When Compassion Is Fierce

Each one of us needs fierce love to protect ourselves in situations where we are at risk of being harmed, hurt or exploited. Unfortunately, these fierce manifestations of self-compassion are often misunderstood as aggression or hostility. In this talk, I will debunk common myths around anger and compassion and show that working with healthy anger can wake up our wisdom, courage and motivate us to take conscious and caring action when needed.

Transcript

This is the end of the video.

Thank you for watching.

Please subscribe to my channel.

Welcome.

Today I will debunk some myths around healthy anger and compassion.

It does not matter whether you are faced with the injustice of a boss continuously asking you to work overtime and not respecting your limits,

Or of a partner who is emotionally abusive,

Or whether you are faced with the injustice of a whole system,

Maybe that you work in or a culture that you live in.

The process to inner empowerment is largely the same regardless of the external situation.

Each one of us needs fierce love to protect ourselves in situations where we are at risk of being harmed,

Hurt,

Or exploited.

When writing about raising Afro-American children in 1979,

The civil rights activist and feminist Audre Lorde wrote,

If they cannot love and resist at the same time,

They probably will not survive.

In my view,

Her words apply to anyone who has ever experienced harm,

Injustice,

Or oppression,

Whether it is inflicted by an individual,

Or by specific groups,

Or by whole cultures,

Whether it is inflicted consciously or unconsciously.

To survive and thrive,

We each need to know how to take care of ourselves by resisting what harms us.

How do we do that?

We need to combine the gentle manifestations of self-compassion,

Such as understanding,

Comforting,

And accepting ourselves,

With the more powerful manifestations of taking charge of our well-being,

Of believing our truth,

Of resolving to protect ourselves,

And of developing the courage to face what we would rather avoid.

Otherwise,

Our self-compassion practice is incomplete.

Most importantly,

It involves skillfully working with anger.

When anger is driven by care,

It is considered a fierce manifestation of compassion.

Picture this.

A small child is in danger of walking into a busy street and getting hit by a car.

The parent shouts at the child and runs to quickly grab it to protect it.

The parent may appear angry on the outside,

But the fierce exterior is in fact driven by goodwill,

Not by ill will.

What stops most people from working with anger is the belief that it is the same as aggression.

You will learn that these are not identical.

Let's start with a bit of sociobiology and psychology.

As a species,

We have managed to dominate the planet,

For better and for worse.

Our strong power subordination mentality is one of the reasons for this.

We also have a mentality for cooperation,

For competition,

For engaging in sexuality,

And for giving and receiving care.

In other words,

These are our rough,

Pre-installed templates for how we can relate to each other.

If we feel harmed,

Hurt,

Or treated unfairly,

We experience the subordination of a more powerful other or others.

One instinctive reaction is to attack the oppressor to gain power over them.

You could compare it to a group of people conducting a military coup to topple a dictator through aggressive means.

Since the rebels gain power through aggressive means,

They have to use violence to stay in power to suppress the dictator's forces.

This perpetuates the cycle of power and subordination.

The other instinctive reaction is submission.

We declare defeat,

Give up,

Give in,

And adopt an inferior position and suppress any feelings of anger as they would jeopardize our survival.

How can we effectively stand up to a tyrant then?

If we look at history,

We can see that what has often worked in achieving specific goals is persistent,

Non-violent resistance by a critical mass of people.

Think of Gandhi's salt march that put an end to British taxation of Indian salt,

Or the march of the people of East Berlin that brought down the wall,

Or the women's marches that helped to prosecute many perpetrators of sexual violence.

What mentality is at play here then?

In my view,

It is cooperation and care for the greater good.

You might wonder,

Does care not refer to soothing,

Comforting,

And other gentle and private ways of giving kindness?

Yes,

It does,

But these are not the only manifestations of care.

Cornel West once said,

Tenderness is what love looks like in private.

Justice is what love looks like in public.

Even in private,

Love may need to be fierce,

Such as a parent protecting a child from harming itself accidentally.

Think of a parent who does not protect their child from harm by not setting boundaries.

They would let them eat what they want,

Go to bed when they want,

Let them decide if they want to go to school or not.

That would be neglectful and uncaring.

They would lack fierce love.

A parent,

However,

Who unnecessarily shames a child for getting bad grades is fierce,

But in an abusive way.

We know that the primary hormones associated with the care system,

Namely oxytocin,

Are involved both in nurturing offspring and establishing close relationships amongst group members,

As well as in aggression that serves to defend offspring from predators or one's own group from attacks from outsiders.

If both the shaming and the protecting parent look angry on the outside,

How can we distinguish them?

They differ in their intention.

One is driven by ill will or ego-focused goals,

Such as the parent's need to be seen to have kids with good grades.

The other one is driven by good will or care for the long-term well-being of the child.

If you're ever wondering about someone's anger or your own,

Ask yourself,

What intention drives this behavior?

Is it good will and care or ill will and ego-focused goals?

Someone can also be saying seemingly sweet and kind words,

Yet they're driven by the wish to manipulate another,

So by ego-focused goals.

Intention is the key.

Hopefully we've now debunked the myth that love is always gentle,

Never angry.

To protect ourselves,

We need the fire of anger to become fiercely self-loving.

To develop this,

We will need to work with anger.

Unfortunately,

Anger is a censored emotion in most of our systems.

Don't worry,

We will work with it in a step-by-step manner to turn it into clarity and wise action,

Not by turning you into a hysterical,

Aggressive person nobody wants to be around.

This leads us to the second myth,

Which is that anger equates aggression.

It simply does not.

Anger is an emotion designed to help us fight and attack,

So it obviously comes with a very strong impulse to act in an aggressive way.

No wonder then that many of us think that the emotion of anger and the action of aggression are the same.

What people are afraid of is to act aggressively because that is not condoned in most societies.

This leads to many people suppressing any feelings of anger when with others.

Now that we know that anger might be driven by care,

It would be a shame to miss the important message that healthy anger is sending us,

Which might be,

Hey,

Someone is violating your boundaries and taking advantage of you.

Wake up!

Put a stop to this.

So many of us need to relearn to feel the emotion of anger while staying mindful instead of getting carried away by it,

So we can drop in the question and listen.

What drives this anger that I'm feeling?

What does it want me to know?

The other common misunderstanding is that being compassionate means being nice to others.

Being nice to others might be socially desirable,

But has nothing to do with genuine compassion and actually doing good.

Being nice is driven by the wish to be loved.

Genuine compassion for oneself and for others is driven by care and empathic concern and not by the ego need of getting approval from others.

In fact,

Compassionate action takes courage and often involves us acting in a socially undesirable way.

Genuine compassion does not care what others think.

It just has to do what it has to do for the greater good.

This energy of fierce wisdom and compassion is described in Tibetan Buddhism by Khandro Rinpoche as a very sharp,

Brilliant wisdom that is uncompromising,

Honest,

With a little bit of wrath.

It's like a mother who does not mind that her teenage child hates her for grounding them,

For lying about underage drinking or breaking another agreement that they'd made.

Genuine compassion is therefore wise because it holds in mind what would be helpful in the long term for people's well-being instead of focusing on the short term.

It does not pander to one's ego.

In fact,

It does the opposite.

Hopefully,

This is helping to debunk the related myth that compassion is always soft,

Weak,

And essentially passive.

If faced with conflict,

Injustice,

Or harm,

Many people realize that they have only practiced the gentle manifestations of compassion as they get scared and want to avoid conflict instead of using these situations as grounds for deepening their practice.

Unfortunately,

Many people take the spiritual bypass right around the messiness of life and realness of relationships and miss out on the best growth opportunities.

Such forms of pseudo-compassion do genuine compassion a disservice as they fail to include wisdom in its definition.

Wisdom helps us to clearly see and understand what is causing our suffering.

Imagine an intelligent and very understanding medical doctor who examines you thoroughly,

Diagnoses your symptoms,

And patiently explains to you why you're feeling the way you do and why that makes so much sense.

This person would not be a good doctor if they did not know how to treat these symptoms.

So we need the ability to both understand the causes and empathize with the pain and have the courage and the skills to alleviate the pain.

Compassion is therefore always ready to help and to act if necessary.

Every kind of pain or suffering,

However,

Requires a different treatment.

We cannot use a one-size-fits-all approach.

We need to differentiate and diagnose properly first.

If someone has lost a loved one and is grieving,

We offer sympathy and comfort the person.

Comfort may look like we're not doing anything,

But in fact we are very active by staying with the pain instead of abandoning the person because it becomes uncomfortable for us.

If someone discloses that they're being abused and they need protection,

Then we may also offer our sympathy,

But we do not just sit there and comfort them and not do anything about the abuse.

That would be like giving someone the wrong medicine and consciously harming them.

As their need is for safety and protection,

We help them to find safety and to protect themselves.

It is common sense.

It would be even worse in that situation to invite the person to prematurely empathize with the perpetrator of the abuse by suggesting that they must be suffering too and that it is not their fault.

This would be invalidating the pain that is present and skipping the most important step,

Which is to help the person to protect themselves.

If they bought into this premature empathy with the perpetrator before being able to protect themselves,

They would likely expose themselves to more harm.

In Buddhism,

This is called idiot compassion.

In psychology,

It is known as submissive compassion.

It is a form of pseudo compassion that lacks the wisdom to know what is needed and it lacks the courage to act on it.

So being self-compassionate in the context of harm,

Hurt or injustice means that we do not just sit there,

But that we awaken our wisdom to do something that actually helps.

Many people believe that if everyone is empowered,

There will be no more getting along with each other.

We will all be shouting our incompatible truths at each other and life will come to a standstill because we are all caught in one big shouting match.

I'm pretty sure that this won't happen.

As I've said before,

Fierce self-love helps us to develop a calm,

Wise and courageous mindset that is ready to act to protect and support if necessary,

Not through aggressive but through smart and persistent action that does not harm anybody.

What that means in relationships is that I learn to calmly and clearly speak my truth and give the other person a chance to listen.

The other person may have a different truth and I can calmly listen to theirs,

So we learn to agree to disagree,

Yet stay connected in goodwill.

It opens the door to genuine dialogue and to genuine democracy.

Of course,

Living together involves compromise and we can figure this out together once all voices have been heard.

What is important to know is that fierce self-love involves taking personal responsibility for our well-being,

Not giving that responsibility to others and demanding something from them.

That would be childish and defiant.

Being true to yourself may of course involve moving away from people who cannot hear your truth or are not willing to respect you.

But the situation leads to a different wise action that you will discover for yourself.

Reviews

I am going to listen to this again, and again. I am really struggling to find the middle path where I'm stern but not yelling. I seem to tip either way but not really balance between the two. It is affecting my ability to parent and collaborate with my partner :(

Exactly what I needed! As a lifelong student of compassion i will be coming back to this to unpack its depth and insight

Thank you!🙏 I love the concept of fierce compassion and your elobarations on it.

Idiot compassion and submissive compassion 🤩 Wow, from Buddhism and psychology. So grateful for the terms💜🌸

Thank you for this session, it is insightful, informative, helpful. I will stay tuned and
listen to other sessions too!

Thank you. I will be listening to this again 🥰

Wow this was so well explained and incredibly helpful. Thank you so much!

Great words of wisdom. I’ll listen again to take in more nuggets of truth. Thank you

I really appreciated your wisdom! Thank you so much!

This talk was so helpful to hear both for personal life and social justice. Thank you so much. Sharing, and taking your course. 💕

An informative and detailed talk with examples that illustrate how fierce self-compassion differs from other forms of compassion. Highly relevant to current global developments. Felt more empowered and optimistic after listening. Thank you, Christine 🙏🏽