I am reading a book called Mindful Compassion by Paul Gilbert and Choden, which talks about the notion that compassion is not about trying to be calm and serene in the face of difficulties, but more so about facing difficulties squarely and with honesty. This requires a keen mindfulness of "difficult" or problematic emotions that we might wish to best leave behind.The authors poignantly note:
If we set out to get rid of our rage, vengeance, sexual desires, anxiety, and all the other stuff that goes on in our heads, then we will be constantly monitoring if we've been successful or not, and this will undermine our mindfulness practice. Moreover, how can we understand or relate to humanity? (p.173)
The difficulty in relating to this excerpt, for me, is that there is a fine line between beholding pain and suffering and "giving into it" or "reacting to it". I think this is the tricky aspect of compassion practice. On the one hand, there are those who regard aforesaid emotions as "impure" (Buddhists included), and therefore as karmic obstructions that need to be somehow purged. While I think this is an important aspect of Buddhist practice, in fact, there is nothing in mind that is truly impure, if we are able to behold it with a certain detachment that is not self-involved. This is the level of seeing emotions as energies rather than as qualities belonging to the self. It's only when I add the second thought of "this is my emotion" that I start to feed into the sense of self, and therefore start to feel the compulsion to act on those feelings and thoughts.
On the other hand, spiritual practitioners might also fall into the error of believing that, because phenomenon are "empty" in nature, one does not need to worry about the consequences of acting on those emotions. This is to deny the rule of karma and to get deeper into enmeshment. So I think an important practice is to try to see all emotions with a certain kind of loving presence that does not attach to one feeling or the other, thinking it is "mine". This way of thinking might also include wallowing in emotions: saying, for instance, "this is who I am and there's no way to change me". One has already fallen into the unfortunate trap of confusing emotions for the self.
Reading novels can sometimes help us practice this art of beholding. Have you ever read a novel and became so identified with one particular character, story, or narrative, that you essentially cut out the rest of the characters as "worthy" of identification? When reading books, one can observe the ways in which some characters stand to represent 'ourselves' while others are marginalized or seen as "others". This mirrors the experience of everyday life, moment to moment. So in those instances, we need to step back and ask ourselves: which one of these phenomena is truly "me', and which are the "others"? Then we can practice somehow not making a hard boundary between self and others: to behold different permutations in how the text might be experienced depending on the reader's identity or the character's identity. But overall, again, the idea is not to judge one character or prefer one over the other, but to try to look at the whole situation with a sort of loving detachment: seeing "this is it" and observing the intricate dynamics without attaching to one particular scene or another.
Gilbert, P. & Choden (2014). Mindful Compassion. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger
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