Dumb Compassion

Transcript

I want to talk to you today about “Dumb Compassion”

So my friend Luis Fernando shared this meme a while back which I really liked and found interesting. It was a quote from a guru. Someone had asked him the question “What is the quality that is most worthy of development as a human being on this earth?”

And the guru responded “It isn’t love, it isn’t compassion. It is discernment.” I thought that was very interesting.

Of course, just about every human being on earth has compassion and has love in their heart, in that… I think it was in a Bill Hicks bit where he said “Ah you love your kids, that’s just great. John Wayne Gacy loved his kids. Everybody loves their kids.” Love isn’t something necessarily that you need to develop – I mean, it’s good to develop.

But if you don’t have discernment, then you run the risk of loving, showing compassion for the wrong reasons, for the wrong times.

This happens a lot, I see this with a lot of people, and I’ve done this at times too of course. When you show compassion to someone who, maybe would be better off if you didn’t show them compassion. Or you show somebody compassion through your actions when it’s actually at a detriment to your own self-love or self-compassion.

So you see people go out of their way for others. Maybe they spend a lot of time researching something to help one of their friends out. And it doesn’t occur to them that their friends only mentioned that in passing and they’re not too focused on it, or something like that.

Or they’re trying to help people who just don’t want to help themselves. In my experience, you can’t help someone who can’t help themselves. It doesn’t work. You’re just going to run up against a barrier over and over.

And it’s hard because, we can be stubborn, we want to show people compassion, we want to be good, and our own hearts reward us for being good and showing compassion. But in that we resign ourselves to suffering.

Because it just means that our efforts are going to be tossed aside, and it’s frustrating when that happens.

There’s a story… I was studying this course in cognitive behavioural therapy online. I recommend this course actually, interested in CBT. Course taught by a fellow named Kain Ramsey. CBT practitioner course.

And Kain tells a story about when he was studying therapy, and every day or every week after class he would see this fellow selling The Big Issue, this homeless fellow or long term unemployed fellow named Chris. Kain would buy this fellow a meal and start telling him everything he’d learned that day and what he’d found out about himself, and the vital questions that he’d learned to ask himself. Self-reflection questions from cognitive behavioural therapy that can have a big impact on your life in the long term. Knowing yourself is important of course, as Kain emphasised a lot during the course.

Kain would see Chris a lot, like every week, maybe a few times a week, for perhaps 18 months. Even though Kain was sharing all this stuff and all these important questions and theories and principles, and trying to help Chris as best as he could… He found it just didn’t make any difference in Chris’s life, and Kain was frustrated. He thought “maybe I’m just not cut out for this therapy stuff… maybe I just can’t do it.”

So he went to his mentor with this problem like, “I feel like I’m on the edge of giving up. Maybe I don’t know how to help people. Maybe I should go back to sales.”

And his mentor said to him “Alright Kain, it seems you’re ready for the next level, the next teaching. Why don’t you stop wasting your time on the Chrises of the world, and start spending your time with the Kains of the world?”

“Stop wasting your time with the people who don’t appreciate your efforts, who aren’t going to gain anything from your help, who won’t match your efforts. Start spending the time with people who are going to take your energy and multiply it, because they recognise the wisdom or they recognise the value in your questions and your time, and they want to create something better.”

It’s not easy to exercise discerning compassion, smart compassion. But it is worthwhile, if you can be discerning in your compassion… spend time with the people who will really take your energy and turn it into something wonderful.

It’s not always an easy lesson to learn because, as I said, we see compassion as something that’s good. Compassion is not always good. Dumb compassion is not good. Dumb compassion can be just a huge waste of time.

But if you spend your compassion and your energy in the right way, that is what makes the difference.

Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being discerning in the way that you exercise compassion, and thank you for showing compassion to others and giving them an opportunity to see if they will take that compassion and do something fantastic with it.
Have a great day and I’ll speak to you soon.