One of my greatest achievements as a human being on a spiritual journey is the conscious movement from fury to compassion.
I grew up in a country where disagreements were retaliated with dreadful consequences and children were train to be insensitive militarized robots. The education system were to take our will, our personality and our humanity. I was told numerous times what a worthless piece of sh*t I was. Mistakes were punished severely and we were only shown an imperfect and intolerant world that wants to shed our blood.
As a result, most of the people I know chose quiet desperation, I moved into resistance and fury. All I heard inside of me was: HOW DARE YOU?!? My fury was fueled by criticism and helplessness.
I spent decades criticizing the world around me with the conviction that this is my job to do that. I am a creative with fresh ideas, now I have a voice and I want to used it. I don’t think that there is anything wrong with communicating a need for change. However, there is a great difference between how this need is communicated. I learnt judgement so I used criticism. And the result was upset and disconnection.
Each time I criticized someone’s ideas or actions, they got upset with me and did not want to work or be with me any more. It is not to say that I did not have the right to express my disagreement but the way I did it was so harsh and critical that people moved into resistance, exactly the same way I did when I was a severely criticized child.
It took me a long time to understand that if I wanted to generate lasting change I needed to come from a loving and accepting place within myself that gives the other person the right to do what s/he thinks best. I don’t have to agree with it, but I must respect it.
Compassion is not giving excuses but knowing that everyone at any given moment in time is trying to do their best to meet a need regardless of my opinion on how they may attempt to do that.
Compassion assumes that everyone wants to meet their needs by the means available to them. These means usually steam from the beliefs systems that they grew up with.
Moving from anger to compassion removes the judgment. My inner critic who feeds on events that appear to be unjust or not good enough is now replaced by an observer.
In compassion, the observer wants connection instead of separation. The observer wants to generate change in ‘ togetherness’ which also means that it may not be possible. This topic is for another post! 🙂
Moving from fury to compassionate understanding is actually moving from separation to connection. In this action, I released anger about the way I was treated as a child and my fear of people. At the same time, I started opening to connecting and collaborating.
