Compassion and Clear Seeing

The first teaching in my counseling training that began the snowball of internal change for me is from my meditation class. My instructor had such a graceful, gentle presence, but also a forcefulness about her. She has a way of speaking softly, yet so precisely, that it cut right through my defenses, and something inside me perked up to receive her message. 

That is how, six years ago, I got serious about mindfulness, began exploring spiritually, and set about healing myself so that I could more effectively help my clients. For seven years before that point, I had moved between various social service jobs that burned me out emotionally and drained me of my (then pretty unconscious) healing and positive energies. 

I was "helping people" in college and through my twenties, to be sure. I allowed my ego the pleasures of self-righteousness and pride on a daily basis, and built most of my life around social service and political activism. I was a fiery revolutionary. The substance use, anxiety attacks, and emotional dysregulation that I also lived with, however, did not help me to meet the lofty dreams I had for myself.


That teacher who so skillfully helped me open up to a new world of thought and feeling ended up being my clinical supervisor for my internship, and I will be forever grateful for her guidance--but more importantly for her compassion and clear seeing--which, as she described during that meditation class, were "like two wings of a bird". On the one side, we must have gentleness and sympathy for other beings. But we must balance ourselves with mindfulness--unconditional attentive presence to our true experience, so that we can see reality. Balancing these qualities allows us to act skillfully on our own behalf as well as for others. 


This idea of balancing compassion and clear seeing has become the foundation of my worldview as well as the core of my professional theoretical orientation. It's encouraging to me that "mindfulness" has increasingly become a buzzword in our culture and in the counseling profession. I would love to see authentic mindfulness practices gain popular momentum, because I know what power and transformation flow from them. Research seems to be showing that cognitive and mindfulness practices are as effective as drugs for coping with various psychological disorders and imbalanced emotional states. 


In most developmental models of psychology and spirituality, each stage transcends the former, while necessarily including and building upon it. To me, this sounds like dialectics, which my previous political philosophies were founded on. Which sort of resolves for me the confusion as to how my spiritual and sociopolitical perspectives could be synthesized. So there you have it.


I started this blog in a way that felt random a few days ago... but now, seeing more clearly, I realize that at my core is a very clear intention--to participate in and help generate a movement rooted in dialectical engaged mindfulness (yep, pretty sure I just made that up!) In other words, I'm into a revolution of the heart and mind that leads to skillful collective action toward building healthier communities and institutions. So, the existential crisis and cognitive dissonance I talked about in my first blog? Maybe with all this "mindfulness" talk floating about, we're on our way to the next stage.