Verified by 
Meditation
Sharon Salzberg and the Power of Compassion
Kindness and care can serve as a vehicle for positive change.
Posted August 19, 2022 Reviewed by Davia Sills
Key points
- Compassion is a response to suffering in others while staying open and resilient.
- It can act as a sustaining intention, even while making proactive and difficult choices.
- Self-compassion is a powerful tool for changing habits and staying resilient.
Sharon Salzberg is a meditation pioneer, world-renowned teacher, and New York Times bestselling author. As one of the first to bring meditation and mindfulness into mainstream American culture over 45 years ago, her relatable, demystifying approach has inspired generations of meditation teachers and wellness influencers. Sharon is co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA, and the author of many books, including the New York Times bestseller Real Happiness. Her next book, Real Life: The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom, will be released on April 11, 2023.
I've been looking forward to talking to you about this topic, compassion, and trying to figure out how to make it sound real even to people who don't practice mindfulness or meditate. In one way, it relates to the basic reality of cause and effect. If I go off and stomp on someone's foot because they're annoying me, they aren't likely to smile and give me a hug back. It doesn't help them, and it doesn't help me.
I often hear from students a concern that being compassionate means we simply lay down and acquiesce to everyone and everything around us. That being compassionate means always saying yes and being a doormat—that it dictates a certain action. Another assumption I hear a lot is that compassion or kindness are weak, like a secondary virtue—that if you can't be beautiful or brilliant, you can at the very least be kind. So that's what compassion is not.
And here is what compassion is: In the Buddhist tradition, which I've been a student of for nearly 50 years, compassion is known as the trembling or the quivering of the heart in response to seeing pain or suffering. It's a movement of the heart, and it's a movement toward seeing if we can be of help.
As Thich Nhat Hanh has said, "Compassion is a verb." Compassion has qualities of self-sufficiency, of wholeness, of not being broken or shattered when facing states of suffering. It has qualities of openness, of spaciousness, of resiliency. It is born out of lovingkindness, of knowing our oneness (with other people), not just thinking about it or wishing it were so.
The mistake that most of us make at one time or another with a practice like cultivating compassion is to try to lay that veneer on top of whatever we're actually feeling: "I mustn't feel fear; I must only feel compassion. Because, after all, that is my dedication—to feel compassion." So we feel incredible fear or guilt, and yet we're trying to deny it and say, "Well, I'm not fearful because I am practicing loving kindness, and that's all I am allowed to feel." That doesn't work.
Instead, you can think of compassion as your intention that motivates your actions. Sometimes that might mean taking very strong actions that are rooted in compassion, like saying no and not giving the money or holding very strong boundaries.
On a more subtle level, we can start with how we think and talk about ourselves to ourselves. Most everyone experiences an inner dialog we call "the inner critic." Unlike we'd approach anyone else, we beat up on ourselves, especially when we're anxious or make a mistake. Anyone else, we'd say, "You did your best; it will be fine." To ourselves, we say, "You're the worse; you never get anything right."
It is interesting that we hold ourselves to such different standards than we hold others to. I can remember one of my teachers, this man named Munindra, somewhere in the '70s, would say things to me like, "Why are you so upset about this thought, which has come up in your mind? Did you invite it? Did you say at 3:15, I'd like to be filled with self-hatred, please? No."
When conditions come together for something to arise, like a thought or feeling, it will arise. That doesn't mean we need to feel passive in the face of our conditions. We can affect things. You know, if you didn't sleep at all last night, for example, it creates a set of conditions that would likely make you grumpier or more spaced out or something. We do work with affecting and changing conditions to the best of our ability.
That doesn't mean we will ever have complete control. So many things arise for so many reasons. You can't effectively say to yourself, "I'll never be afraid again." Or, "I have grieved long enough. It's done now." Because when conditions come together for something to arise, they will arise.
Our real superpower is in being able to relate to what has come up in a different way so that there isn't necessarily the glue holding us to it. We don't necessarily take it to heart. We have a choice. We have agency in terms of what we're going to do about something. You might have a huge wave of anger. That doesn't mean you're going to press send on the e-mail. It's up to you.
Is this an area where self-compassion can be useful?
I don't remember ever being in a room, back when I was in rooms with people, and talking about self-compassion without someone raising their hand and saying that self-compassion is laziness. That it is like giving yourself an excuse. That it is losing all the standards of excellence. That it is like saying, "What the hell? I made a mistake. I'll forgive myself. I'll make another one in 10 seconds. Who cares? I'll forgive myself then too." Over and over and over again, I kept hearing that. So there are some assumptions people make about self-compassion that are a little different from compassion for others.
We can spend an awful lot of time obsessed with our flaws and the mistakes we've made and what we did wrong. And not give much airtime to the good within us, the choices we make to be kind, the choices we make to be restrained. It would be awfully easy to tell a lie when we speak the truth. We make choices to learn. And it is good to actually give more airtime to that part of ourselves. It's not conceit or self-preoccupation or arrogance.
Self-compassion is actually a much more balanced perspective of who we are. This compassion comes into play not always, say, around our successes: "Wow, I've learned Spanish," or "I learned how to play tennis." It comes in when we have blown it, when we've made a mistake, or when we've fallen down in some way.
It's an essential quality for reframing how we look at those times. Do we over-identify with them and declare ourselves a failure? Do we lose all resilience, the ability to bounce back and start again? Are we stuck in some way? Are we speaking to ourselves in a way we would never speak to a friend or even a stranger?
Those are all interesting questions. And interestingly enough, I'm not a scientist, but I'm told by researchers that the research really points to the power of self-compassion. That if you want to learn something new, you want to change a habit, you want to make progress in something, the most powerful tool we have is self-compassion.
