Tag: Sympathy

How To Handle The Mosh Pit of Life

©2017 Joan M. Newcomb, CPC

It’s been an emotional roller coaster ride recently. With all the events around the world, no one has been spared, it seems. It’s hard to maintain equilibrium in the midst of it all.

My original training as a healer and spiritual counselor taught me to be detached from my clients. The intention was to stay out of sympathy with them, because sympathy can actually be disempowering. If you feel sorry for someone, it invalidates their capability as Spirit. When you acknowledge them as Spirit, it recognizes them as whole and capable of creating their reality.

However the other end of the pendulum presented was empathy. The problem with empathy is that you’re feeling their feelings. Which makes it really hard to be neutral.

I’m sure the original translation of the teachings meant to be compassion. That is, compassion in the Buddhist sense, which accepts and doesn’t resist suffering, but also wishes all beings peace and happiness.

When I shift from my everyday perspective, where I can get caught up in injustice and sorrow, to an expanded perspective as Consciousness, I truly understand compassion.

As Consciousness I view the world as my creation, not a school but a playground of experiences. I can appreciate both the creativity of myself as Consciousness, and also the other aspects of Consciousness, in their life stories in form. I recognize that even the most unconscious-seeming person is still Consciousness. I can have compassion for the pain and discomfort that comes from being in form, in a body, without awareness.

There are some very painful stories out there. There’s heartbreaking loss. And yet, as Consciousness, there is no loss. The dead are still with us, we just can’t see them. The house is gone, things are lost that are irreplaceable in form, but there is life beyond.

Consciousness is neutral about these things. Consciousness is also neutral about time. It may take years to recover from the trauma, to rebuild lives. To Consciousness, this entire lifetime is in the blink of an eye.

Before “waking up”, I was in tremendous pain for so many years. I was suicidally depressed some of the time. When I lifted out of that level of depression, I made choices that may have limited me to the outside world, but were intended not to tip me over, to keep me from going back into that pit of despair.

Our societal measurements of success are not the same as Consciousness.

You can’t dive into physical reality without getting muddy. If you try to avoid it, you’ve missed the point of being here.

I look at what is happening in the world and I want to end poverty and starvation. I want everyone to feel nurtured and loved. I want everyone to be spiritually enlightened. I want everyone to have their heart’s desire.

And when I shift my perspective as Consciousness, I see that what everyone is striving for, they already have. Freedom. We are free to experience the world in all of its aspects. We’re free to explore the depths and the heights. We are free to create expansion *and* contraction, increase and limitation.

What everyone is desiring, they already are. At their Essence, they are Consciousness.

When I sense all of us as Consciousness, as much as I’d like to say it’s like a symphony, it’s really more like being in the mosh pit of a heavy metal concert. In the rain.

When I sense everyone as Consciousness, I can see how everyone is actually enjoying themselves here, even folks who thought they had tickets to Vivaldi and found themselves in the crowd listening to Metallica.