Felt compassion is different from our usual intellectual or ethical compassion, which come from the rational intellect and from our brain's capacity for empathy. Felt compassion is way more visceral, so visceral, in fact, that when it's happening to you, it can feel as if the pain of the world is being played out in your own emotional body. The great 19th-century sage Ramakrishna went through a period where he would feel the pain of the grass when he stepped on it. You can't make that kind of compassion show up. It comes to you, through grace, from your inner core of divinity. You as an individual ego don't and can't feel with others in this utterly open way, just as you in your ego-self can't love unconditionally. The opening you're experiencing is an opening into your God-nature, your true Self.
And this, believe it or not, is the key to true invulnerability. As you touch and surrender to the radical openness of your divine self, as you settle into the openness that you might experience through meditation, or through opening to nature, or through this acute recognition of the pain in the world, you start to discover the paradoxical truth that this open spaciousness is invulnerable. Nothing can touch or take away the spaciousness that is most deeply you, just as nothing can take away the love that comes from those inner depths. So, by reclaiming and occupying your vulnerability, by letting yourself truly feel it, going down to the depths of it, you come to the place where you are truly invulnerable. And here's where you transcend the protections that the ego has been trying to create for you. These are nothing compared to the protection of this enlightened openness.
During a pilgrimage to South India, I visited the Chidambaram Temple, one of the most powerful shrines to Shiva in the world. There, I had a meditative opening as powerful as any I've experienced—an opening into vastness and light that started in my heart and seemed to fill my body. When I left the temple town, riding toward the next stop on my journey, it felt as if everything around me was happening inside my own body. I could feel the ache in the shoulders of the workers winnowing grain, and even the pain of the grain under the threshing field. It wasn't pleasant, though there was so much love in it that the tears flowing from my eyes were only partially tears of grief for their pain. For the first time, I realized what divine compassion really is: not sympathy or even empathy, but the actual felt experience of others' suffering as your own.
An awakening like this inevitably brings emotion in its wake. Some of the emotions are 'higher' ones: gratitude, generosity, and the capacity to feel with others. But some of the feelings that come up are precisely the buried feelings that we've learned to mask or avoid. For me, in my journey through South India, one of these feelings was intense personal guilt—why wasn't I doing more to help these people? But threading through and beyond both the global pain and the personal guilt was a feeling of love so powerful and ecstatic that tears poured from my eyes and my heart felt as if it were big enough to hold the world.
For K, the personal emotion that was arising was grief, an almost bottomless sadness at the pain of life. Yet within that grief, inside her experience of life's basic vulnerability, she also began catching inklings of that same divine love. Paradoxically, the cheerfulness and positive thinking that had protected her from feeling basic vulnerability had also been protecting her from feeling the deep love. Spiritual growth demanded that she open to feeling, even feeling grief and anger and fear, that she be willing to sit inside it, and let it change her.
A few weeks after our conversation, K wrote to me, "I've been letting myself be with the feeling of global pain. Yesterday, it opened up into peace. It was such a deep feeling of peace. I realized, this must be what bodhisattvas feel. That even in the deepest sorrow, there is the deepest peace."
When you allow yourself to consciously enter the state of vulnerability, you find that at its heart is peace. The peace that passes understanding. The peace that comes from standing poised in the aching heart of life. The peace that is your true protection, your invulnerable core.
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