Book Excerpt: The Compassionate Life, by Marc Barasch

Ode presents an exclusive book excerpt from The Compassionate Life: Walking the Path of Kindness (Berrett-Koehler, 2009), by Marc Ian Barasch.

Marc Ian Barasch | June/July 2009 issue

On a recent visit, making my way down the hill after meditating before the stupa's gargantuan, faintly smiling Buddha statue, I fell in stride with an athletic-looking woman in khaki shorts, hurrying down the path. When I mentioned my writing topic, she slowed down to talk. She had a story, she said—a simple one about meditation and compassion.

“I fi rst started to meditate when my boyfriend dumped me,” she said as I huffed along beside her in the thin mountain air. “I needed to sort through all the bad feelings, but I was afraid that I'd look inside and find out one thing: that I basically sucked. Gradually, though, I found it didn't matter if I thought I was horrible or if I thought I was great: I could drop my whole story and just breathe. It was a chance not only to explore myself but to get over myself. Meditation became this tool to not react in my usual way.”

She was a ski bum, she told me, the “rabble-rouser and hellraiser” in a family of perfectionists. Her older sister was the one with the high-powered, big-city job and the fantastic two-career marriage, the one who would come to her house and “just criticize everything about me right down to the stinky sponges in the sink. She'd drive me crazy until wham! I'd get combative and we'd have some huge, screaming fight.”

During one of her sister's visits, they set out on a scenic drive. “Well, soon it was the usual: ‘You're driving too fast! There's a beer can on the floor; the car is filthy!' And I noticed my habitual response coming up inside: Who the hell are you to tell me how to live? Back off! But this time the words didn't come out of my mouth. For once I was able to just notice her, notice my own feelings, and breathe.

“When I didn't react, it made her even madder. She upped the ante. There was this onslaught of everything she could throw at me: ‘I make all the money in the family; it's me who'd have to scrape you up if anything bad ever happened to you,' blah, blah, blah. But even though I heard her anger and anxiety, I was able to slow down; and instead of getting defensive and lashing out, I just asked her, ‘Are you okay, Carol?' And I meant it. I wanted to know.

“Well, she was so caught off guard, she didn't even have a retort. Instead she started to blurt out everything about the screwed-up place her life had come to—how she was going to leave her husband, how she'd be alone in the city, how she was afraid she'd never have children—and then she just broke down sobbing! And all the snotty comebacks I'd stored up just evaporated. I could feel the whole burden of my personality, her personality, our history, fall away, and like some beautiful plant springing up out of nowhere, there was just compassion.”

Her story, like Ricardo's, confi rmed for me a spiritual insight— call it, To Find Your Heart, Lose Your Head—that's as close to a universal principle as you can extract from the mystical traditions. The ego is really a sort of trance state from which it is possible to awaken. And beneath its incessant inner commentary, behind the persuasive story lines and the beliefs that spawn them, beyond the passions that give those beliefs their emotional clout, there is a wellspring of pure compassion.

The great Hasidic rabbi known as the Maggid told his disciples that the best way to realize the love at the heart of the Torah is to “cease to be aware of yourselves. You must be nothing but an ear which hears what the universe of the word is constantly saying within you. The moment you start hearing what you yourself are saying, you must stop.” The Buddha, in a radical act of reflection, suggested we disbelieve our thought process entirely.

Easier said than done, of course. If you want a little aperçu on that subject, try sitting stock-still for a while on a cushion or a chair; just sit there, observing the old inhale and exhale, trying not to get carried away by those broken-record thoughts yakking in the background; just sit, dangling from a rope of breath above the morass of your charming personality, and you will soon be at one with a hundredfold generations of meditators who have discovered self-delusion's ripeness.

In seeking what Buddhism calls Big Mind, I confess I sometimes look inward and fi nd new vistas of smallness. But my practice, such as it is, hasn't been all eddies and doldrums. Sometimes I can forsake the drone of internal gossip, opt for the unadorned Now. Then I find myself gazing into a void where, moments before, the bustling manufacturing hub of selfhood had been on track to fulfi ll its daily quota. I get acquainted with my mental habits— tics, really. I start fi nding my neuroses less dramatic than tedious; enough to tell them, when I'm really not in the mood for entertaining, to just buzz off. Once, at a seminar, I heard a Westernized lama say that a meditator's state of mind should be like that of a hotel doorman. A doorman lets the guests in, but he doesn't follow them up to their rooms. He lets them out, but he doesn't walk into the street with them to their next appointment. He greets them all, then lets them go on about their business. Meditation is, in its initial stages, simply accustoming oneself to letting thoughts come and go without grasping at their sleeves or putting up a velvet rope to keep them out.

Similarly, Sufi teachings specify that a certain impartiality is required to mount the “thrones of compassion.” It is said one must remove the veil of wahm (“opinion” or “conjecture”). “The real heart,” said the Islamic sage known as the Prince of the Illumined, “is that heart which is neither on the right nor on the left , neither above nor below, neither far nor near” —that is, beyond ordinary cognition and its incessant parsing of differences.*

No one would claim it's not tricky business. Such work, the alchemists used to say, is opus contra naturum—work against our natural tendencies—here the mind's impulse to classify this person as near, that one as far; this one a beloved, that one a rival. Various traditions call for cultivating detachment from the potent cues presented by the outer world (or, for that matter, the inner one): Do you feel distaste when you see a particular person coming toward you on the street? If so, regard that distaste as a thing apart, disconnected from its object, generated in your own heart and mind. By the same token, don't just swoon over the feeling that refl exively arises when someone fl ashes her most attractive smile.

*A friend told me of visiting the Dalai Lama in India and asking him for a succinct definition of compassion. She prefaced her question by describing how heart-stricken she'd felt when, earlier that day, she'd seen a man in the street beating a mangy stray dog with a stick. “Compassion,” the Dalai Lama told her, “is when you feel as sorry for the man as you do for the dog.”

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