Is your heart heavy today?  I could feel its weight just as the clouds began to fill the sky.  A mixture of sadness, loneliness, pain, maybe regret.  Did something go badly?

I got caught in a downpour this afternoon.  Just as I was leaving the cafe, the clouds opened up and poured out a heavy rain.  I ran four blocks from the cafe to the parking garage in my jeans and sandals.  The jog was exhilarating as hell.  Stretching my legs and racing through the gusting rain felt so good.  The air was warm and fresh.  The cosmic thunder was a symphony above my head.  I ran past the capital to the lake and watched the wind move the water.  Magnificent.

Even dark skies can bring peace and contentment and ecstasy.  You were looking for comfort today.  I said, “nyinge, nyinge.”  I hope you felt it.

When Tibetans hold a baby in their arms, they whisper “nyinge, nyinge,” overcome with affection and compassion.  The words are an expression of this kind of love, an absolutely exquisite tenderness.  A recognition of inborn innocence coupled with a blissful compulsion to nurture.  This is how Tibetans conceptualize compassion.  When they describe the process of cultivating compassion, they might say, “nyinge, nyinge.”

my little one

Yesterday, three dainty sparrows landed in the grass near my feet and nipped the dandelion flowers.  I never knew sparrows ate dandelions.  They feasted on a blossom as big as their head and speedily mashed the little bundles of yellow petals they yanked out with their beaks.  What would it be like to be a sparrow enjoying a salad in the wild?  They were so near, I could imagine holding one in my hand.  It’s been a long time since I felt a bird in my hand, but I remember the sensation of soft, fluttering feathers and the warm, weightless form of a creature so small, I could feed it all day with a crumb from my breakfast.

Another creature made my heart glow later that same day.  A little baby bumbling along in the grass on her hands and feet stole my gaze so completely as I strode down the sidewalk that I almost walked into a bush.  I came within inches of smacking my face into huge branches that extended out over the sidewalk.  I yelped, jerked myself back, and quickly circumvented it.  The infant’s father chuckled at me.  My tenderness for his brand new human, so beautiful and wobbly, was not well hidden.

Tender compassion is that utter joy you feel when you see another being receive nourishment or shelter.  Even when you see suffering, even when you empathize with another’s pain, tender compassion carries with it an almost illogical overwhelming joy.

How to Experience Tender Compassion

In recent weeks, I’ve observed that tender compassion follows quickly and robustly from certain mental exercises.

1.  Forgive everyone for everything, completely and utterly, especially yourself.

If you experience forgiveness and a deep letting go, no longer thinking about how you want others to be different, the perception of innocence in everyone blossoms, and this gives rise to tender compassion.  The more profoundly and completely you can forgive, the deeper your compassion will be.  Compassion is intimately tied to judgment and criticism.  We are constantly making determinations about who deserves love and who does not.  Dropping judgments, not simply to abide by moral constraint but to experience things in a new way, leads to a conceptual awakening and an opening of the heart.

Forgiveness is the capacity to see things as they are with complete acceptance for what they are in that moment, without the tension of resistance.  You begin to notice that the vast majority of the pain you attribute to injury is actually chosen, and when the actions of others cease to cause you pain, what injury is there to protest?

Sit in a quiet place and say to everyone in your life, “I forgive you, completely and utterly.  May you be forgiven.  May all of your apparent mistakes and shortcomings be dissolved and trouble you no more, and may my misperceptions of mistakes and shortcomings within you be erased or made irrelevant to my love for you.”

2.  Open to being needed.

Like little birds chirping with their mouths agape, tugging on you for a response, many people will come into your life begging you for help or laying demands upon your time and energy.  Resistance and resentment come easily.  You may not have what they need, but that doesn’t matter.  All that matters is the way your heart responds.  You can protect your time and energy when you need to, without the faintest hint of guilt or anxiety, and still feel tender compassion taking full form in the heart.

Consider the way you gaze at a little bird and say, as they tilt their head at you and wait for another crumb to fall, “Dear, that is all the food I have.  No more.”  You still glow with tenderness.  It is the experience as a whole that is imbued with love.  Any suffering in those present, you discover, is intertwined with the stirring of love of which you are both a part.  You might worry for them, but you don’t feel guilt.  You don’t feel drained by their demands.  You just love them, and you know that is more than enough.

In a quiet place, think of someone whose needs seem to exceed your limitations.  Allow any resentment to move through you, and deeply relax your body.  Say, “Your needs cannot harm me.  I allow you your needs. I will respond with love as much as I can, knowing that the universe will carry you through.”

3.  See the Divine in everyone.

Jesus said, “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me.”  Everyone who comes to you in need is God in disguise.  This is easy to see for the stereotypically “least,”  a homeless person or someone starving in a third world country, but consider those you truly see as least.  Consider the sort of people you most dehumanize.  The ones who slip under your compassion radar, the ones who seem excempt.  The neurotic, the borderline crazy, the emotionally weak, the intellectually feeble, the romantically desperate.  Who evokes disgust in you?  Think especially of those for whom you feel the disgust is somewhat deserved.  The person who loses control and sabotages their relationships.  The person who makes the same mistake twice.  The person who fails to do the admirable thing.  The person who expresses emotional distress in a most socially awkward way.  Ironically, those who disgust me most are those who evince very limited compassion, a state that literally turns my stomach, but not out of moral indignation.  It’s simply a gut reaction, but even uncultivated compassion warrants compassion.  I’m realizing I can forgive even the incapacity to forgive.

Those who disgust you are indications of where your heart is still blanketed.  How your heart responds to the least of those is how your heart responds to God.  Gaze upon those who turn your stomach, even them, and say, “nyinge, nyinge.”

You can transcend disgust by trusting that everyone who comes into your world is God in a different form, even those for whom you have little admiration.  At some point in your evolution, you stood in their shoes.  Another way to transcend disgust is to realize that it’s just a physical process.  Social disgust is a physical response we often learn in a very arbitrary way.  In my doctoral thesis, I created social disgust for otherwise neutral behaviors.  First, I exposed the research participants to a foul odor.  Next, I offered them an explanation for the odor that was conceptually related to the behavior they were to encounter later.  When they encountered the behavior, thinking about it evoked sensory memories of the bad smell.  They judged the behaviors as more morally wrong than those for whom a different concept explained the bad smell.  The point is that disgust is just a physiological reaction and does not necessarily mean anything.  Once disgust is set aside,  you are left with are the practical concerns presented by someone in need… and your heart.

Take a moment to contemplate someone whose needs evoke disgust or disdain instead of compassion.  Imagine looking them in the eye, and say, “God, I see you.  Thank you for coming to me in this disguise.  How can I serve you?”

4. Look for the gift.

Even those who come to you in dire need offer you something, an opportunity for your own healing or an answer to a prayer.  Their very act of seeking something from you is often the vehicle for their gifts to you.  Look for the gift.  You will find it every time.

A dear friend once told me how he helped another member of the sangha overcome her psychosomatic sensitivities.  The woman was particularly sensitive to smoke and fled campfires and other sources of air pollution.  She often wore a surgical mask and made a big fuss whenever someone created smoke.  At first, I think this irritated my friend, who felt she needed to get over her apparently neurotic sensitivity.  One day, however, as he watched her walk away from a grill, he decided just to join her.  He didn’t criticize her.  He didn’t judge her for wandering off.  He didn’t even encourage her to get over it.  “And you  know what,” my friend said, “the next time she was around a fire, she said it didn’t bother her as much.”

I looked at my friend and thought, “Hmm, she healed you.”

Sleep Well Tonight

I hope your heavy heart has lightened now.  There is nothing wrong.  Everything is perfect just as it is.  You are perfect just as you are.  Nothing needs resolving.  Everything is already intrinsically resolved in its essence, and this will unfold and become conscious with time.  So don’t pry open the flower bud.  Just hold it in your hand and enjoy.

nyinge… nyinge