Can you feel compassion for another, or for yourself? Is it hard to feel compassion because you are constantly thinking, why should I feel compassion for someone else when no one cares about me and my problems? No one cares about what I am going through? This way of thinking makes it impossible for you to think and feel compassion for yourself or others

It seems hard to feel empathy, because most people think in the singular. I am suffering. I don’t have the time to sympathize about others. When you are in the throes of difficulty, the last thing you want to do is to start seeing things from another’s perspective. However that is exactly what you need to see in order to stop living in negativity, self pity and pain. We are all going through difficulty just on different levels and in different ways.

When we begin to see things through the lens that all suffering is one and the same, your suffering is no different to mine. The circumstances may be different but the result is the same, as all pain goes into the same melting pot, whether it be mine or yours. When we understand this, we want to create as little pain and suffering as possible because we know it is all the same and goes into the same space. We can choose to live in compassion, because we understand that there is no difference between the pain we create and pain we receive. We are all here to experience different forms of it on this earth, in order to learn and heal, ourselves and each other.

When a person close to you is going through a difficult time and you are the co-recipient of the same difficulty, are you able to feel compassion? Does your ability to feel empathy depend on whether you see the problem as self inflicted by the other person or whether you see it as a personal choice they have made or a life situation that has just come about but sticks around longer than you feel comfortable coping with?

So why is compassion so hard? There always seems a barrier blocking it, why? Well part of the reason I feel is forgiveness. If you cannot forgive another for their choices, decisions,  reactions, weaknesses and missteps then the chances are that you are not able to forgive yourself for your choices, decisions, reactions, weaknesses and missteps. This means you feel no compassion for yourself, and if you cannot feel compassion for yourself, you most certainly cannot feel it for anyone else, because as with all things, you have to start with yourself.

So why is it hard to forgive yourself? Well in most cases we do not like seeing our own faults and mistakes, so we tend to not accept them and heal them. We like to see ourselves as perfect and the other as the one with the problems. This builds a barrier between two people and we begin to live in tolerance rather than love and the only hammer that breaks down the barrier wall is forgiveness.

True compassion is one that crosses boundaries of all kind. It is the unmasking of humankind in its essence.