Compassion, when we sense, understand, and feel another’s suffering and are spontaneously compelled to act, should be an integral part of any conversation on our individual and collective human health and happiness.
In Chinese medicine we have this very important concept of inherited essence. Inherited essence is the totality of the potential we come into the world with. Some aspects of our inherited essence are very personal and predispose us to particular physical, emotional, and character traits, our individual strengths and vulnerabilities. These we inherit from our parents. On a deeper level our inherited essence is the product of the evolution of our entire human and planetary family. These are the more primordial aspects of our being. The powers that make us human. Our deepest human programming. These are our human inheritance. An integral part of our human inheritance is the capacity for compassion.
“At our core, at our essence, we are programmed to be compassionate.”
At our core, at our essence, we are programmed to be compassionate. All of us are born wired with the capacity and the drive to sense and to connect with the embodied emotional responses of our fellow human beings. It is the force of this connection that compels us to act to alleviate discomfort or suffering when we become aware of it in other members of our human (or Earth ) family. It is who we are at our essence.
If this is the case, and modern science and the ancient wisdom traditions now seem to concur on this point, why do so many individual human beings spend so much time not acting from this compassionate place? What is the source of this dissonance and disconnect to our connection to our deepest, most primordial, most compassionate self?
The answer appears to be in what happens to us AFTER we are born. Our capacity to access that limitless space of inherited compassion relies on our ability to sense and feel our universal interconnectedness to all beings. Our oneness.
What happens to us that creates this disconnect from our birthright? What happens is we are born into a world of others’ habituated dissonant patterns. This is why we seem so often to be on automatic. We are literally run by a collection of old habituated patterns.
These ways of being in the world were programmed into us, after our birth, either intentionally or unintentionally. We were born into and live in a world filled with habituated thinking patterns, habituated imaginative patterns, habituated sensory patterns, habituated emotional patterns, and habituated patterns of the breath and spirit. This programming distorts our relationship to the world and to ourselves.
This congestion, this dissonance, inhibits our access to our sense and our feeling of interconnectedness. It creates a context where we feel alone, separate from the world. When we feel separate from the world we can no longer sense and feel our connection to others. We can not connect to the universality of joy and fear and grief and worry and anger. We can not feel compassion.
We can, however, dissolve these old habituated patterns. We can re-enliven our senses and liberate our bodies from their emotional prisons, We can reclaim our primordial connection to compassion. We can reclaim our rightful human inheritance of life lived in a limitless sea of compassion.
Next Up: Dissolving old habituated patterns
To learn more check out: Entering the Vessels: 6 Week Introductory Course