Keeping Compassionate Company

 "If you don't believe in God, it may help to remember this great line of Geneen Roth's: that awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage." (Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird, p.29-30)

I love this line from Anne Lamott, "awareness is learning to keep yourself company". Now when I read this, I wonder, how does this relate to the Buddhist notion of awareness? Is it not dualistic to say that we keep ourselves company--as though there were a subject and an object within ourselves? Perhaps the more interesting question to pose is how awareness can be compassionate. I think it probably starts with getting to know our fears and recognizing that the person who enters every situation is always enough. Even if we don't have the words, the tact, the know how, etc. the compassionate voice within is always open to mystery, and tries to make do with whatever happens to be available, in the confidence that we have enough to navigate uncertainty and challenges.

But as I say this, I also realize that it's not as simple as it sounds. It seems that the "learning to keep yourself company" that Geneen Roth describes is not just about cultivating a pure awareness. I think it means having a loose and soft approach toward our thoughts, which welcomes all thoughts without confusedly believing they are permanent, fixed and real. Compassion is a kind of soft awareness that does not even keep score about the amount of compassion we have or exude: it's a kind of soft knowing that all states of mind are empty in nature and therefore there is nothing we need to attach or cling to. If, on the other hand, we are clinging tenaciously to our views, our body, emotions etc. then we will have a very tense and grasping perfectionism around ourselves. It's as though our thoughts are armor that is designed to protect the self and enhance the fulfillment of its desires. Rather than letting thoughts come and go, such a way of being is bound to create misery and a sense of tightness around the body.

Ultimate compassion does not discriminate; it does not say that this or that is more or less worthy of love. We don't pick and choose which emotions are better to have, any more than a gardener likes one flower better than another. A true gardener appreciates the variety of all the flowers and plants in the garden. In a similar way, when our awareness is soft and not particularly identified with one state or feeling (or another), we can appreciate all of them equally as adding a certain kind of diversity to the garden. At the same time, the tricky part is to know that we are not the sum of all these flowers in the inner garden. In this sense, compassion involves creating a beholding space that allows anything to happen, and which thus involves loosening a sense of trying to control all the elements of our experiences.

Compassion can also extend to the various thoughts and voices around us. When someone is scolding us, do we conclude that the words are belonging to that person? Or are the words only created when we hear them in our minds? When I accept that the words I am experiencing are my own thoughts, then there is no further need to react to them or reject them: they essentially become mine, since I am the one choosing to interpret them as I do. When I decide to take a softer approach to the words around me, then they too become "nobody's thoughts in particular", so I cease to create a duality of subject and object or "my thoughts" vs "your thoughts". But this requires a skilful softening of awareness that does not attempt to divide the world needlessly.

Lamott, Anne (1994). Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor.