Compassion in Action

Breathe in the world's pain, breathe out love, and let karuna (compassion) blossom in your life.

By Anne Cushman

Two old friends of mine recently met for lunch at an outdoor café--both of them teachers who had been practicing yoga and meditation for almost two decades. Both were going through difficult times. One could barely limp up the stairs; she'd been in acute physical pain for months and was facing the prospect of hip replacement surgery. The other's marriage was coming unglued; she was struggling with anger, grief, and chronic insomnia.

"It's humbling," the first woman said, pushing her salad around on her plate with her fork. "Here I am a yoga teacher, and I'm hobbling into classes. I can't even demonstrate the simplest poses."

"I know what you mean," the other admitted. "I'm leading meditations on peace and lovingkindness, and then going home to cry and smash dishes."

It's an insidious force in spiritual practice--the myth that if we just practice hard enough, our lives will be perfect. Yoga is sometimes sold as a surefire path to a body that never breaks down, a temper that never snaps, a heart that never shatters. Compounding the pain of spiritual perfectionism, an internal voice often scolds us that it's selfish to attend to our relatively tiny pains, given the vastness of suffering in the world.

But from the point of view of yogic philosophy, it's more useful to view our personal breakdowns, addictions, losses, and errors not as failures of, or distractions from, our spiritual journey but as potent invitations to crack our hearts open. In both yoga and Buddhism, the ocean of suffering we encounter in life--both our own and that which surrounds us--is seen as a tremendous opportunity to awaken our compassion, or karuna, a Pali word that literally means "a quivering of the heart in response to a being's pain." In Buddhist philosophy, karuna is the second of the four brahmaviharas--the "divine abodes" of friendliness, compassion, gladness, and equanimity that are every human being's true nature. Patanjali's Yoga Sutra also enjoins aspiring yogis to cultivate karuna.

The practice of karuna asks us to open to pain without drawing away or guarding our hearts. It asks us to dare to touch our deepest wounds--and to touch the wounds of others as if they were our own. When we stop pushing away our own humanity--in all of its darkness and glory--we become more able to embrace other people with compassion as well. As Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön writes, "In order to have compassion for others, we have to have compassion for ourselves. In particular, to care about other people who are fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, mean--you name it--to have compassion and to care for these people means not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves." But why would we seek to take the counterintuitive step of embracing darkness and pain? The answer is simple: Doing so gives us access to our deep, innate wellspring of compassion. And from this compassion will naturally flow wise actions in service of others--actions undertaken not from guilt, anger, or self-righteousness but as the spontaneous outpouring of our hearts.

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