Compassionate Connection Begins With Companioning Our Own Suffering

Courtesy of Gerrit Vermuelen @ Unsplash

Rather than seeing the “unwanted” parts of our life as inconveniences or obstacles, we have the choice to regard them as raw material for cultivating uncontrived and abiding compassion. Rather than evaluating these events as “unwanted”, i.e. bad, which results in suffering (because it is not the events that causes the suffering, but the thinking that makes it so), we have the choice to companion the suffering, and in so doing, be refined, elevated, and made beautiful by it.

Only when we have experienced walking towards, into and through our own suffering may we be able to compassionately connect with others. Because we are all bearing some form of pain, in some ways, and to varying degrees. Suffering is an inevitability, for any who have experienced love, would have experienced suffering in equal measure.

But, what does it mean, to companion?

Allow me to first offer 3 “raw material” from my life as examples:

1. Violent childhood (of the genre “so strange, it has to be true”).
2. Suicidal tendencies (twice).
3. Eating disorders (bulimia and anorexia).

Thus, having had four decades to contemplate these raw material, my sense-making as follows in terms of what it means to “companion my own…