To love a child, to parent them, is to walk around with the terror of loss just beneath your skin. Most of us manage it well, letting them climb trees and go on air planes and drive in cars.
But, be careful not to manage it so well that you cannot find it in an instant. Let the risk of being alive, and loving, be something you can access with each breath.
I don’t want us to have to see our child in another in order to feel for them. I don’t want us to have to imagine our own excruciating scream to be motivated to act. We do not need to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. Our love, our terror, our intimacy with the risk- that should be enough. We should recognize it in the hand that cradles, in eyes of shock, and soft curve of a jaw line passed through generations and tended in growth of all stages. We shouldn’t need to feel our own world destroyed to be moved. We do not need to do that. That is not empathy. Empathy is to feel ANOTHER’s feelings in your body as you feel your own. To feel the emotion in OUR collective body. This feeling your own feelings about someone else’s situation is something different than empathy. It has a place, an important place in your process. But it’s essential to separate the two. Because if we are not careful, entangling our own experience about someone else’s emotions can lead to the codependent empathy cycle rather than the compassion circuit.
The codependent empathy cycle leads to more separation, exhaustion, overwhelm and fear.
The compassion circuit nourishes us with energy for action, mends separation, offers clarity and courage.
Cultivating the capacity of our individual compassion circuits is protective. The more bonded we are to each other, the less harm we will allow. The more solutions we will find. The more potent we can be.
We can barely imagine what would be possible, we have to go there to find out. We must cultivate those hearts to know their wisdom. To know that future.
