When you are truly dedicating yourself to your life, you become focused, disciplined in what you want to do. You put in effort that you didn't think you could have, you think differently, you discipline and structure your life around it. I think to me, discipline is what has kept me alive after all the surgeries and stuff that I have been through in my life. Self-Discipline, is like a bandage, a brace or a shield that keeps me focused on what I see as my existence in this world. To me, discipline invokes several things, Buddhist monks meditating for days on end, Samurai practicing, skilled military units, high end athletes. Discipline is the force behind so many success stories.
Compassion. That is a hard word to use without summoning the responses of either "weak willed" or "bleeding heart liberal". Compassion is so far the opposite that it is inconceivable for me to understand how people use these words about compassion. Honest, deep commitment to a compassionate life is not easy. To understand compassion, you have to understand yourself. You have to understand yourself at your weakest and your strongest, and be willing to understand both are components of your life that will constantly happen in many areas of it. Compassion then means you have to understand these will happen in others too. To not judge someone based on compassion, is understanding that they represent the same core values that you do. That they live in life, that they see what the world does to itself, to those who live within it, and knows that it places great strain on one's humanity.
To practice compassion, you have to be open to a very easy to explain, but hard to practice sentence. Humanity is interconnected and what happens to one happens to all. This lesson was taught to me by a Buddhist monk when I was younger, and a boy in the bed next to me died, and I didn't see him the next morning. He explained that the reason I was sad, is because we had become friends, and as friends, he had made an impact on me, and even though I didn't know him that well, that string had been made, and then had been broken. As adults, we become jaded by all these external things, a lot of them are thoroughly important, like living, money, housing, food, family and friends. But a lot of them are used as distractions, that make us feel a part of something greater than ourselves, and thus devalues what we are as a species. Football teams, cricket clubs, cities, counties/provinces/states, nations and religions are all artificial constructs that deflect our attention from the constant thing in this world. That we are all one species, we all have the same core dreams and needs, and what they are is:
1: Peace, so that we may go about our lives in safety and without fear.
2: Love, to give and to receive. We love our families, our partners, friends, pets, children, and we cherish and desire that in return.
3: Health, that we may interact with the world, the beautiful things in it, and do it without pain and suffering. And finally
4: Happiness, to do all of the above, that we may enjoy it, and feel satisfied with what we create, what we do and how we live our lives.
All humans harbour these basic needs, and compassion, is understanding that we all have the same core principles, compassion is acting with knowledge of this forefront in our mind when we deal with others. Disciplined Compassion, is a concerted effort to practice this not only outwardly to others, but also be compassionate to yourself. To understand that you have these values, these core tenets and understand that it is permissible to apply them to yourself, to have compassion for yourself, is one of the hardest things for people to understand. To say that I am worthy of the success that I create, the Love that I crave, the Health that I work towards and the Happiness to enjoy it, has been so ingrained into us to mean greed, to mean narcissism to mean not following the majority, that those who do, often feel abandoned. When you start placing your values on something outside of yourself to make your happiness, your peace, love and health, then you give up the power to enjoy it when you create it, and sadly when that outside force/person/idea doesn't return it, it feeds into hate, and all the things that compassion diametrically opposes.
So when you hear me say today, I am focusing on my Disciplined Compassion, you will know that not only am I focusing on my understanding and interactions with others, I am giving myself re-affirmation that it is ok that I give the same to myself. (Picture credits to me!)
Well said.
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