Today,
I want to talk about a beautiful, noble yet mistakenly interpreted feeling:
compassion. We have intrinsically
thought that compassion implies pity and sorrow, and thus, we have turned the
simple yet powerful act of putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes, seeing
the world through their eyes, smelling the possibilities with their sense of
smell, feeling others’ pain as our own, into something vile; compassion is the
elevated feeling that leads you to total empathy, to understanding what your
reason, your mind and your ego cannot abstract, by the simple and magical act
of beating with someone else’s heart that becomes your own …
Our
limited, misleading description of compassion, demonized as pity, makes us
think we are good when we dim our own light, so others can shine. My heresy? Based on compassion, our light should shine so generously
that it will generate light all around it, minimizing pity, maximizing compassion.
We
think we should be "humble" (another misinterpreted word) and we
should belittle ourselves, when the truth is, if we are as great as we can be,
we are allowing others to be as great as they really are, as they can become.
But in an attempt to go beyond this idea, in the search to find what causes
this feeling of hypocrisy disguised as humility, I came to the words of Marianne Williamson: “What scares us most is not our darkness, but rather our
light”, that is to say, when we think we are being compassionate with others,
we are really just feeling selfish pity, and when we think we are helping, by
turning out our light, we are just fleeing from our own light, we are afraid of
our own greatness.
So
forget it. Shine. Be as great as you are, as you can be,
beat to the rhythm of the Universe and all the beings you find on your way, and
let the light shine on them, protect them, inspire them and, above all,
surround them in an embrace full of compassion, which in Hindi, is nothing more
than “Namaste”: I love the place in your heart where you and I are ONE.
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