Compassion is to feel the suffering of others as if they were ours. Compassion is a spontaneous resonance with everything that feels and lives, which mobilizes us to relieve the pain of those who suffer. Compassion is not a mere empathy that leaves us overwhelmed by the pain of others, but a dynamism that does not resign and does everything to pacify and release those who suffer. Compassion is the active response to the pains of all beings, whether physical or psychological.

In the deepest compassion, as in the deepest love, the apparent separation between me and the other disappears: the borders of mind and skin are diluted, and a fuller and wider life pulses in us and in everything that exists. Love and compassion are initiations of the heart to the mystery of Life.

Love and compassion can begin for us, if we need it, but its enlargement frees us from the torture of obsessive self-centredness in our personal problems and sufferings. With love and compassion the heart opens to others and this relativizes our pains, bringing us strength, confidence, courage and an intimate feeling of self-realization. Love and compassion make us wider, potentially limitless like the universe.

Paradoxically or not, not only love, but also compassion leads us to joy. The joy of discovering that pain, suffering, violence and negativity do not have the last word and that we possess the immense power to reduce and abolish them. The joy of vibrating in unison with the world, in its lights and in its shadows, in its totality.

The joy of seeing that it is possible to overcome all limits, feeling love and compassion even for those who make us and others to suffer, for putting us in their place makes us feel their present suffering and limitations, but also their potential to evolve beyond that.

Author: Paulo Borges. Copyrights iLIDH 2015-