Compassion

A man entered the subway with his two young sons who proceeded to run all over the place. The man just sat there, even though many of the passengers were clearly annoyed. Finally, someone confronted him. The man looked up and said, “Sorry. We just got back from the hospital where their mom just died.” Everyone’s anger at him dissolved.

I taught an 8-week mindfulness course this spring for educators who wanted to learn how they could bring mindfulness to their students, many of whom have very hard lives. When it came time for each person to introduce themselves, I asked them to give their name and where they worked and then to “tell a story of a child who pushed your buttons until you knew his or her story.” I began with a story of my own from 1974.

One by one, we went around the room and heard 21 stories. One was about a 4th grader who was physically and verbally violent in the classroom. His teacher was beside himself until he found that the boy’s family had walked from Guatemala to the US border, and he had lost a family member along the way. At the end of the stories, we sat in silence for a minute. Then I said, “So, this course is really about how do we hold our students (and everyone) with love and compassion and hold them accountable.

Several teachers reported that after that first day and after learning practices that they could use during the day, they noticed that many of these students’ behaviors began to change in both obvious and subtle ways. The children could see and feel and hear that the teacher cared about them. The suffering was still there, but suffering that is held in compassion is a different kind of suffering.

There is so much research on the impact of childhood trauma on a person’s behavior. A friend of mine who teaches adults how to play again told me about a study of men on death row. More than 90% of them had been physically abused during childhood. Another commonality was not remembering ever playing with others during childhood!

When someone pushes our buttons, and we find out “the rest of the story,” they often don’t push our buttons anymore. Ultimately, we don’t even have to know the rest of the story, we just have to remember that there is always a story. As one of the teachers said about the child who pushed her buttons, “this child was not born manipulative; that is a learned behavior.” Note: Technically, others don’t push our buttons. Rather they do things that cause us to push our own buttons! (The Pixar movie “Inside Out” illustrates this beautifully.)

Compassion is such a powerful attitude that we can choose to take. I was at an educator’s conference with the Dalai Lama in 2009 where he said that compassion is a skill that can be taught. My first reaction was “no, don’t reduce this to a skill.” However, during the conference, I realized that while compassion is more than a skill, it can be taught and practiced, and that virtually anyone can learn. Others have written entire books about compassion and forgiveness. In a future post, I will talk about a family of behaviors that are deeply interconnected, including love, compassion, and forgiveness.

Ultimately, compassion is a choice and it is always available. The problem is that we often forget this choice. Interestingly, one of the words that the Buddha used for mindfulness also means to remember. You can see a great (and short) video about this, created by the Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock by going to YouTube and typing “Get Service.” I recommend the one uploaded by judahben05.

This then leads to the question, what can we do to increase the chances of remembering compassion during the day.

That will be the topic of next week’s blog.

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In a couple weeks, I will be asking for feedback about my blog posts. One of the challenges in blogging is finding the right length. Today I am including two paragraphs that add about 200 words. One possibility is to end each blog at a point, signified with a dotted line, and then a one or two paragraphs that I know some readers will find useful. I am including such an addendum today.

I developed a practice I called compassionate accountability. When I taught college, I met (about a month into the semester) with students who were doing poorly. In my office, I explained that I saw a big gap between their potential and their actual work and that something was getting in the way, e.g., they were working full-time, taking 20 credits, were partying too much, had personal problems at home, and other possibilities. I explained that I cared about them and wanted to help them succeed. I said I could help them with some of the problems and that the college had resources for others (e.g., the Writing Center, the Counseling Center). I ended with “so what’s getting in the way?”

It was like I had administered truth serum! My students’ response to my compassion was openness and honesty. I listened, we talked, and we worked together. Things changed for the better in most but not all cases. However, the human-to-human relationship had been established. On several occasions, I saw a student who had still struggled in the course and had gotten a C or a D. They would greet me warmly—the low grade was not a judgment, but simply an accurate assessment of the work that they had been able to do.