3 Lessons in How to be Fierce and Compassionate

It's my belief that Compassionate Power is the most radical and effective power that we have to create a thriving present and future. However, we can disown this power, not believing its full strength, thinking it will make us weak or a ‘push over’ if we are too compassionate.

Yet my experience is that compassion is the fiercest, strongest, most unstoppable force for positive change and achieving your goals. It will supercharge your passion, dissolve the belief blocks and limitations that might have stopped you in the past and activate an inner resilience in you that is formidable.

‘Compassion and passion’ was last month’s topic of conversation for my Circle of Women events, and it really showed me that the richness and importance that I felt about this topic was alive for other women as well. As I reflect on our conversations and my experience of how central compassion has been in coaching women, 3 lessons surfaced that I wanted to share.

Lesson 1: We have atrophied our compassion muscle – it’s time to turn it back on

'We make a huge error in trivialising and rendering sissy compassion'
Matthew Fox's article: The return of the Black Madonna a sign of our times

Turning on the news can be depressing and overwhelming – a feeling of being a small pawn in a far bigger picture where mass pain, trauma and suffering are a daily occurrence. You might ask yourself, what can I possibly do about that? It can feel like nothing, and so the pragmatic choice is to cut off from your compassionate feeling muscle, to let it atrophy just a little so that you have the emotional, mental space to act with positive intent and hopefully make the world a better place as a result.

However in your desire to avoid ‘compassionate fatigue’ are you in fact also lessening your connection to your passion? Is it possible that overtime your desensitized sensitivity starts to backfire on you, that along the way of turning down the volume on the hard bits of life, the tone, richness and high notes of your joy and zest for life are also less easy to hear?

When I became a mother choosing to desensitize simply became a no-go option; both because I wanted to taste all the sweetness of life as a new mama and because I’m now more committed that ever to creating a future where my daughter can thrive. But that left me with a challenge. How can I feel compassion and not be overwhelmed? How can I let it fire up my passion and be fully in the lightness, buoyancy and possibility of life that I feel is where I can achieve my greatest potential?

So I took it to the collective intelligence of our circle as we explored how passion and compassion showed up in our lives. The response was revealing:

Compassion has become a paradox, either an ideal that is impossible to live up to, or a weakness that you can’t afford to inhabit.
We worry: ‘If I’m compassionate with myself, will I be too soft on myself and allow things to slide that I should not?’ Or, ‘if I’m compassionate with another, will that mean that I give them the license to act in a way that leaves me worse off?’
We don’t talk about compassion in our lives – it can become a duty, an ‘ought to do’ vs an ‘inspiring way forward’.
We all experience how we can be incredibly uncompassionate and harsh, especially with ourselves.
Yet also on reflection we realised that often the way through the major challenges we have had in our lives has been first to have acceptance, empathy and compassion, then everything else flows.
Compassion has a different pace to the speed of modern life, we slow down our breath, we reflect and be present, without this space to acknowledge our ability to ‘feel with’ ourselves and others, we can find ourselves living on adrenalin and anxiety.

This awareness of our habitual, unintentional disconnect from compassion was also greatly contrasted with what enabled us to experiencing compassion more deeply, namely…

Lesson 2: Compassion is something we need to embody for it to become a strength

'In both Arabic and Hebrew, the word compassion comes from the word for womb’Matthew Fox's article: The return of the Black Madonna a sign of our times

In the heroine’s journey, embodiment and specifically the intelligence of the womb are hugely important keys on the journey of transformation. They stand for the deep mysterious intelligence of our bodies, instincts, sexuality and creativity that are often, in modern western culture at least, subjugated to the ‘higher power’ of the mind and rationality.

I’m an avid researcher of the myths of the feminine and although Matthew Fox is exploring one legendary heroine (e.g. the Black Madonna), when you look closely at the key ‘Goddess myths’ compassion is often a central component.

For instance, Lakshmi, the Hindu archetypal energy of joy and abundance is born out of an argument between the gods and demons. She is created from the ambrosia of life whose origin comes from being able to sit with the churning oceans of anger created in their grand argument. Who would have thought, Joy comes from a compassionate response that includes our inner gods and demons!

Or Inanna, the oldest written myth of the heroine we know of (Sumerian, and closely linked to the later heroines of Aphrodite, Astarte and Venus), is reborn from the underworld because of two little creatures who empathize with the pain of Inanna’s underworld sister (aka shadow). It was not in judging, improving or slaying her inner demons that Inanna ascended to her full power, but rather through having empathy and feeling with them.

In our circle events we explored our relationship to compassion and passion through 3 wisdom centres in our body: mind, heart and womb. We explored how it felt to really stand in our insights, feelings and experience of compassion, and it was through the language of our body that we found our confidence and where ‘fierce compassion’ really came alive.

This fierceness looked different dependent on our individual situations; for some a protective warriorress of new life, for others an unmovable presence and rooting in the midst of change, or an openness to be vulnerable to speak our dreams and desires and have courageous conversations on what matters to us. In all cases, these responses started from ‘embodying’ our experience fully and were in high contrast to the more passive conceptualized understanding of compassion as feeling sympathy. Rather, we experienced compassion as a dynamic, alive, responsive and active energy, all of which lead to our third lesson…

Lesson 3: Compassion is the source of passionate, creative living

'Grieving, celebrating and acting justly are all part of compassion.'(Mathew Fox)

Compassion is not about martyrdom, of ‘having to’ and ‘should do’s’ because the world, my loved ones, need me too so much. It is about opening to a deeper experience of love and connection to what is important to you. Compassion comes alive in this intimacy of connection, and it falls apart when we cut off and separate ourselves from life and our passions.

In fact when we allow the full range of compassionate experience in our lives, it becomes the source of renewed creativity and passionate living.

What do I meant by that? Well often compassion is limited to a certain hard and narrow path of ‘handling suffering’ in our lives or the wider world. Yet compassion really encompasses all of what it means to truly ‘feel with’ ourselves and others. In fact, its breadth and inclusivity is one of it’s key qualities. It’s where our individualism meets community, where our desire to live purposeful rich lives is received in its context of belonging.

Based on this, grief and celebrating are both essential parts of compassion and our willingness to express both are also key lessons in living with fierce compassion.

For example, grief was the authentic response by a client of mine who saw the potential undermining of all her hard work in sustainability and environmental protection in the days and weeks post Trump’s election. In giving space for her grief, she opened up also to the strength, values and huge reservoirs of love for our planet and all those working for true Eco-nomics. This has given her the resilience to step up into a more high profile role in innovatively, lovingly disrupting our disconnected, unsustainable ways of living.

Remember also not be timid in your celebration of life too! Do you sometimes find yourself so concerned with ticking off the next item on your to do list that you barely pause to celebrate your achievements, small and big wins, or mark key moments in your life? Yet by sharing your celebrations with others, you give yourself buoyancy, you create connection to others that affirm your loves and joys, and in this space community starts to form.

Which leads us on to this small phrase, with a lot of power to unwrap with discernment; ‘acting justly’

Let me start by sharing this research from Benjamin Grant in his TED talk, 'What it feels like to see the earth from space.’ He shares a study done of astronauts by Pennsylvania University looking at the impact of the visual experience of seeing the earth from outer space. From the studies, academics believe that this experience changed the hard wiring of their brains to develop new higher state faculties. They broke down the impact of this visual experience of seeing the earth from afar as giving i) an overwhelming sense of emotion, ii) feeling a huge appreciation of beauty for the earth and iii) and feeling of connection to every living creature.

In other words, a compassionate awakening. Stepping into a peak state through a radical experience of wholeness, connection, appreciation and care.

What I take from this is that to choose and cultivate experiences of beauty, connection and wholeness, and allow them to emotionally moves you, means you’ll naturally want to act in ‘right relationship’ to yourself and the world around you. You’ll also give yourself the grounds to care about the wellbeing of ‘life’ beyond your personal sphere.

It’s here that the real fierceness of compassion comes – to act from that knowledge, even if it might present risk to you. This higher functioning embodied compassion is willing to pause and be with any fear or anxiety that arises, stepping out of the ‘power over’ paradigms (that says we are too small/insignificant to make a difference) and discover an inner power to stand in your values and what matters to you.

When we take time to cultivate these essential experiences of embodied connection and ‘feel with’ ourselves and others at key junctions in our lives, compassion becomes our gateway to thriving because it’s quite literally you tapping into the felt collective intelligence of what it means to thrive together on planet earth.

When you choose this broad and deep experience of compassion, you connect to yourself and our world in a way that brings your passion alive, and prepares you to taking that next courageous action for what you believe in.

So… Today I choose to be fiercely compassionate and passionate for what I love. I know that in doing so I will grow in my bravery and courage, and discover latent strengths inside me that up until now I’ve only peaked into.

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