Breathing Compassion

If you are looking for my short novel, A Matter of the Soul, scroll down to the next post or click here.


I planned a post like this a couple of weeks ago, and then suddenly the world changed. Business as usual is no longer possible. People are confused, frightened, sick, dying. It was like we blinked and everything fell apart. Businesses closed, jobs disappeared, store shelves were bare, and every day there are more sick with COVID-19.

People are left wondering how they can cope and how they can help. The advice is to stay at home and to look after your neighbours, particularly the elderly. It’s not very helpful advice. Many of us don’t know our neighbours. And if we do, we might not have shared our digital contact information with them. It is not easy to help someone while you are sitting on your couch.

I care, but what can I do? How often have you asked yourself the same question? Some would say pray, but traditional prayer means calling on someone outside yourself and all you can do is wait and hope they fix the problem. It lets you do something, by speaking the words of your prayer, and is itself a form of connection, but it might leave you feeling like a bystander. It might leave you wishing there was more.

So now what? We have compassion, but what do we do with it?

There is this:

A couple of years ago I read a book by Pema Chodron, a Bhuddist teacher. This was where I first learned about Tonglen breathing, as it applies to Universal Compassion. I myself do not ascribe to any particular teachings, Bhuddist or otherwise, but I have used this breathing ever since because compassion is important to me.

It is deceptively simple. Just long, slow breaths. You breathe in the pain, the discomfort, then breathe out some ease, some relief.

Why might this work?

We are all connected, you and I and your friend shaking with anxiety and the person with Covid-19 lying under a respirator and a South American person sweltering in a heat that never allows their perspiration to dry and the pangolin curled up in a cage.

We are all connected in the Soul. It’s not just your soul or my soul but the Soul of the whole universe, bigger and fuller than we can ever imagine. When you breathe as deep and slow as you are able, you reach to the place where you can sense your soul. You may not sense it at first, but it is there, in the stillness. This is the place where we are all connected. When you breathe in, you can take with you the pain of others. Take it down with you to that place of stillness where it can be transformed, and then breathe out some ease.

Here is something to be aware of about the physical act of this breathing. For some reason, it doesn’t come naturally to us to breathe like this. I think the busy-ness of our lives causes us to become accustomed to short little breaths. You might find it necessary to hold your hand on your stomach to remind yourself to push out your stomach so that your diaphragm has room to move down to allow you to take a deeper breath.

Ignore the voice that says this is crazy or hokey or non-scientific. We don’t have the luxury right now of holding onto rigid ways of seeing things. Give yourself a chance to try this kind of breathing. It can allow you to send compassion to anyone, anywhere. It requires concentration, but you don’t have to maintain it for a long time. Once you have a sense of it, you can do it for a minute here and there throughout your day, according to what you are able.

As the world seems to grind to a halt, except in hospitals, stillness might be just what we need to help us to find true compassion.