. Because to truly live as a human being, and not as an animal, means to elevate.

Most of the feelings of missed opportunity that people carry within them are related, in one way or another, to the fact that they have not fulfilled their human role, which is to elevate from time to time. Even for a moment. Even for a single breath.

So we will begin from here. We will begin to play with compassion by allowing ourselves, emotionally and spiritually, to rise for a moment, like a bird. To see the entire human story, those who are close to us and those who are far from us, to breathe, and to release for a moment our inner dramas, our sense of being right, and the places where we were hurt or where we hurt others.

We send an embracing gaze to all. To all.

This is not the cancellation of boundaries. And it is not the erasure of traumas. It is the beginning of a healing process. A process that reminds us who we really are. A process that leads us to the liberating and powerful place of compassion toward human beings and toward ourselves.

To truly live as a human being means to elevate from time to time.

Questions for practice
(to be answered in your own handwriting for yourself, or shared in a practice group)

  1. What are the first associations that arise in you when you hear the word elevation?

  2. Give three examples from your life of situations in which you felt elevation, in which you were involved in an action that was connected to elevation, alone or as part of a group?

  3. Is elevation beyond routine in your view an action that can be practical and possible on a fairly regular basis?

  4. In which areas of your life would you like to have more tools for elevation?

  5. In what ways will your life become more free and more expansive with the help of a new compassion that you will awaken to?

Chapter 4: Does the “Other” Really Exist for Me, or Is It Only a Set of Projections That Is Convenient for Me to Maintain?

Chapter four opens the second part of this journey. This part deals with the essential question of how to see the other and through that how to see myself. As has already been stated, the art of compassion is ultimately a skill that we seek to activate first and foremost for ourselves. When we act correctly for our own sake, we will necessarily act correctly in relation to our surroundings. There is no other way. Any way of looking at giving that does not pass through the deep understanding that the act serves first a fundamental and elevated interest of ours does not allow giving, love or compassion to flow in the right way, to be effective and to become truly meaningful. Any approach that encourages self sacrifice when the person is empty inside is a harmful approach and eventually leads to exploitation of people, to their diminishment and even to control over them. Every action that a person performs is meant to be part of an inner circle of nourishment that strengthens and expands the person. If a person is occupied with something that is not part of such a circle, then something in that action is not right. It drains them and harms them.

From this point chapter four continues and raises the question: does the other really exist for me, or is it mainly a set of projections that I cast upon them because it is convenient for me to preserve them? We can discuss this question without end and never reach a complete answer to the question of whether there is such a thing as an objective perception of reality, and whether such a thing even exists. It may be that all that exists are agreements between subjects, between inner feelings, which allow us to create an illusion of objectivity. Yet such a discussion belongs to a wider philosophical domain.

Within the work of the art of compassion we focus on the movement that occurs between me and the other. It is about the capacity to reach the other from an elevated inner position, a position that is capable of holding and embracing the other even when the other competes with me, confronts me or arouses difficulty in me. Within compassion there is also a wish to see the healing of the other. Within compassion there is also a deep understanding that the other and I are much more similar and much more connected than we are used to thinking and therefore the healing of the other is in the end also my healing. Compassion allows me to see that the suffering of the other could also have been my suffering.

In a position that is the opposite of compassion we find condescension and disconnection. These are expressed as inner feelings of rejection, hatred or contempt. The inner voice says things like he is at fault, he is worth less, he is not important. This is a feeling that seeks to distance me from the other because the encounter with the other awakens something uncomfortable in me. What exactly repels me. In most cases it is a reflection of parts inside me that I do not want to see. This is one of the deep roles that others play in our lives. They show us aspects of ourselves that are difficult for us to see directly.

Here we arrive at the core question of the chapter: to what extent do I truly see the other? Am I able to recognize that there is a person there with a personal past, with traumas of their own, with confusion, with pain, with wishes, with exaggerated self criticism, with fears that are not mine? To what extent am I able to recognize that alongside my own story there also exists a separate and complete story that belongs to another person?

This is a deep question that is directly connected to the inner practice required for the cultivation of the muscles of compassion. In the natural state, in almost every encounter, the human being tends to project. The person casts upon the other an image, a thought or an interpretation that is convenient to believe in. In this way the person quickly decides who is standing in front of them, clings to that decision and continues to maintain it. Even so, there are moments in which reality gives us an opportunity to become closer to someone about whom we have had rigid and clear opinions, and suddenly we discover an entire world there. We discover a human being. Depth. Story. A real and living presence.

From here the question sharpens again: to what extent am I truly able to see the other? To see the other means to calm within me an inner mechanism whose supposed purpose is to protect me from getting too close, but in fact what it really does is to protect me from getting too close to myself. Fear of the other is ultimately fear of myself. Since it is not easy for me to see myself in an authentic way, I project onto the other my thoughts, stereotypes and prejudices, which keep the other in a narrow image that does not allow me to see what is truly hidden within me.

This is the question that challenges us. Am I able to see that there is an other there. Not just a role, not just a function, not an enemy and not a threat, but a human being. Am I able to see them without judgment. Am I able to see them without an immediate need to interpret their choices. Simply to see them.

Such a way of looking is similar to watching a character in a film. I see a character and I know that they exist. I see a person and I know that this person has an inner world. A body. Awareness. Thoughts that mostly have nothing to do with me and perhaps will never have anything to do with me. Even so, they exist.

In a paradoxical way, in order to truly get closer to the other, we must first introduce a little distance. We need to remove projections so that we can see. We need to move the other a little further away in order to be able to observe. Only when we really see them do we discover how close we actually are. When we are too close in a confusing way, we do not truly see the other. We see mainly our own reflections.

From here the task of this chapter becomes clear. To see the other and to see that there is a story inside them. Not a good or bad story. Not an interesting or boring story. Simply a story. Within that story there are layers, wishes, fears, inner contradictions, things the person is ashamed of and things they are proud of. Every human being is a full world. A whole book. A living divine story.

Are we willing to see the books that fill the world in the form of the human beings around us? Every person is a wondrous story. It is not easy. This is the work of compassion.

To see that there is an other there without forgetting myself. I am the one who is looking, but for a moment I stop the automatic associations, the myths and the projections and I allow my gaze to become clearer. The work of compassion requires seeing. When we see, we rise above the familiar emotional reactions we usually employ. We open our eyes wide and we see more. We see a real story. A human story.

The more we see the human story, the more compassion grows and the smaller the chance that we will want to harm another person in any way. For this to happen we must stop the automatic habit and begin to see. To see that there are people. To see that there are stories. Just as we ourselves are a story, so every person around us is a story. To be in compassion means to listen, to be interested and to come to know these stories.

Questions for practice
(to be answered in your own handwriting for yourself, or shared in a practice group):

What are the things that disturb you the most in other human beings?
Have you sometimes managed to feel compassion toward people who express these things in a very obvious way?
What are the things that are most uncomfortable for you to have people mirror back to you through their behavior? What is hardest for you to see in yourself through other people?
Do you sometimes notice that you are not really seeing the other in their fullness, but mainly what you think about them?
How does it feel, in those moments when you manage to release these projections and to see a person without any judgment, expectation or need?

Chapter 5: Compassion as the Tool That Allows Me to Make a Real Journey Toward the Other

I believe that the more we learn about compassion, the more we discover how little we actually understand about compassion, and this is both good and appropriate. This is how it should be. I hope that this discovery awakens an even stronger desire to inquire into this phenomenon, to understand over time how great a value compassion has in human life, and why it is so worthwhile and so important for a person to explore compassion, to become familiar with it, to clarify in which areas they find it hard to embody it, in which places it is too painful or too challenging, and what the gap is between what the person thought compassion was and what they discover along the way. It is not by chance that there is such extensive engagement with compassion in various spiritual and religious traditions. All of them in one way or another deal with the question of how we create a deep connection with the other.

When we go deeper inward we discover that the practice which enables us to be in a healthy interaction with the other is nothing but an expression of an inner need of ours. It is a legitimate, important and central human need to grow through the encounter with the other. We have no other way to do this. When we learn to relate properly to the other, we are at the same time serving ourselves. In the depth of things there are in fact no others. Here I express a certain worldview, according to which there are no truly separate beings, but rather countless representations of myself that I meet through different people. They exist as themselves, but for me they appear as representations, as mirrors, one mirror after another. I have no other way to see the world.

Every object that I encounter activates from within me a certain energy of perception, returns to me, is received and interpreted according to the way in which it reminds me of myself. This is not a question of objectivity or subjectivity. It is a question of position. How I am positioned in the world and how the world reflects me back to me. Every person has barriers, screens and masks that distance them from what is really taking place inside them on the emotional and mental levels. Compassion allows us to make a real journey toward the other, and as the title of this chapter hints, this means that it allows me to make a real journey toward myself through the other.

When I bring compassion, which means a positive attitude toward the other as they are, I am in fact bringing a positive attitude toward what that person is showing me about myself. Everything that another person shows me, whether it is a homeless person, a sick person, a person in deep mental turmoil, a person with no visible difficulties, or a person who has chosen paths that I could never imagine choosing, each one of these is a representation of an aspect within me. I am not able to see this except through the eyes of compassion.

Because of this it is very important for me to add to this lesson the concept of acknowledgment. Part of the experience of compassion is the act of acknowledging the other person, acknowledging their very existence. In a paradoxical way this sense of acknowledgment becomes even stronger precisely when the other is in pain, when another person is suffering. When I meet a suffering person from a place of compassion, my level of appreciation and respect for them is even higher. When compassion is truly active within me, and when this art is truly present in me, I do not only acknowledge that person, I also stand in service to them, out of love and out of devotion.

This is not because it is required, and not because it is the moral thing to do, and not because the other asked me. It springs from an inner desire to touch that person, together with acknowledgment that this person reminds me of my own pain. In the end, I cannot reach my own pains unless something in the world reminds me of them. Why should I wish to reach my pain at all. Because when I do not meet my pain I invest enormous amounts of energy every single day in running away from myself. People are usually not aware of how many inner resources they invest in avoiding their inner pain. We recoil from what hurts, just as we shy away from putting our hand into fire.

In the realm of emotional growth and healing, there is no possibility to heal pain without looking at it directly. We are required to remember it, to recognize its existence, to join with it without becoming addicted to it and without collapsing within it. This is a process of reconnecting with myself. It happens almost always in the presence of another human being.

This is especially true when the other is not involved in ongoing drama with me. If I am in a deep conflict with a very dear person, the level of intensity is too high and there is no inner space left for compassion. I am busy protecting myself, reducing danger and closing breaches. Therefore when the other is someone with whom I am not in direct conflict, an important invitation opens before me. Compassion is the tool that allows me to make a real journey toward the other, and therefore toward myself. It is a journey.

This journey becomes especially intense when the other is in distress. Why is that. Because their distress awakens my own distress, the distress that I do not want to meet at all. The other invites me. If I wish to grow, to integrate emotional and spiritual awareness, to feel love, to expand and to move forward, the other invites me there. The other does not need to plead or ask or demand. Their very presence in the world, together with the difficulty and pain they carry, is an invitation for me to find inside myself more layers of compassion, more acknowledgment of their existence and a deeper desire to help them and to lighten their burden, even a little.

All of these movements that arise within me, the wish to hold, the wish that the other will feel better, the wish to extend a hand, these are processes that expand me, heal me and allow me to feel meaning and aliveness. This is a work of spiritual elevation and it happens thanks to the other.

If I sum up this lesson, compassion is essentially a kind of guide. It is a guide toward the other, who is in fact a guide toward myself. Within this guidance of compassion I am asked to find within myself a very deep acknowledgment of the very existence of the other, whether they are suffering or not. To what extent am I able to see the people around me and inwardly say thank you for their existence. This acknowledgment reminds me of the true relationship that I have with the world and of the role of the world in inviting me to grow through the examination of the emotional connections I have with it. One of the highest, sweetest and most divine of these connections is my ability to be in compassion toward human beings. The ability to see them, to acknowledge them and to remember that by their very presence in the world they allow me to take my own journey.

Questions for practice
(to be answered in your own handwriting for yourself, or shared in a practice group):

  1. What do you most enjoy in becoming close to another person?

  2. What is hardest for you in becoming close to another person?

  3. Do you remember an experience in which compassion significantly changed your relationship with someone, or clearly changed a certain situation?

  4. Which physical sensation feels to you most similar to the experience in which compassion truly floods your awareness?

  5. Compassion allows a person to become free from an inner prison. Have you ever experienced such a feeling as a result of compassion toward a certain person, place or group?

Chapter 6: Seeing the Other through the Lens of Compassion as a Kind of Coming Home

Chapter six concludes part two, whose theme is that to see the other is to see myself. This is a place where spiritual knowledge meets emotional knowledge. It is a place that is not simple, just as the whole subject of compassion is not simple. It is not impossible and it certainly allows progress, but it takes the person to the greatest challenges of their existence. This understanding is very important. The lack of understanding is also important. Our difficulty in grasping the importance of compassion for the individual and for society and our lack of understanding of its deep place in creating a healthy human existence and of the terrible price we pay when compassion is absent, all these are essential parts of the way of compassion.

Alongside this we must also be aware of what the path of compassion demands of us. It demands that we carry pain. It demands that we face difficulty. It requires of us to rise above what is easy and familiar. This too must be part of our understanding. The mature person knows that they cannot live a balanced life without meeting challenges and without passing through difficult places. Many times we wrap our difficulties in layers of denial, in excessive busyness, in excuses and in different stories. In this way we try to transfer our difficulties into inner quarantine stations so that we will see them as little as possible.

Yet every such station exacts a heavy price. It robs us of growth energy, of creative energy and of the energy of our capacity to love. Even so, people prefer to live like this. They prefer to face less and to avoid more. I have spoken about this in previous chapters. At the same time there are areas of life where we do invest effort and energy. A certain job, a certain relationship, a field in which it is relatively easy for us to see results. There we are willing to invest and to exert ourselves.

However, when it comes to paths that belong to the art of compassion, many people keep their distance. Why is that. Here I suggest a complex line of thought that may be controversial for some. Whoever wishes can delve into it further.

I claim that at the deepest levels the human being is not entirely happy to be here. In their origin the human being is spirit, is energy, is harmony. On the divine level the soul chooses to come here. The soul wants to go through lessons and to grow through the human experience again and again. But when the human part comes here, it forgets its origin. Then it looks at the deal it has agreed to, often not fully consciously. This deal includes loss, pain, illness, disappointment, frustration and a sense of distance from the source. It is not an easy deal.

Sometimes we even deny the difficulty of this deal through a kind of spiritual bypass. Through worldviews of light and love and statements such as I am a being of light and all is fine and I am doing my work here, while ignoring the simple fact that it is difficult here. There is pain. There is crime. There is arbitrariness. There are people who harm other people. There is fear for our loved ones and for ourselves. Deep inside something in us asks why we needed this deal and why we chose it. When it is hard to admit this, we invent for ourselves a different story, a story that says I very much want to live. It is uncomfortable to admit that perhaps deep inside this deal is not fully acceptable to me.

Compassion can help us make inner peace with this deal but only after we recognize that we are not fully at peace with it.

Where does compassion enter the picture. Compassion reminds us of a deep truth through people.

Why is it so often difficult for us with other people. Why do we separate them from us. Why do we push them away. Because people remind us of the truth we are trying so hard to forget. Through the crises they experience or the crises they create for us they remind us of our dissatisfaction with the deal we have taken upon ourselves. Therefore we prefer to maintain a certain distance. Judgment is a form of distance. Condescension is a form of distance. All of these are ways to avoid meeting the truth inside us.

When I succeed in rising into compassion and looking at another person from a loving and non judgmental place, regardless of who they are and what they have done, something very precious happens. The ability to see the other with love reveals the ability to see myself with a similar love. I succeed in looking with embracing, divine eyes at my own contract here. I succeed in embracing again my soul choice to come and live here despite the pain and even with faith that the pain will be a doorway to growth.

To see the other through the lens of compassion is a kind of coming home. It is a click with the soul. A meeting with home. An inner statement that says I am here and I truly choose to be here. This choice cannot be just a verbal statement. It is not a product of a course or a workshop. It begins to be real only when I succeed in being in compassion toward the people who are the painful mirror of my own difficulty with the deal I chose. These are the people who show me how hard it is for me to accept this deal. Many times I am not aware of this and it is too painful to be aware, so I remain only with aversion, with judgment, with separation, with superiority.

When compassion awakens in me toward them, something softens inside me. I finally soften my inner anger about the deal. I remember again its beauty, its creativity, its growth and its healing, even with all the pains that still await me.

This is the reason that compassion is so important for a person who truly seeks a life of meaning. Compassion gives such a person a bridge home while still alive. It gives a bridge of responsibility and agreement with the fact that I have come here again, that I have to some extent given up being a pure being of light in a harmonious realm and that I have chosen again the human journey with all its lessons.

Deep inside I know that this journey has great value, but I cannot reach that depth without compassion. Compassion toward whom. Toward all the mirrors that show me the truth. Toward human beings.

In the previous chapter I spoke about the aspect of acknowledgment, about thanking them for their existence. Here compassion becomes the way through which I reconnect to the journey I chose, together with everything I have experienced already from childhood onward. Compassion is what connects all the pieces of the puzzle. It opens the inner quarantine stations so that I will no longer need to deny. It gives me the strongest tool that allows me to heal these places, to transform them and to become more whole in my journey and of course to receive much more from it.

Questions for practice
(to be answered in your own handwriting for yourself, or shared in a practice group):

  1. How do you connect between gratitude and compassion? Do these experiences feel related to you?

  2. What kinds of things that people mirror to you feel very uncomfortable or unpleasant for you, despite your attempts to escape them?

  3. Can you at this moment connect the feeling of compassion with a sense of inner spiritual expansion in you? Can you describe this in a few lines?

  4. How do you connect between the expression coming home and the experience of being in full compassion?

  5. In your view, how can compassion become an excellent way to rest from unnecessary efforts and struggles in life?

Chapter 7: The Other Person’s Point of Pain Is Also the Point of Opportunity for the One Who Witnesses It

Chapter Seven opens Part Three of the six-part process. This part focuses on the understanding that compassion is the discovery of the divine part within me through my relationship with the other who is in pain.

It is important for me to clarify from the very beginning of this chapter that compassion is not related only to the person who is in pain. Compassion gains a special intensity and significance when the other person is in pain, and it is certainly meaningful when we seek to help another person be in less pain. Yet it is also possible to be in compassion toward a person who is not in visible pain at this moment. Compassion is a way of entering the truth of another human being. And within the truth of the other person there is pain, and often hidden pain, and there are scars and traumas from the past. When I enter the emotional truth of the other, I encounter all of these layers, and at the same time I stop hiding from seeing the other person, and in fact also from seeing myself.

And yet, if I wish to realize my compassion and practice it, it is not done only מול people who are currently in clear and obvious suffering. Compassion can be practiced with every person, at every moment, and it is even worthwhile to do so. It is the ability to cross the screens of judgment, the screens of separation, the screens of fear, the screens of stereotypes, groupness and tribalism, and to enter the other person with an inner embrace of who they are.

There is something here that resembles love, but there is also an additional inner action taking place. This action touches my own pain, the pain of separation that I have carried since childhood. Compassion works with this pain, tends to it, and brings me back home through an inner embrace by way of the other. Through the other, a temporary healing occurs of the pain of separation from which every human being suffers from the moment we arrive on Earth. That pain of separation is also the force that drives us to search, and search, and search for home, and from this searching are born growth, development, and healing.

Another point I want to bring forward before entering directly into Chapter Seven is the close relationship between compassion and abundance. Abundance is a connection to an experience of “there is,” as opposed to an experience of lack. An experience of “there is” means a felt sense that I have possibilities, resources, plans, and connections. This is not an intellectual understanding, it is a heart experience. I feel that there is.

A large part of human distress, human conflicts, and human problems comes from an experience of lack that is often exaggerated and even illusory. One of the roles of a growing human being is to connect experientially to the “there is” within them. This “there is” is a distinctly spiritual concept. Sometimes this is confusing, because people tend to associate abundance with materiality, yet materiality is only a representation of a deeper spiritual truth.

When I am in compassion and I succeed in dissolving the walls that constantly build between me and other people as part of living in the physical world, I move from a state of lack of connection and lack of bonding into a state of abundance. I experience the truth that we are connected and related, and that there are not such great gaps between us as it seems within the physical experience, which is built, among other things, on levels that are quite large, and too large, of separation and distinctness. Our role as human beings who seek to grow beyond our animal dimension is to reduce, again and again, that separation, much of which is an illusion, through tools such as compassion.

When we do this, we connect more to the abundance within us, to the experience of “there is,” which is based first and foremost on the feeling that I am connected. Connection creates nourishing channels, and the experience of lack weakens. The source of this process comes, among other things, from my ability to be in compassion. Compassion allows me to let go of judgment, and when I let go of judgment and the superiority that comes with it, I experience a nourishing and pleasurable connection through relationship with people.

And now we arrive at the heart of Chapter Seven. The other person’s point of pain is also the point of opportunity for the one who witnesses it.

When a person experiences pain, they experience a sense of lack. When there is a wound in the body, there is a lack of tissue, and pain signals that there is a lack that requires care. Longing is pain because it is an experience of lack. When I meet a person in their pain, I meet them at a moment of lack. Sometimes it is a lack that I am not in at that moment, but it echoes within me a similar lack that also exists in me.

The other person’s lack awakens in me memories of lack through identification, or through a transfer of emotional experience from the other person to me. And this creates an opportunity. An opportunity to meet the lack within me through the lack of the other person. Through a nonverbal message I send them an energy of embrace, an inner message that says, I recognize your lack, I have had a lack like this too, and perhaps I will again in the future. I want to extend a hand to you, and I want to offer you from the abundance I am experiencing now, so that you will be a little less in lack, even if this is your challenge right now.

I cannot take the other person’s pain or lack away from them. But I can help them, through my presence and my compassion, to deal with the lack in a more supportive way. And at the same time I can meet my own lack, look at it, and embrace it, and in that way stop ignoring it. It is very easy to ignore our pains and lacks, because we want to rest from them a little and feel that our lives are good and flowing. But the lacks remain there even when they are not being tended.

In this meeting I am able to send the other person a deep message. Your lack is also my lack. This is a temporary state. You are allowed to be in it. I am not above you. This does not separate us. This does not prevent me from loving you. This does not make me better or more important than you.

Two processes are happening here in parallel. On the one hand, I am offering connection and support. On the other hand, I am meeting the lack within me. Energy flows from side to side, because energy always moves from where there is more to where there is less, and it returns in a circular movement. This is a circular process, because a day will come when the roles will change, and we will need that same touch.

People who have less at a certain moment are in a position of receiving. The role of those who have more is to give, also on the spiritual level. This is a role. When surplus does not flow, it has no real value. Abundance that does not flow loses its meaning.

This, then, is the moment of opportunity. There is pain there, and there is energy here. There is lack there, and there is “there is” here. The flow seeks to happen. It benefits both sides. Both sides leave the meeting remembering something, because there was never truly someone here in a superior position, only different energetic states that made mutual flow possible.

Practice Questions (answer in handwriting for yourself or share in a practice group):

  1. How do you feel when you are exposed to someone close to you, when they are in pain?

  2. How do you feel when you are exposed to someone who is not really close to you when they are in pain?

  3. What are the main difficulties you experience when you are in communication with a person who, in that moment, is suffering?

  4. Do you remember a case in which, following an interaction with a person in pain, you felt uplift and a positive change in yourself?

  5. How would you want significant people in your life to relate to you when you are in pain?

Chapter 8: Any Relating That Is Not Connected to Compassion Is a Form of Alienation

This chapter is the second chapter in Part Three, which deals with compassion as a way to find the divine part within me through my relationship to the other person in pain. I want to remind you, as I said in the previous chapter, that compassion does not depend only on the other person being in pain, or being in significant pain. Each one of us has, at every given moment, some kind of pain, visible or hidden.

When I approach another person with compassion, I relate to them in a very specific way, including my relationship to their pain. The other person’s pain intensifies the act of compassion, the test of compassion, and the possibility of realizing it. In practice, we have two basic options in the way we relate to people.

You can see it as a clear axis. On one side of the axis stands compassion, and on the other side stands judgment. Compassion is connection, understanding, and a sense of shared destiny. Judgment is separation, superiority, and sometimes even hostility, racism, and exclusion. Chapter Eight wishes to say something simple but deep: any relating that is not connected to compassion is a form of alienation.

It is worth repeating this. Any relating that is not connected to compassion is a form of alienation. This statement is meant to remind us that compassion, like some of the most important things in life, is something we must return to again and again. It is a daily practice that is very easy to forget.

It is very easy to forget compassion and be pulled, without noticing, into a place of separation. Almost automatically we return into our shell, into our walls, into our fears, and into the feeling of separation from the other. We forget the connection. In this chapter I want to remind a basic principle that should already be familiar: there is no in-between state, there is no static state, and there is no emptiness. In the place where there is no love, fear grows.

This is a simple equation, an axiom. No love, fear. Many times in our lives we suddenly find ourselves in an experience of emptiness, lack, darkness, and fear, because for too long we have not invested in that place love, hope, light, and creativity. We allowed a certain space to be managed מתוך a lack of good things, and when there is such a lack, something else inevitably takes its place. The situation does not remain neutral, and it is easy for us to forget that.

We have a role in the world, the role of people who seek to be meaningful and to have influence. This role begins from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep, and sometimes even when we are awakened in the middle of the night. And it is completely okay that we do not always succeed in this role. This is not a failure, but evidence that we still have a path to walk. It is also a sign that we need self-compassion.

And still, we have a role. A role whose meaning is ongoing work, ongoing improvement, practice, and training. You can think of it as an inner gym. Within this role, it is important to remind ourselves that in every interaction with another person, direct or indirect, from near or from far, the moment there is no compassion in it, alienation is inevitably created in it.

From that alienation grow judgment, fear of the other, and distancing from the other, even when the other person is very close to me. And toward these states as well, we seek to behave with tolerance, understanding, and forgiveness. It is necessary that we practice compassion toward ourselves, toward our limitations, and toward the human tendency to forget our role, which is to see human beings through as few screens of judgment as possible.

Here an opposite movement takes place. When I gradually remove the screens of judgment, I do not leave emptiness. There is no emptiness. I remove the negative and create a space in which the positive can return and appear. But if this feels too threatening to me, if I do not know another way to be, I may run back into judgment. Sometimes judgment is perceived as a defense, as a way to protect ourselves from people. If I am afraid of the space where there is no judgment, I will not allow myself to stay there.

When I remove fear, natural love can rise from within me. Not by force, but with pleasure, with joy, with ease, and with naturalness. We have a role to identify our tendency toward judgment. Not to skip over it, not to deny it, and not to assume we have already passed it just because we decided that we are not judgmental people. Such a decision is not enough.

Judgment and compassion are two complementary poles. If I do not actively maintain compassion, I leave more room for judgment. And if I do not actively reduce judgment, it will take its place. The reduction begins with awareness. To recognize that I am judgmental in a certain moment. To feel the discomfort and the mistake. To say to myself, here, now you are judgmental. And then to calm down, to lower it, and to allow space for compassion.

On the other side, the more I practice, deliberately, a non-judgmental way of looking at the other, the more compassion strengthens. This is real training. Again and again I check myself. What is my initial reflex in front of this person. Is there compassion in me. Am I willing, even internally, to embrace this person. Am I willing to listen to what is bothering them, even if I do not particularly like them. These are small but precious moments of compassion.

Am I able to imagine this person as a small child, as a baby, as an elderly person, with a complex life journey. Am I able to go beyond my mask of judgment. Here my role is revealed in its full complexity. On one hand, to be aware of the moments in which I am judgmental, and on the other hand, to act deliberately in order to lower that. But once judgment is lowered, I must also activate and maintain compassion.

I must challenge the part of me that is ready to embrace the other person, that is ready to listen to their story with attention, that is ready to extend a hand even from a distance. When I do not do this, I automatically move into a state of alienation, sometimes without noticing. There is no blame in this. This alienation must be identified, seen, and acknowledged.

Sometimes alienation appears as obvious judgment, and sometimes דווקא as a sense of imagined neutrality. But true neutrality does not exist here. Either I am in compassion, or I am in alienation. All other states are an illusion.

If I do not feel, toward a certain person, the basic warmth, the inner willingness to embrace them as a human being, it means compassion is missing in me toward them. In such a state I am in alienation, even if I am not aware of it. Then I must learn to identify the part of me that has contracted and distanced, to acknowledge it, and to embrace even that part with compassion. To ask myself to lower it a little.

From this place, between me and myself, I practice again the experience of compassion in all its components, while observing the other person. This is the role. An ongoing role. And from compassion, we will also remember this: we will never be perfect at it.

Practice Questions (answer in handwriting for yourself or share in a practice group):

  1. Try to recall the last time you felt significant compassion toward a specific person. How did you feel afterward, in a general way?

  2. Focus your awareness on a person for whom it is especially difficult for you to feel compassion, now or in the past. What emotions accompany that?

  3. What would happen if you could “activate” your compassion muscle more easily and much more quickly?

  4. Is there or was there a relationship in your life characterized mainly by “emotional quiet,” with little touch or communication?

  5. Regarding that person, what happens, or what would happen, if the tool of compassion were available and accessible to you and you used it with that person more?

Chapter 9: No Spiritual Development Is Real as Long as It Does Not Improve Compassion

As mentioned, Chapter Nine belongs to Part Three, the part that says that compassion is essentially the way to find the divine part within me. A large portion of the people who are in processes of growth, searching, and development are in fact searching for the divine part within them. They want to connect with it, draw close to it, return home, awaken to it, recognize it within themselves, activate it, realize it, and implement it in life. And in this chapter I want to say clearly: it never works without compassion. Not here, not in our human form, as human beings living on this planet. It does not work without compassion.

And that is the title of Chapter Nine. No spiritual development is real as long as it does not improve compassion. This sentence reminds me of a conversation I had with my neighbor, a neighbor who has a pizzeria inside his home. He is a religious man, observant, and he often listens to lectures by rabbis he loves. One time I went in to buy something from him, and he was listening to a lecture in which a very simple idea was said: God says to a person, you were okay, but as long as you are not okay with your friends, you have not done much. This is an idea we sometimes miss. It is easy to miss it because it is not a simple task.

Especially people who occupy themselves quite a bit with what is called spiritual growth. People who develop, go to workshops, read books, discover more about a reality beyond the physical reality, research it, search for it, meditate, create, write, dance, dream, talk, go on journeys and trips, and constantly search for the divine within them. They have an inner power, an inner voice, that keeps pushing them to continue the search. And in that place, I believe, a fundamental misunderstanding sometimes happens. We do not always understand how much human interaction occupies a place within spiritual development.

And this is not interaction only with people you can connect with through a similar spiritual language, or talk with about spiritual concepts. Usually that is not where the main challenges are. The challenges are דווקא with people who are more earthly, people who see a different reality, and who אולי will never see reality the way you, or you, see it. People who will not deal with it, who will not understand, who will not grasp, who will not recognize what in your eyes seems important for spiritual development.

As long as I do not grasp at a deep level that these people are no less divine than I am, and that their spiritual growth is no less meaningful than mine in the way their soul chose to live these lives, I am greatly limiting my growth. And if I do not see this, I remain limited within my spiritual development, within my spiritual doing. In other words, as long as my spiritual development does not include, in a clear way, improvement of my compassion skills, in my eyes it is not really spiritual. It is staying inside some kind of shelter, without going out and facing the challenges that these lives place in front of me.

To face the challenges is spiritual growth. And one of the greatest and most meaningful challenges for human beings is the attainment of compassion toward one another, the ability to deal with separation, judgment, and alienation, and hostility that can reach the level of violence. Again, as I said in the previous chapter, we cannot ignore that horrifying things happen in the world. A world without development, cultivation, and awareness of compassion creates emptiness, creates a vacuum, and creates the foundation for fear, hostility, violence, and alienation, to the point of an automatic and cold agreement that people get hurt when a need arises.

Compassion is a spiritual mission. And it is a mission implemented in every moment. It does not require a special workshop. It also cannot be dependent on a special workshop, because it happens in everyday life. It is one of the most applied, most everyday, most immediate, and most challenging spiritual concepts. It requires us again and again to return to the basics, to look to the sides, to look around, and to see where I have a failure of compassion.

For people who are engaged in spiritual growth, there is a special challenge here. The challenge begins when we understand that sometimes we run away from the real challenges of life. We run away from the places where it hurts us, from the places where it is very hard for us to cultivate compassion. We run away from there into a spiritual practice that wraps us in a warm and comfortable bubble, so that we will not have to touch the close places.

Everywhere, as I said in the previous chapter, where there is no compassion, there is alienation. And when there are people who hurt me, harmed me, bothered me, caused me pain, people I find difficult, people I cannot stand, two sentences with them and I want to run away, and when with these people I do not succeed in developing compassion within me, I enter alienation toward them. And this alienation hurts me. This emptiness hurts. This lack hurts. It hurts whether I am aware of it or not. And if I am a more sensitive person, and if I am in processes of spiritual growth, I feel it even more. And then I may force myself to close off and distance myself, or tell myself, okay, it is impossible, there is nothing to do.

It is true that sometimes it is impossible to communicate with a certain person. Sometimes there are people who try to exploit us, to drain us, who harass us, who hurt, who threaten, who behave in an aggressive or disruptive way. We have no obligation to hold dialogue with them. We have no obligation to agree with them. We do not give up boundaries. We do not allow exploitation. We do not allow aggression. No.

And still, inside us, we can practice compassion in a one-sided way. We can practice it inside our head and inside our heart. We can imagine ourselves extending a hand to this person, embracing them, seeing the hurting child inside them, feeling it, even while in reality we keep distance and a boundary. Because if I do not bring a practice of compassion toward them, I have created alienation. And in the place where there is alienation, I experience lack. It is like an inner wound. It hurts me. And what do I do with the pain. Often, I distance myself even more.

So I return to the title of this chapter. In my view, a person who dedicates more resources to the practice of compassion is a person who is more in focus on their spiritual growth. This does not mean that spiritual growth practices that did not emphasize compassion have no value. They have value. But they live in constant lack, and there is a problem within them if they do not also include improvement of compassion and practice of compassion.

How do we practice. Each way in its own way. To see the other, to be able in imagination to embrace them, to extend a hand, to recognize the hurting child inside them, to feel it. Everywhere, with every person in this world, in every moment when there is no compassion in me, there is alienation in me. Spiritual growth means, as I said in the previous chapter, to be aware of it, to recognize it, to reduce it, and to practice, in the head and in the heart, one-sided compassion. To practice again and again.

In this place it is possible to experience real spiritual development. A connection to the divine part within me, perhaps in a way that cannot be experienced in any other way. In my eyes this is the peak, the top of the pyramid, of spiritual growth. Everything can support it. Everything can lead to it. Self-realization, expression of creativity, connection to love, and more and more things. But in the end, here as human beings, there is no real value to our growth if it does not include a constant improvement in our compassion and in the way we live together as a society.

Practice Questions (answer in handwriting for yourself or share in a practice group):

  1. What is, for you, in general, “spiritual growth”? What do you expect a spiritual growth process to create in a person’s life?

  2. Which qualities and areas in your life developed without any connection to compassion?

  3. When you look closely at those qualities and areas from the previous question, what happens if you “add” an expansion of compassion within you to them?

  4. What additional areas will grow in your life as compassion expands and becomes a larger part of you?

  5. Do you remember an example in which compassion was, for you, the key to personal development you could not experience before?

Chapter 10: To Experience Love, We Must Experience Compassion

In this chapter I want to remind you of something I say in all the courses I create, because it is an especially important message in light of our usual learning habits. We need to read again and again. We need to return to the text, meet it once more, and not treat reading as a one time action. In truth, I am building here an ongoing relationship between us. I am, in a certain sense, a messenger through whom information flows, sometimes even before I myself fully understand it. And still, I know this information has value, has impact, and has the ability to help people wake up, open their eyes, remember, and expand.

My role is to transmit this information. But what truly matters for you is to be in a relationship with the information itself. Less with me, and more with the content. And when I say relationship, I mean that we meet again and again. That there is dialogue. Me and the information, me and the story, me and the sounds. The information is transmitted through my voice and through my body, because this is one of my roles in life as I experience it.

But the real relationship is with the information that arrives. The more we enter into deeper connection with this information and surrender to connecting with it, the less we need to agree with everything. We do not have to accept everything. On the contrary, within a relationship there are also questions, clarifications, reservations. And still, we are connected. And from that connection I arrive naturally at Chapter 10, which opens Part Four of the process.

Part Four deals with compassion as a necessary realization of love. I do not think we are able to define love in a truly sufficient way, and compassion is also difficult to define fully. Still, it seems to me that compassion is slightly more accessible to definition. And it is completely fine that we cannot define these things all the way, and yet we know love exists. That there is such a frequency. Such an essence. Such a mode of being. And for many people, and perhaps for everyone, love is a deep and essential part of who we are.

This exists on the conscious and the unconscious levels, in direct ways and in indirect ways. The search for love is a central theme in human life. People look for love in physical reality, in imagined reality, in creation, in work, in different experiences. For me, love is a place. It is home. It is the source. It is truth. It is what came before our experiences of the absence of love.

It is good that love remains slightly vague when we try to define it. Sometimes we confuse love with relationship. We confuse unconditional love with an unconditional relationship. There is no such thing as conditional love. Love, by its nature, is not conditional. But there are relationships that do have conditions, and love can exist within them. And here we introduce the link between compassion and love.

What Part Four of the process wants to say is that compassion is a necessary realization of love. Meaning, in every place where I believe, think, or feel that I am in a relationship of love, especially when this is interpersonal love, this relationship cannot truly exist without compassion.

As I said in the previous chapter, spiritual development is not real, or it is very limited, as long as it does not improve compassion. Here we focus on the same principle, but through the question of love. This is one of the central places that allows us to observe our capacity for love. How strong it is, how developed it is, how present it is, how courageous it is in touching what hurts.

Compassion does deep work for us in everything connected to the experience of love. With the person I love, how do I meet their pain. How do I behave toward them on the level of judgment. Where, inside my love, do I forget compassion because of personal needs, conflicts, fears, or wounds. In which points, in which islands or gaps inside the space I consider a space of love, am I lacking compassion.

This is a very significant question. Because as long as we do not ask it and do not examine it, the space in which we seek to cultivate love may become too closed, too narrow, sometimes stuck, and even destructive. Such a space tends to fall again and again into crises, and it struggles to fulfill its natural purpose, to expand, to develop, to grow. Love is an expanding and developing force, with infinite potential.

In the places where I know I love, in the places where there is a person who is very important to me, a family member, a close friend, a person I would be willing to do everything for, precisely there it is worth checking my level of compassion. It is worth checking where I am still judgmental toward this person, and not taking anything for granted. Not love, and not relationship.

Even with a beloved child, a beloved sister, or an old friend, the soul meets developmental challenges. In those places, when we look honestly at what exists, we sometimes discover islands of judgment, meaning islands of lack of compassion.

If we truly want to experience love, if we want to allow it to be free within us, stable and nourishing, we need to challenge the compassion inside it. We need to challenge the places where we have retreated into judgment. Those places exist, and that is fine. These are spaces of development. There is no reason to panic when they appear even inside spaces of love.

We are human. We are physical. We live in a reality that includes lack, and every lack hurts. Therefore, in order to strengthen love, to expand it, and to help it realize its drive to grow, we need to search and find where we are still judgmental toward the people we love. This does not contradict love.

We can see it like a small hole. And every hole demands energy to maintain it, because it hurts. Instead of continuing to maintain holes, we can open them. Look at them. Say to ourselves, here I am judgmental. Here I struggle to welcome the essence of my partner, my child, my sibling, my friend.

And then, in that exact place, ask myself to lower judgment. To look at things as they are. And to imagine myself hugging that person precisely in the place where I was judgmental.

For love to exist, we need to meet the challenges of compassion and not run away from them. Not pretend that everything flows simply because there is love. Inside every love there are islands of judgment. Looking at them matters not only for the relationship itself, but also for our inner world, and for the way we recognize, measure, and deepen our capacity for love.

Practice Questions (answer in handwriting for yourself or share in a practice group)

  1. Do you have compassion for every person you love?

  2. On the level of emotional experience, what is different and what is similar between love and compassion?

  3. Do you remember a case where someone was supposed to love you, but there was almost no compassion, on their side toward you?

  4. Take an inner survey of the people dear to your heart, family and friends. Without naming specific people, do you recognize figures you feel love toward but not necessarily significant compassion toward?

  5. How might love and compassion connect more deeply for you in the future?

Chapter 11: Compassion Toward the Difficult People in Our Lives, The Confusion, The Challenge, and The Benefit

This chapter addresses one of the most challenging areas of compassion, and perhaps also one of its most confusing areas. From the beginning I said that compassion is not a simple matter. Compassion is one of the greatest, most important, and most shaking challenges that human beings encounter. It is a deep challenge, uncomfortable, and not easy.

I want to say this explicitly so that we do not approach compassion lightly. Not as a superficial statement, not as a sentence spoken from the lips outward. To say to ourselves or to others, I have compassion for you, is a beautiful intention, a worthy desire, a good beginning. But it is important to know that real compassion includes pain, conflicts, legitimate resistance, deep confusion, and many holes in our understanding of relationships, love, containment, affection, and friendship. All of these gather inside compassion. And that is exactly what makes compassion both a difficult challenge and a fascinating challenge.

On the other side, it is important to understand that when compassion begins to disappear, and when not only is there no effort to bring it and practice it, but it is simply not present, we enter a real danger zone. From this understanding, this course was created. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that anyone who chooses to watch, listen, and learn here already carries a certain level of compassion, and even a relatively high level compared to average.

And still, we cannot be satisfied with having a reasonable level of compassion. Most of the people who are here want their environment, their country, and the whole world to go through a positive change. For such a change to happen, we are asked to rise. When we rise, we become inspiration for others. And when this happens inside a group, the influence expands even more.

Our current level of compassion is part of a global compassion system that is still lacking. There is a measure of responsibility we need to take. We need to recognize that we have not worked enough with our compassion, and to make it a more central mission in our lives. Chapter 11 places us directly in front of one of the places where we tend to deceive ourselves when it comes to compassion.

The subject of the chapter is compassion toward the difficult people in our lives. People from the past, people in the present, people with whom we have an ongoing conflict or an unresolved dispute. People we cannot speak with, people a short conversation with them drives us out of our mind. People who disappointed us, who hurt us, who treated us with emotional violence or other kinds of violence, or with force and arbitrariness.

These can also be people far from us, public figures, leaders, politicians, known people who awaken in us anger, worry, disappointment, or other difficult feelings. And sometimes these are also people from childhood, people who did not see us, who exploited us, who used us, and some of them may even continue to behave that way toward us to this day.

There is a very wide network here, from the closest circles to the widest circles, of people who are the most difficult for us. And they are there, not by accident. They reflect to us the places inside us where we are not free. Places where we are not released, not flexible, not creative. Places where we are stuck. This is not their problem. This is our problem.

These people represent for us the dark places inside us, our deepest pains, the places where we can reach even hatred, disgust, or wishing something bad upon another person. This is part of our humanity. These are areas where we have not yet found a better way, a higher way, a more creative and effective way, to deal. A way with more compassion.

And this is exactly where we are asked to reorganize ourselves. To be in compassion toward a person does not mean giving up boundaries. It does not mean changing our opinion of them. It does not mean making them right, or accepting their actions in the past or in the present. It does not mean bringing them back into our life or creating contact. Compassion is not an action toward the other person. Compassion is an inner action. It always happens between me and myself.

Compassion is what clears an inner path for me, allowing me to improve my relationship with myself, and from there also to improve relationships with others. But with the most difficult people in our lives, it is like walking in this world with heavy weights. We carry them without understanding why we cannot move more freely, why life feels so cumbersome and heavy. That is where the reasons are.

Therefore, precisely there, we are asked to invest more, persist more, and practice compassion more deeply. That is where the power of our love is realized. Love that, at its root, can be directed toward any object. Even toward the most repulsive person, the most infuriating person, the most harmful person, and even the most dangerous person. Not because it justifies them, but because it heals us.

When I activate compassion toward this difficult person, I release myself from their darkness, a darkness that also strengthens the darkness inside me. Inside compassion I lower judgment. I lower fear. I lower pain. I reduce automatic emotional reactions. I look at this person, and I even imagine myself hugging them.

This is not easy. It can hurt. It can bring tears. It can awaken antagonism, and it can feel like surrender or danger. But it is not. It is elevation. It is healing. It is saying goodbye to a heavy weight that has carried us for many years.

Compassion frees us from the need to continue holding painful feelings toward that person inside us. Feelings that may be justified, may be understandable, but are also harmful. Here compassion truly challenges us. And here we are asked to act, to work with ourselves, not in order to repair a relationship, not in order to return to speaking, and not in order to become friends. But in order to free ourselves.

This person is an inner object. They represent a weight we continue to carry. As long as we hold the painful sensitivity toward them, we limit our freedom, our creativity, and our ability to move in life.

This is an advanced lesson. Lesson 11. A lesson in which we connect compassion and love, and we remind ourselves that love is not meant only for the comfortable places. We need love also in the uncomfortable places, in order to treat what hurts, in order not to get stuck there, in order not to live inside dark areas that prevent us from arriving home.

For this we recruit compassion. We work with it quietly, between us and ourselves, again and again. And we release a little more of these weights. First of all for ourselves. Sometimes it also influences others, but that is not the goal. The goal is our healing.

Only good can grow from this. It is not easy, and it never was easy. But it is good to improve in it slowly, gradually, a little more and a little more, and to discover additional layers where we can experience love even in the hardest places.

Practice Questions (answer in handwriting for yourself or share in a practice group)

  1. Try to recall several figures from the past whose memory feels especially negative. What is the emotional experience like when you return there? For each one, imagine yourself wrapping them, if it is possible, in a cloak of compassion from you. It is not always possible, so do not force this exercise. Only with those you can.

  2. If it is possible, it is recommended to repeat this a few times. What happens to your feeling with it?

  3. What do you think happens to extreme feelings such as hatred, for example, when they are challenged slowly and carefully with compassion?

  4. What will happen inside you as you become able to feel more compassion toward negative figures, from the past and from the present?

  5. Do you allow yourself not to send compassion to everyone, are you tolerant and compassionate enough toward yourself in the places where it is not yet possible?

Chapter 12: Reaching a Place Without Judgment Is Much More Than a Slogan, and It Will Not Happen Without Compassion

Chapter 12 is the third chapter of Part Four. Part Four deals with the understanding that compassion is a necessary realization of love.

I can say that even for me, while creating these courses, a refreshing, deep, and meaningful understanding is taking place regarding the art of love and the skill of love. I am learning how compassion enters as a form of inner action, as a practice, as responsibility, as inner work, and sometimes even as a lifeline when it comes to realizing love and sustaining love.

Compassion is a kind of action. A kind of inner work that invites us again and again to enter it and to face what it places before us, so that we can improve our ability to love another person. In my view, this may be the most important task human beings have here on planet Earth. Compassion is one of the tools, one of the paths, that allows us to improve and expand in matters of love.

And that brings me to Chapter 12. Reaching a place without judgment is much more than a slogan, and it will not happen without compassion.

It is good that human society has progressed over the past decades to recognize that judgment is often harmful. It is good that we have progressed toward understanding that judgment does not truly have a healthy role in dialogue. Judgment brings fear into dialogue, and it brings pain into dialogue in an unhealthy way.

Because if I am judgmental, I am actually in pain. Only I do not say, I am in pain. I attack, I project it outward. I say something is wrong with the other, when in fact I am seeing my pain through them. The fact that we have reached this societal recognition, and that we can actually see this progress in recent decades, is a very good thing.

Also regarding self judgment, we are beginning to understand that judgment, in many cases, is an excellent way to destroy. It prevents good communication, prevents relationship, prevents problem solving, prevents growth, prevents creativity, prevents flexibility, prevents love, prevents connection, prevents dialogue, and prevents shared development.

There are many ways we can destroy when we do not know how to create a good relationship with our pain, and when we allow our pain to be sent outward in a harmful way toward another person. Then we see the other person as representing our pain through a lens of judgment. Therefore, the fact that we have reached a societal awareness where many people understand that judgment is harmful is truly good.

But the fact is that we return there again and again. We need to deal with it again and again. And the reason is that judgment by itself is only a projection of pain. If we do not meet pain through compassion, if we do not bring the positive pole that stands opposite judgment, which is compassion, then we keep recreating the same inner battle and we return again and again to judgment.

It is exactly like the saying, you cannot fight darkness without lighting a candle. Yes, we want to identify judgment when it appears, and we want to reduce it intentionally, but that is never enough. It is never enough only to block the negative expression. It is never enough only to put out a fire without understanding why it ignites again. Because something is missing in the environment, and that missing element eventually creates the recurring fires.

Compassion is much more than not being judgmental. Not being judgmental is important, but noticing that I am judgmental is mainly a signal that I am missing compassion in a certain area. It is a signal that I am not fulfilling my role of loving. That I am not truly seeing the other. That I am not sending them, in my imagination, a hug.

Every person is part of me, and I am part of them. Even if they are difficult, even if they are harmful. And in every place where I fail in matters of love, I create fear. I create excessive criticism. I create judgment. I create alienation. It can happen in a blink.

We do this all the time. We forget our role all the time. Sometimes we even enter social discourse that fuels judgment and alienation, cynicism, irony, skepticism, stereotypes. This is how we are. And it is okay to hold compassion even toward this, because we have a path to walk. But let us know the path. Let us recognize the path.

On our original, divine level, every person we see is a reason for celebration simply by being present. Every person is a reminder that we are more than we think we are. Every connection with another person, even in imagination, brings us home, to the God within.

And every lack of connection, every time we neglect it, distances us from the source. In every moment. In every second. In every encounter. If we are not experiencing the realization of love, if we are not experiencing compassion, the inner willingness to connect, not only to want but also to realize it, with every person, and especially with the people it is hardest for us with, then we are far from the place that is right for us as developing, growing human beings.

Therefore it is not enough to say, I want to be without judgment. I want to meet my pain that makes it hard for me to feel, in my imagination, that I am going to hug someone, especially someone who repels me, someone who annoys me, someone who is needy, someone who exhausts me, someone who drains my energy. My role as a growing person is, in my imagination, to hug them. To hug their pain. To hug their cracks. And through their cracks to see my cracks as well.

And in this way to connect. To remember that I am never better than anyone else. Never better than anyone else. Compassion reminds me that we are on the same line. Each one is a different expression of a soul that chose its path. We are on the same line exactly. Each with their roles. Roles chosen with care. Each soul for itself, and also within contracts it created with other souls in order to challenge itself in this life journey.

So I say again, saying no to judgment is excellent, just like saying no to violence is excellent. But if I only said no to violence and I did not create a space of love, creativity, compassion, and respect, violence will return. The same with judgment. It is not enough to say no to judgment. There is work beyond that.

I want to set a goal for myself. That I can walk in the street, and in my imagination, in my heart, I am open to everyone. Because everyone is also a bit me. And everyone is an invitation to meet the divine part in me. And everyone is also a failure that is predictable in advance if I have not done my inner path. And of course I will fail many times, we will continue to fail, but there will be moments when we suddenly stop and feel, wow. What a reality is here.

This man. This woman. This person who is not beautiful. This simple woman. This thoughtful man. This old man. And also people we struggle to meet, beggars, people at intersections, people who ask for something and we do not have the strength to look. And that is okay.

But inside, we can open the heart. We can hug them in imagination. And remember that we are on the same line. And until we feel that warm and positive feeling, we are only telling ourselves, do not be judgmental, but we have not yet done the work.

Judgment is the reminder. It is the fire we want to put out. It is the darkness. It is the sign that in that exact place we need to find the part in us that remembers that every person is a representation of God. That every person invites me to remember the God in me by sending them love, by hugging them, by hugging their pain, by giving them a hand in imagination, and by freeing myself from my fears of the very existence of another, which are actually fears of my own existence, and of the God within me.

Practice Questions (answer in handwriting for yourself or share in a practice group)

  1. Are you able to admit that you have judgment toward certain people, at least in certain situations?

  2. What kind of relationship do you have with the part of your personality that is sometimes judgmental?

  3. Do you find yourself negotiating with yourself in an attempt to reduce judgment from time to time?

  4. To what extent do you compliment yourself and appreciate yourself when you succeed in recognizing judgment inside you and softening it?

  5. Do you currently have a reasonable degree of compassion for the judgmental parts inside you?

Chapter 13: Self-Compassion: Releasing Myself from the Burden of Guilt and Unnecessary Debts

Chapter 13 opens Part Five. Part Five is about you, about me, about us. While compassion is a tool that helps us love other people and be properly present in a world that includes people, that same tool is also required toward ourselves.

Without it, we will not be able to fully realize compassion outwardly. We will be very limited in our ability to use this tool in life. To a large extent, we live inside an inner relationship, a relationship between ourselves and ourselves.

Within that relationship there are always several inner figures. Some of the figures within us are critical, judgmental, impatient, tense, anxious, and worried. At times we carry elements of self-cancellation or low self-worth, and alongside them there are other parts that do appreciate us and do recognize us. There is an internal relationship, and that relationship needs attention, care, nourishment, and cleansing.

This is the primary space, the basic laboratory, where we work on everything. This is the space we are actually trying to heal when we apply compassion outwardly. In the end, everything returns inward.

Everything a person does is for the sake of their relationship with themselves. Everything. Everything a person gives to the environment is also done for themselves. And it is good that it is so. You could call it healthy selfishness.

Therefore, a person cannot avoid examining the tools they wish to use outwardly also within themselves, also in their inner dialogue. They must remind themselves again and again of the most important reminder of all, that they are at the top of their own priority list. And that can be confusing.

Sometimes work, parenting, service roles, and giving roles cause us to forget ourselves. We get pulled outward and become somewhat emptied. We may have a desire to give, an enthusiasm to give, a sense of mission, or sometimes even guilt. And we forget ourselves. It is very easy to forget ourselves.

That is why the next chapters, Chapters 13 through 15, will focus on self-compassion, self-love, and self-forgiveness, against the background of everything we have discussed so far regarding compassion toward others. Now the movement turns inward.

Chapter 13 focuses on self-compassion and on freeing myself from the burden of guilt and from unnecessary debts. There is a statement here that is especially important to me, and it is very easy to miss it in processes of growth, in relationships, and in a person’s relationship with themselves.

Feelings of guilt are a kind of poison. Completely unnecessary. How easy it is for a person to place themselves inside an inner field trial, to accuse themselves, to become their own prosecutor, to not allow themselves even a defense attorney, and to hand down a verdict.

We learn this in childhood, and it is as if we never stop being guilty children even in adulthood. We understand reality better, but we do not always internalize it. We remain, to some degree, embarrassed children who did something wrong, children carrying an exaggerated and excessive burden of responsibility.

Out of this sense of guilt, we accumulate inside ourselves inner debts, debts connected to guilt, to regret, to the feeling that I am not okay, to the feeling that I made a mistake and I must constantly fix. Here we need self-compassion, and in especially large doses, particularly in the places where we feel intense guilt about things we have done.

We made mistakes. We were aggressive. We were arbitrary. We did not see the other. We exploded. We forgot. We neglected. And at times we also found ourselves in manipulative systems where we were made to feel guilty again and again over time. We feel the pain and the contraction, yet we do not notice that we did not protect ourselves, that we did not create an inner boundary.

This is where self-compassion enters and says, I am not that guilty. I am okay. I understand my pain. I understand my weaknesses. I want to hug myself. I want to recognize the sources of pain that led me to behave the way I behaved.

The more self-compassion I have, the less room guilt has. Guilt and judgment are very similar. Even when I am judgmental toward another person, I am essentially accusing them of something. And the more I develop compassion toward myself, a willingness to listen to my pain, a willingness to understand its sources, a willingness to hug who I am, to be my own defense attorney, to listen to my own story, the less guilt I carry.

Beyond that, the more active I am in self-compassion and self-recognition, the less I allow others to make me feel guilty in their presence. Compassion does not allow it. I can still be compassionate toward them, and it is even desirable, without abandoning myself.

Now the focus is on self-compassion whose role is to free me from the burden of guilt. Guilt says, I am not okay. Compassion says, you are okay. You are worthy of a hug. You are worthy of being heard. You are worthy of a place. You are part of a great divine creation.

There are no guilty people here. The story of guilt collapses and is no longer relevant. A person can take responsibility for what they did out of self-compassion, out of the recognition that they acted מתוך pain. This is not guilt.

Children tend to blame themselves very quickly because their worldview is childlike and black and white. If something went wrong, someone is guilty, and the finger often points inward. As adults, with more tools, we can choose differently.

We can take self-compassion and work with it. Through it we can discover more and more islands of guilt, and hug them. Not to rush to cancel the guilt, but first to hug the place that carries it. In every place where I hug the guilt, its intensity decreases.

Guilt isolates me. It makes me unworthy. It places me in a corner of shame, of separation. Compassion reconnects me. Sometimes there is no need for explanations or logic. Telling myself, you are not guilty, does not always work. What works is compassion. What works is love.

Now we bring compassion inward to locate the islands of guilt, and there we hug ourselves and release ourselves. We can say to ourselves, I take responsibility, but it ends here. I release myself from these debts.

Not only on a cognitive level, but with softness, understanding, and recognition that there are pains and scars that led me into certain patterns of behavior. From there, later, forgiveness and release can also be born, but they will not happen without self-compassion.

It will not happen unless I see my pain, hug it, give it a hand and acknowledgment, and pass through it a clear message, there is no guilt here. We no longer need guilt. This story is no longer relevant when compassion becomes the dominant voice within me.

Practice Questions (to answer by hand for yourself or to share in a practice group):

  1. How do you feel about the word “guilt,” and how does “guilt” affect your life?

  2. Think of an issue you used to blame yourself for a great deal. What happens when you pour a lot of self-compassion into that place?

  3. When you feel the urge to judge yourself harshly again, try to cancel the “trial” through self-compassion. What do you think will happen then?

  4. Have you managed to practice self-compassion recently? In what area, and where did it take you?

  5. When you practice daily self-compassion, you will be different than you are today. Can you imagine yourself in that place?

Chapter 14: Self-Love as a Tool to Increase Self-Compassion, and Vice Versa

Chapter 14 is the second of the three chapters in Part Five. This part focuses on deepening the inner work with self-compassion, self-love, and later also self-forgiveness. In this chapter I want to pause on the connection between self-love and self-compassion, and on the way these two skills nourish each other.

In the simple sense, self-love increases self-compassion, and self-compassion increases self-love. It is a cycle. When one of them strengthens, it amplifies, maintains, and nourishes the other. And when the other strengthens, it reinforces the first. Throughout this entire process we are speaking about skills, skills that require cultivation.

This principle has accompanied us from the beginning, through the Healthy Nature Principle. Human beings have high skills, you could also call them spiritual or divine skills, but they all exist in a state of potential. That is their law. Without ongoing cultivation, which is a blend of attention, training, practice, listening, and continuous searching with humility, these skills weaken.

It is very similar to light. If we stop turning on the light, we cannot understand why suddenly there is darkness, even if for a long time there was light. The light does not remain by itself. It must be replenished. That is exactly what happens with self-love.

Self-love, as I teach it in a dedicated and extensive course, is an ongoing process of cultivating my relationship with myself. It is the cultivation of the type of relationship, the character of the relationship, the inner language, and the way I relate to myself. It means bringing love into that relationship actively.

To speak to myself in a loving language, to say soft and embracing words to myself, to prefer myself, to give to myself, to grant myself, to smile at myself in the mirror, to be kind to myself, gentle, attentive, patient, and supportive. It is a wide system of tools and skills that allows a person to feel more and more love within themselves.

Self-love means that the relationship between me and me becomes more friendly, warmer. At times it also includes a parental dimension, where I become for myself a good father or a good mother. It is a relationship in which I can enjoy myself, walk with myself, find value in being with myself, appreciate myself, and compliment myself. All of this under the understanding that it is a skill that requires ongoing practice.

When we move to self-compassion, the focus shifts slightly. Self-compassion focuses on the way we move through the journey of life, the way we meet and treat our wounds, our personal wounds and our social wounds. Compassion goes to the pain that gives birth to judgment, to the pain that gives birth to distance, alienation, and inner barriers.

Compassion relates to judgment, to our reluctance to connect with people, and in the depth of things, also to our reluctance to meet the divine dimension within ourselves. Compassion gives us a hand so we can pass through that fear. The fear of meeting our pain through the other, meeting our truth through the other, meeting our greatness and our beauty through the other.

Yes, we are afraid of it. Compassion allows us to reach the most refined places in the other, and from there also in ourselves. And of course, self-compassion is not easier than compassion toward others. It requires us to look at ourselves in honest reflection and hug what is inside, with joy, love, and appreciation.

This too needs practice. Again and again. Because it is a skill. It improves with time, it becomes more present, and at the same time it requires more attention, because the environment we live in is still saturated with judgment, alienation, and fears. Therefore, ongoing work is required.

When we practice self-love, it becomes easier to practice self-compassion. When the inner dialogue fills with a language of love, broadness of heart, tolerance, and listening, courage is built in us to approach the places where we are judgmental toward ourselves.

Those are the places where I struggle with myself, and that is where we are invited to hug, to try to understand, to see the beauty, to see the path this soul is walking in this life journey. There we discover the pain and the self-anger and hug them too. This is compassion.

Compassion is the ability to approach the painful place, the negative feelings, out of love, tolerance, and containment. It is impossible to realize compassion without seeing pain. Judgment is always a product of pain. Therefore, often it is precisely in the presence of significant suffering that we can meet and realize compassion, because there is nowhere to run and there are no masks.

The pain is visible. The suffering is obvious. And the question is whether I can reach it with compassion, or whether I flee. Compassion begins with identifying the pain, identifying the inner alienation, and sometimes even identifying the inner hatred and the lack of tolerance, as well as the excessive self-criticism and the judgment that flows from all of these.

We want to identify it. To recognize that it exists. Not as a confession that blames, but as honest recognition. To understand that I am sometimes judgmental toward myself, and that it comes from pain, from lack, and sometimes from traumas. After I recognize it, a different choice becomes possible, the choice to hug that place.

This includes hugging the judgment itself, the patterns that weigh me down, the fears, the misunderstandings, and the uncertainty. To understand that this was the only way I knew to relate to the pains and the problems. From that understanding compassion can be born.

All of this becomes possible when self-love is present in the inner space. And the more I succeed in softening the judgment, the inner alienation, and the fear through deep compassionate work, the more I create within myself a larger space of self-love.

Self-love becomes easier, clearer, and more understandable, not because I declared it, but because I neutralized inner mines through compassion. I went to the pain. I did not run. I was honest with myself.

Self-love does not exist through denial of self-judgment. There are always islands like these. And there is always work. This is the ongoing cultivation of compassion.

The more I did this kind of work, the more I opened within myself a wider opening for self-love. And the more I opened an opening for self-love, the easier it became to be in self-compassion. In this way, a space is created within me that contains more joy, more creativity, and more life energy, because obstacles were neutralized, love entered, and room opened for intuition.

These are movements of healing.

Practice Questions (to answer by hand for yourself or to share in a practice group):

  1. What is your most common act of self-love?

  2. What do you think about the possibility, on a deep experiential level, of being the “mother of yourself”?

  3. Try to describe the relationship between you and yourself at this time. What works well, what needs improvement, and what is the overall experience between you and you?

  4. In which areas of your life would you feel better if you could be more in self-compassion?

  5. Without thinking too much, write what is similar and what is different between “love” and “compassion,” a few lines and that is it.

Chapter 15: Forgiveness from the Mind, Compassion from the Heart. Understanding from the Mind, Seeing the Bigger Picture from the Heart

Chapter 15 closes Part Five, which deals with self-compassion, self-love, and self-forgiveness. In fact, this is the first time I am bringing in, with clear attention, the word forgiveness. We will relate to it shortly. I want to linger on our ability to forgive ourselves, on the importance of self-forgiveness on the way to self-compassion, and to add additional elements of self-understanding, and finally a wider view of different situations, as part of cultivating the capacity for compassion.

Part of the chapter title already defines the direction. Forgiveness from the mind, compassion from the heart. Understanding from the mind, seeing the bigger picture from the heart. We have a mind. We have logic. It is true that in courses and materials on inner leadership I place emphasis on the right brain, on experiential logic, on intuitive logic, not in an attempt to cancel rational thinking, which is very present, but in order to create balance and mutual fertilization. I even call it a marriage between the left brain and the right brain.

We are not always good at this as human beings. We are better at separations, and sometimes even at inner and outer competition. So the logical, decisive, analytical, organized part competes with the spontaneous, intuitive, flowing, emotional, spiritual part. In that competition, everyone loses. It takes time to understand, and within the cultivation and development of inner leadership, part of our role is to create connections between these two parts.

That does mean strengthening the right brain, the feminine intuitive mind, because at the level of civilization it is relatively weakened, despite its deep wisdom, despite the places where it knows more. And its absence, for example the absence of compassion, which is more connected to the emotional, spiritual, even divine space within us, is a danger. A physical danger on the personal level and on the public level. We are aware of it. We understand the prices we pay as a culture when we give up on compassion or reduce it.

And yet, we cannot rely only on compassion. Compassion is one aspect of relating to others. We also need the logical aspect. We also need boundaries. Sometimes we also need distance, and we need recognition of a person according to accumulated experience. Mind and intuition are meant to be in mutual fertilization.

That is how I relate here to forgiveness. Forgiveness comes more from the logical place. I learn, on a logical level, that it is right to forgive myself. Self-forgiveness also addresses the more critical, rational part within me. The critical part says, I was not okay, or I am not okay. The part of self-forgiveness says, okay, I recognize that I was not okay, and I forgive myself. I choose to forgive myself. This is important work. It neutralizes part of the load.

But it is still not compassion. Forgiveness is more decisive, focused, and responsibility-based. Compassion goes around it and beyond it, and also hugs the part that feels it is not okay, hugs it, lets it feel loved and wanted. It is okay that it asks for forgiveness and wants to justify itself, but it needs more than that.

There is a well-known story about an African tribe, or something like that, about how they treat someone who creates many problems and repeatedly breaks the tribal rules. They place that person in the center of a circle, and each person tells them how wonderful they are, how much they love them, how important they are. It helps the person return to the position where they do not have to commit violations in order to feel included and belonging. What they are missing is love.

So forgiveness and taking responsibility are more logical, and that matters. But if there is no compassion, if I cannot also bring in self-compassion and see a wider picture of myself and of the pain that led me to that weakness, that mistake, that error, I will remain in inner cycles of repeating the mistake and then asking forgiveness, repeating the mistake and then asking forgiveness. And this happens not only between me and me, it also happens between me and others.

The same is true regarding the element of understanding. To try to understand myself, to understand where I came from in doing what I did, that I am not satisfied with. Here too I need some muscles of reason, and also courage, to rise a little from the place of I am not okay. Okay, I am not okay, I took responsibility. I ask myself for forgiveness. I recommend practicing self-forgiveness regularly, even every day before going to sleep.

To release ourselves from various things, from slips, from careless words, to forgive ourselves. And I also want to understand where it came from, where it happened, where it arrived from. This is important inner work that helps me move toward compassion, because compassion already brings the wider picture.

It brings a wider picture about the story, about all the people around the story, about the real drama, about the places where I hurried to blame myself, about the role of the other person in what happened, about the role of society, about the role of the situation. Ultimately, to be on my own side.

Self-compassion is to be on my own side, even if I was not okay. It does not mean I do not take responsibility. It does not mean I tell myself I was okay. But I am still on my side. I do not lose myself. I do not create self-alienation within me because I was not okay.

I do not punish myself beyond the inner punishment that already exists, the pain. When I realize I messed up, I hurt someone, I missed something, I forgot, I lost something, I have already been punished. That is very significant, and it will be discussed a lot in the course on reducing excessive self-criticism.

It is very significant to be on my own side. And it is not easy. It is not easy. But who will stand by me and for me in my place. No one can, in the end. I want to be my own defense attorney, without reducing even slightly the responsibility for what I did, and still to be the one who leads me, the one who looks at the big picture, and in that way reduces self-judgment.

And only if I reduce self-judgment do I have a real chance for learning, for change, and for not repeating the mistake. As long as I cannot understand myself, as long as I do not see a wide picture, embracing, defending, understanding, listening to my story, within the place where I did something supposedly not okay and I was supposedly supposed to ask myself for forgiveness, as long as I have not reached that place where I reduce self-judgment as much as I can, hug myself, hug the child within me, hug the man or the woman within me, with this thing and in this thing, only then do I have a chance to move forward.

Only then do I have a chance to reach a similar situation one day and choose a better choice, thanks to compassion, not thanks to the fact that I got very angry at myself for making a mistake. That does not work. That anger does not hold. We return to the same mistakes as if to pull ourselves back in. Why. In order to receive attention from ourselves.

But that is not the attention we originally wanted. We wanted attention of love. And therefore, when the attention that arrives is anger, we repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. Until we receive more self-anger. When we receive self-love, self-compassion, and self-forgiveness, that need will calm down, and we will no longer need to demand our own attention in a negative way.

Just like with children, we are, in the end, children. Children who need self-forgiveness, who need self-understanding, who need self-compassion, who need self-advocacy, even if we made mistakes. Only in this way can we heal those wounds that lead us again and again to the same mistakes, and only in this way can we transform them and rise to a new place.

Practice Questions (to answer by hand for yourself or to share in a practice group):

  1. How able are you today to forgive yourself? Are there things that are still stuck in a lack of self-forgiveness?

  2. What happens inside you, in your psyche and in your body, when you strengthen your self-compassion?

  3. Are you able today to be more understanding toward mistakes you made in the past, and that you also tended to regret quite a lot?

  4. Think of an event in which you acted in a way you later regretted. Can you now identify the pain that drove you to act that way?

  5. What would happen if every day you created a five-minute ritual of self-forgiveness for everything that still does not feel resolved in your life?

Chapter 16: Authentic Creativity Is Nourished and Set in Motion Through Experiences of Compassion

Chapter 16 opens the final part of the process, within the framework of eighteen chapters and steps for learning the art of compassion. It is important to say from the outset that what is learned here is not meant to be a one-time experience. Especially when it comes to compassion, which is a complex and not simple human task, repetition, revisiting, and ongoing practice are required. Any progress in this field, even the smallest, functions like a deep healing for the soul, for the personality, and for our relationship with ourselves and with the world.

The most central tasks we have as human beings are interpersonal tasks. Most of the meaningful challenges in our lives reach us through people, through interactions, relationships, significant figures, traumas connected to people, fears rooted in human contexts, prejudices, stereotypes, judgment, alienation, and conflicts. We cannot escape the human sphere. Even if we try to withdraw or distance ourselves, at some point we will feel an inner lack that will push us back into contact with people, and there we will meet again the conflicts, the inner misunderstandings, and the challenges within us.

Within this sphere, compassion is one of the most meaningful tools for deep human development. It enables us to work consciously with the inner and outer conflicts that arise מול other people, and with all those emotional contents that awaken within us as a result of the presence of different people, in different situations and circumstances.

In this part of the process, we enter the meeting point between compassion and creativity, intuition, and self-expression. As has been said לאורך the way, compassion operates first and foremost for the benefit of the person who is compassionate. A person who practices compassion gradually succeeds in undergoing an inner transformation away from habits of separation, alienation, judgment, superiority, and stereotyping toward others. These habits are not random. They are survival strategies that were built in order to locate ourselves in the world, understand who we are in relation to others, who is stronger than us, who belongs to “our camp,” and where our place is within the social hierarchy.

These strategies may serve us on a basic survival level, but beyond a certain point they block our human development. Compassion allows us to remain in the interpersonal sphere in a more relaxed and open way, and to receive nourishment from encounters with other people. Every person we meet symbolizes something for us, and every human encounter nourishes us in some way: sometimes with joy, sometimes with a mental challenge, sometimes with concern or inner restlessness. Either way, every person is a source of emotional and conscious nourishment.

From here we arrive at the heart of this chapter: authentic creativity is nourished and set in motion through experiences of compassion. Creativity, which will stand at the center of other courses and processes within inner leadership, is first and foremost the way a person expresses the inner world into the outer world. Through creation, a person conducts a dialogue with emotions, enables transformation and healing, and builds a bridge between inner reality and outer reality. Creation is both a contribution to the environment and a strengthening movement back toward the self.

To allow creativity, a relatively free inner flow is required. This flow is blocked when fears, emotional distress, unprocessed traumas, and inner obstructions are present. These obstructions prevent the natural and healthy energy of the person from flowing outward in a harmonious and pleasant way. Creativity, in its deeper sense, is an expression of that flow.

Not every person immediately identifies as creative, and sometimes the very concept is experienced as distant or reserved for a gifted few. Yet when we look at creativity more deeply, we discover it is a natural, healthy, and necessary movement for every human being. Every person needs their creative expression. A large part of human distress, both visible and hidden, stems from the fact that many people did not receive, or did not allow themselves, access to their natural creative expression, sometimes because of mistaken education that taught them they are “not creative.”

To allow creativity, we need to reduce the barriers between ourselves and the environment, since creativity is an ongoing interaction from inside to outside. Here compassion plays a central role. Compassion dismantles emotional blocks, reduces judgment, and opens the possibility for heart-to-heart connection, even if at first the connection exists only in the imagination.

When judgment softens, new and available energy is released, seeking expression through creative initiatives. The less judgmental I am toward others, the less judgmental I am toward myself, and the less I fear that others will judge me and my creation. Compassion toward another strengthens self-compassion, and this allows me to see my need for creative expression through love, respect, and recognition, rather than through fear of rejection or ridicule.

In this way, a circular movement is created: when I bring compassion outward, I experience less judgment from the environment. The energy I transmit returns to me in a similar form. When I send out judgment, alienation, and superiority, that is the energy that tends to return to me as well. When I send compassion, recognition, and connection to the human story of the other, I experience more openness, acceptance, and support.

Thus compassion nourishes authentic creativity because it removes the obstructions to the healthy flow of energy from me to the world and back to me. This flow strengthens self-confidence, affirms the need for personal expression, and enables a person to take further creative steps from a sense of stability and belonging. These are healing processes that prepare the ground for a deeper, freer, and more authentic expression as the journey continues.

Practice Questions (answer in handwriting for yourself or share in a practice group):

  1. Do you have self-compassion for the fact that there are creative impulses you have not yet dared to realize?

  2. What creative ideas might open in you when certain interpersonal walls soften thanks to compassion?

  3. Try to recall a “creative failure,” something you initiated or tried and it did not succeed. Can you look at it today with compassion?

  4. Compassion is a connection to the God within, and so is creativity. How is your relationship with the God within you?

  5. What new creation do you long to create in the coming months or years?

Chapter 17: If We Listen Well, We Will Discover That Intuition Always Flows Toward Us With Great Compassion

Chapter 17 is, in my view, a challenging chapter, and that is a good thing. It is good to be challenged in Lesson 17, approaching the completion of this process of learning the art of compassion through eighteen lessons. As always, it is important to remember: this process is meant to be a stimulus בלבד.

A stimulus for application in daily life. Yes, it calls us, but it also asks, suggests, and invites repeated viewing and group work. These are themes that are very significant for life, and they are not simple to implement, mainly because of the confrontation we have with other forces operating in the physical reality of life.

Facing these forces, we seek to bring a growing skillfulness in positive forces, in remembering who we truly are. For that to happen, we need repeated circulation of the material within us, with others, alone, and in a group. To absorb as much as possible, to see that sometimes it does not work, and to return to practice.

And so we arrive at Chapter 17, which carries a challenging title: if we listen well, we will discover that intuition always flows toward us with great compassion. I said this is a challenging chapter.

This chapter also touches metaphysical concepts, and connects compassion, intuition, and the God within us. God is a concept, a word. In English it is a short word, God. In Hebrew it is a longer, deeper word, it seems to me, or perhaps we have simply grown used to it differently. Either way, it is a representative word, and it matters in the context of what we are learning here, both regarding intuition, which is taught in another course within inner leadership, and here, within compassion.

When we speak about intuition, we may call this part within us the inner God, the higher self, inner guidance, inner guides. The name does not matter. We are speaking about something beyond the physical self or the emotional self, something wider that sees more.

This part, the God within us, speaks with us. It communicates in different ways, gives signs, hints, signals. It has a unique channel of communication that is not always accessible, not always easy to believe in, and not always easy to connect with. That channel is what we call, in our language, intuition.

Compassion, in this sense, is the ability to see and meet the divine part within me through my ability to see the divine part within another. Ultimately, both exist in a subtle vibration. Despite all the dramas, the pain, the traumas, and the scars, there is presence there, a presence beyond the drama.

When we succeed in compassion, when in our imagination we activate ourselves by embracing another person and containing within that embrace their life story with love, recognition, and acceptance, this is compassion. It is based on the understanding that every human being came into life with a bundle of tasks and a bundle of choices. They came from their divine space into a life path that includes pains, traumas, injuries, and failures. All of these are challenges and missions the soul chose in advance, on the divine level.

Not seeing this means remaining trapped in judgment, which separates me from others, hides from me the divine part in me and in them, and binds me tightly to the ground, to the illusion that there is nothing beyond the earthly story alone.

When we rise a little and allow intuition to operate, the one that sees more, the one that “runs ahead of time,” something different happens. Intuition that runs ahead of time is not a logical or scientific concept. And yet we encounter it, we play with it, and we accept its existence.

Intuition comes from a source that in certain respects is beyond life, yet at the same time is deeply connected to life. It also guides life, and it also participated in planning it. This source provides us with intuitive information, and if we are not frightened or alarmed, we can feel that this information comes toward us with a great deal of compassion.

Intuition is not judgmental toward the person. If intuition offers me a direction and I do not follow it, it will not be angry with me, and it will not quarrel with me. It remains compassionate toward me, and its offer remains open for later as well. Intuition comes from a source that is compassionate toward me, with an energy of embrace, understanding, and recognition of my dramatic story, with my hesitations, pains, and doubts.

All of this exists within the stream of intuitive information. There is a lot of compassion in it. And so, when we succeed in more compassion toward people or toward reality, it is a sign that we are approaching the world from a feeling place, but not only feeling, rather a higher kind of feeling.

In that place, where I open in my imagination to the higher expression of people, I also open to intuition, because they belong to the same territory. I can feel people better, be more intuitive about them, because I am less sunk in the drama of needing to separate, define, and label.

All of these definitions, “this is Mizrahi and this is Ashkenazi,” “this is an arse and this is a nerd,” “she is a freha,” “she is too rich,” are screens of judgment. They hide from me the real, divine story that exists in every person. At the same time, they also hide from me the ability to feel people, to be with them in intuition, to sense them, to know them, to see the story through information that comes from my heart.

Judgment screens block spiritual information that can reach me from everywhere. Therefore, the more I practice compassion, the more open I am to intuition. And the more I listen to intuition without fear, the more I can feel that it comes with great compassion, with a deep desire to help me advance in life and fulfill the missions I came with.

This is how compassion and intuition are connected. Compassion is a story of listening and remembering my source and the source of the other. When it is present, it removes blocks and fears, and allows me to receive intuition more easily, to recognize that it comes with compassion and tolerance, that it is an offer and not a demand, and that it respects me and my choices of whether to listen or not.

This is one complex: intuition and compassion. And I invite you, as you go out into the world and approach areas in which you would like more intuitive information, to begin with compassion. First soften. First remove judgment. First see the deep and divine story. First connect.

And from that place of compassion, you will see how suddenly intuitive insights begin to join you.

Practice Questions (answer in handwriting for yourself or share in a practice group):

  1. What, in your view, is the connection between “compassion” and “flow”?

  2. Have you noticed that when you are in compassion, it is easier for you to “listen” to contents and truths connected to people than when you are not?

  3. Do you have self-compassion for the part of you that sometimes does not believe your intuition?

  4. When you connect compassion and intuition into one place, what is created from that, for you?

  5. Intuition includes a unique kind of listening, and so does compassion. How is your “listening muscle” these days?

Chapter 18: From Compassion to Inner Peace: Reducing Criticism, Better Relationships With Myself and With My World

Chapter 18 concludes a process that is meant only to begin. Compassion is probably one of the most important things in human existence, for two central reasons.

The first reason is the recognition of our ignorance. It is important to know how ignorant we are, so we do not take meaningful things for granted and assume we know what they are, when in fact we are very far from knowing. It is good to have the humility to say: I do not know, this is still weak in me, I have a lot to practice, I do not fully understand this. The concept of compassion is common and widespread, and it is perceived as positive, important, and necessary, but where do people actually implement it in practice?

The Nuremberg Code was meant to protect people from situations of lack of compassion, but it does not help. Entire systems operate without compassion, people are harmed, and it is as if all codes and all laws do not work, did not protect us, do not protect us, and will not protect us.

The only thing that will protect humanity is that more and more people recognize that they must work on their compassion. That compassion must be learned from a young age. That we must become familiar with compassion, become familiar with the price of judgment, and recognize that we have a tendency toward judgment, separation, categories, stereotypes, comparisons, superiority, and contempt toward another population. We are like this. It is there.

From here comes the second reason, derived from the first: I must devote my whole life to learning, training, and implementation, together with the other components of inner leadership, all of which connect with one another, nourish one another, move one another, and become a whole complex in which compassion is a very significant part.

I cannot be in inner leadership if I color the world around me with judgment, because that becomes self-judgment. And when I am in self-judgment, I am in inner separation between parts, I isolate myself, I do not listen to the parts within me, and from that separation I also attack myself. Then I do not listen to my inner voice, and it becomes easy to manage me, and I have no inner leadership.

This is an introduction to the final chapter, which comes to say: this is meaningful work, sacred work, work, in me, in you, in all of us. Our role is to work with our compassion, to improve it, and it is possible. It is magic, it is pleasure. And it is also possible to pass it on to others through example, not through persuasion, not through long logical explanations. We can pass it on by inviting others to learn together, and mainly through personal example.

Compassion can be contagious. Compassion offers an option that releases and dismantles barriers between us and others, and between us and ourselves. When we demonstrate it, we invite others to do it too.

So, Chapter 18: from compassion to inner peace, reducing criticism, better relationships with myself and with my world. We must understand that the tendency toward judgment comes with us from birth. It is a challenge we arrived with. We emerged from the birth canal with judgment. We separated from the place we came from, from the divine place we were in, and immediately entered a world that is built, at least at first, on separation and distance from the source.

From that place, you immediately build the barriers: who is for me and who is against me, who will nourish me and who will not, where must I be careful. Very quickly I build walls, barriers, judgment, and exaggerated definitions. At first they are necessary for survival, to know where I should be and whom I should connect with.

But over time it turns me into a relatively closed creature, and as I said before, a creature disconnected from the inner voice. Because to connect to my inner voice, I must return home. I must return within me to the source within me that speaks through me. It was never truly separated from me, it is only that I became somewhat distant. And my challenge as a human being is to draw closer again while I am here on earth, to rise into compassion, and to feel the divine within me while I am still flesh and blood.

This is the role. And this is what ultimately builds the foundation for what we call peace. Because what builds the foundation for war is those same walls, those misunderstandings that can reach hatred, that judgment that produces hostility. That judgment takes energy that is meant to flow between two sides and traps it into two camps. It is not healthy for energy to be imprisoned in two camps, so it will want to break through the walls, and it will produce war.

Instead of breaking through the walls, we can dissolve them through compassion. The walls within us and the walls we have with others are essentially the same thing. They are projections of what exists within us.

As we develop compassion toward ourselves, we learn how much we exaggerated in self-criticism, how much we exaggerated in self-judgment, and how much we did not understand our true story. How much we became experts in self-flagellation and unrealistic self-expectations. Compassion helps us see this, soften it, and say: this criticism is not so necessary for me. It is not effective. It teaches me nothing. It does not help me develop, it does not help me change, it does not push me toward anything.

What moves me is a healthy inner force that is there, a natural creative force, and only when I am in a space of compassion can that force express itself. That is what will help me correct where I erred, that is what will help me find the right way. Not criticism and not self-hostility. It does not work. Self-criticism serves self-judgment, serves inner isolations between different parts of the psyche.

Compassion dissolves the walls and shows us that it is better to embrace myself after I have made a mistake than to be angry with myself. Better in terms of effectiveness. If I embrace myself after I erred, I have a greater chance not to repeat the mistake than if I punish myself. Compassion is more effective. It is more energy-efficient. It shortens the path. And it builds a foundation for inner peace and outer peace.

In order for me to make peace with someone who was once an enemy, I must see beyond the drama between us. I must come with compassion and see the human story there, the God within them, the child within them. Then we can shake hands. Then we can embrace. Then we can listen. Then we can speak about conflicts. Compassion is a foundation. It is the ground for a healthy society and for my healthy relationship with myself.

Therefore compassion is such a meaningful asset for lifelong learning, teaching, and demonstration, without being angry at ourselves when we do not succeed. If we are judgmental, we must also be compassionate toward our own judgment. Every time we enter self-anger, we made a mistake, okay, we made a mistake, compassion toward that mistake.

Compassion does not keep accounts. It does not take revenge. It does not boycott. It is not offended. It is always there as an option to use and to practice. It is simply a muscle we want to cultivate more and more. If you have come this far, that muscle within you has already begun to develop. And it is important that you see you still have a long road to develop it, not only you, also me. This is a way of life.

More and more compassion, more healing of myself, more healing of the environment. Thank you for coming here. We are on a journey of cultivating inner leadership within us and within others, and this journey truly yields its fruits.

Practice Questions (answer in handwriting for yourself or share in a practice group):

  1. What are the most important things you learned in this course?

  2. What are your new challenges following this process?

  3. Have you experienced a situation in which your compassion succeeded in softening self-criticism? Can you describe it?

  4. Think of a person you consider in some way an “enemy,” a “bad” person, or someone who has done harmful things recently. What might happen if you open compassion toward them?

  5. What do you want to wish for yourself today, six months from now?

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