If you boil down the resistance to vaccines (outside of medical reasons), masking, our internalized ableism, and our unchecked privilege - all things physically fueling the pandemic - the one issue at the core is lacking compassion.
It’s an emotional and spiritual block that’s become physically destructive. It’s the most powerful tool that’s innate within all of us, yet is the one that many cannot recognize (or have yet to cultivate), whether out of selfishness, ignorance, or simply because they’ve never understood what true compassion means.
In western society where individualism reigns supreme (to our collective detriment), compassion is often misdefined and misexperienced as ‘pity’.
Compassion by its definition is about removing our separateness from a situation or another and feeling as they feel, understanding that, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “my humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.”
Instead, western society has become obsessed with #selfcompassion and #selflove, which are both vital to our well-being and ESPECIALLY in the wake of personal traumas, but only when practiced in balance.
What’s needed on the other end of the scale for balance to be achieved?
Compassion.
Authentic compassion for others.
When we over-prioritize self-compassion (outside of times of healing), we become deficient in genuine compassion for others; when we prioritize compassion for others at all times, we become deficient in self-compassion for ourselves.
And herein lies the lacking balance that we’re up against: too many people prioritizing self-compassion at the expense of others, and too little prioritizing compassion for others at the expense of their immediate wants.
Our self-compassion must be toggled down for the sake of compassion for others, and ironically, in a global pandemic, when we scale back our self-compassion in support of compassion for others, we benefit as well, gifting self-compassion by protecting our own lives.
In a global pandemic and in continuing “unprecedented times” our compassion for others *must* be unprecedented too.
That’s a collective lesson we’re being called to learn. Let’s be better students.💜