Compassion
For a variety of reasons too lengthy to go into detail here, compassion has often been one of those words I struggled to understand for a long time.
It’s not that I am a cold-hearted bastard really. It’s just that my approach has always been akin to: “Ok what’s the problem? Ok what needs to be done to fix it? Ok let’s do it then.” Followed by action. Usually the more seemingly urgent the situation the more speedy the action part comes along. I am sure any women reading this are knowingly shaking their heads in unison. My response is seemingly typically male. Even after I learnt that taking a direct approach is not always the best thing to do, the way I worked that out was still purely as a result of seeing “Oh ok…this is the most obvious and simple way to resolve the issue but apparently this person can’t deal with that so we have to take this circuitous route.” There was still a very clear line for me as to how far I would go “out of my way” (i.e. what I perceived to be the most simple, direct and effective route) to resolve an issue. Not so much professionally, but certainly in my personal life.
By being able to work with a varied number of people I became exposed to a true kaleidoscope of realities and in time this allowed me to become far more flexible even in my own life as to what was “right” and “wrong”.
Today, even in my personal life, even when a situation or person falls outside my boundary of tolerance with regard to them being involved with me to some extent or other, I am able nonetheless to still see the situation and if not that at least the person, from a point of view that has a lot more compassion in it than it did in the past. Everyone truly does the best they can with what they have.
Even when they try to kill us for no good reason —which has happened to me, so I am not speaking metaphorically here— they are still just trying to do the best they know. Of course this does not mean you waste your time, effort and energy with these people (unless you consciously choose to do so knowing the full risks). It only means you can remove them from your life but consciously and with no negative emotion associated to the event, and in fact with compassion towards them and their situation. Though I have in many ways moved somewhat beyond base Zen concepts in my own philosophy, certain aphorisms still apply for me in many respects. In this case it is: “Right and wrong are a disease of the mind.” Taken literally it is simply an amoral statement. Understood in more depth it is a compassionate thought. At least, that is my view.
In more specific terms, hypnotherapy is of course extremely useful when trying to view certain events or situations or people in our lives from perspectives that are not just “different” but hopefully closer to the actual underlying “truth” or reality of the matter. Philosophically of course we can never be absolutely sure of the true reality or nature of anything, however we can certainly make some approximations that result in better outcomes on a consistent basis. And hypnotherapy is extremely useful in this regard, if for no other reason than doing it places us into closer rapport with our unconscious and hence into a closer contact with a much larger perception of reality. Consider that while consciously we can only retain on average about 7 chunks of information, unconsciously it’s at the very least in the millions and probably in the billions (it depends on which studies you look at). Surely, being more in touch with the mostly hidden aspects of our internal reality can only bring a higher degree of clarity and with that comes compassion towards our fellow humans.
