The nature of compassion and its care

Compassion is a quality or feature of our hearts.  By “heart” I refer not to the physical organ that pumps blood throughout our bodies but to the energy center associated with the location of the physical heart through which the revitalizing energy of love flows throughout our bodies and minds and beyond into our relationships.  This flow sustains our emotions in a positive orientation.  It is this “heart” that can be bruised, battered or broken by emotional trauma or touched by an emotionally moving story or event.  It is the seat of our emotions at the center or core of our being.  Its healthy function gives depth, height and breadth to our vitality and carries us forward into the vibrant, life-enriching purpose for which we are here on earth.

Our heart center also serves as the portal through which wisdom flows into our awareness.  In teaching our minds to deny or disregard our emotions, the ego teaches us to become less aware of our hearts’ presence and its messages and to reduce our hearts’ function — often to the point of numbness, sometimes to the point of hard-heartedness.  My offer is to help you to care for your heart and not suffer from the harmful side-effects of the ego’s teachings.

To care for your capacity for compassion is wise in part because this capacity allows you to enjoy your life to the fullest and not to miss out on the best life has to offer.  To fail to care for your capacity for compassion means to shrink away from intimacy and reduce your relationships merely to opportunities to intimidate, manipulate or subjugate yourself to others.  It means teaching yourself that sharing life generously risks too much and that you will be better off within the safety of a comfort zone where you can avoid exploring life as fully as your heart desires.  It means failing to recognize and acknowledge the immense value of your heart’s desires. It means settling for little of what life would offer you that you imagine may be possible.  It means stifling your imagination and ultimately becoming one of the walking dead by which much of modern society is currently populated.  Dare you fully live instead of slowly die?

Life without an open-hearted flow of compassion stagnates as surely as a dammed up stream will stagnate once its life-giving waters cease to flow.  At first it may seem good enough to admire the protected pond behind the dam and claim it as your own but eventually the nutrient-rich silt of life settles to the bottom as the water’s depth decreases and pollutants gather in the pond in increasing concentrations.  As the pond silts in and grows increasingly polluted, life seems less and less worth living.  In its stealth mode, the ego is a cruel master to which our hearts may become enslaved.  Our hearts cry out for freedom from the ego’s chains forged of pride and shame and guilt and blame.  We are not here on earth to be enslaved and suffer in silence as if we’ve lost all power to live otherwise.

Beyond enslavement, suffering and silence, compassion leads us to a life worth living.  Its empowering and uplifting value to us is immeasurable.  The ego would rob us of this value in the name of protection from further heartache.  But the truth is that the ego teaches us to preserve our heart-rending memories of past pain as false treasures protected in a vault that soon becomes the tomb for our brightest hopes and fondest dreams.  The choice to nurture your compassion and revive its healthy function in your life is a choice on behalf of a life worth living fully with faith in love’s power to cause all things to work together for good — your good and the most expansive good of others too.  So, if you identify compassion as your capacity to dream of doing good for others as well as enjoying being yourself with all your natural joy, consider exploring the ideas I will share with you.  As you learn to wisely conserve, nurture and express your compassion, you are helping others to do likewise and sending out ripples of growing compassion throughout the world around you.

Let us not resist our natural temptation to be compassionate.  Together let’s let down our ego’s guard and learn to be wisely compassionate instead of feeling foolishly so and regretting ever having been compassionate.  Following our hearts may have once led us to feel foolish and betrayed.  Yet, do we truly want to never take that risk again?  A wiser way of risk-taking is available.

When are you likely to benefit from consulting with me about compassion?

Consider talking with me if you . . .

• Have suffered (or are now suffering) heartbreak and grief because you let yourself care about another person as if he or she were a loved one who meant more than all the world to you,
• Are inclined to want to help people and wonder how best to provide help or what more you can do,
• Have resources you want to share with generosity but are confused and cautious about how to do so,
• Are sensitive, empathetic and/or tender-hearted and feel drained after being around others,
• Have become weary or wary on account of endless cycles of futility and senseless conflict that never seem to actually resolve anything and instead merely perpetuate, recycle or even exacerbate problems,
• Hope that there’s a better way to address problems and want to find it now,
• Believe that there is a way to find relief from heartache and want to find it rather than merely settle for learning to endure more heartache,
• Feel a call within your heart to help bring an end to suffering by humans and/or other forms of life — or to prevent and undo the harm already done to Nature — and are not yet satisfied with how you’ve responded to that call or
• Feel in your heart a cry for love that you cannot silence or ignore and have not yet satisfied.

If you are ready to exit futility’s endless cycles of heartache and instead invest your compassion wisely in a way that brings lasting relief for both yourself and others, let’s talk.  In the sphere of compassion, you can consider me a kind of investment counselor.  I’ll help you to invest your compassion wisely so that your heart’s cry for relief is deeply satisfied.  There is a better way — a way of wisdom too little known and honored in this increasingly foolish world.  I will help you find it for yourself.  Along the way you will discover the renewing energy and joy of love your heart desires and identify your own inner well of wisdom by which to revive your courage and commitment to living compassionately as both a giver and receiver of love.

The way of mutually shared, interactive, all-encompassing love awaits within you.  Through your mastery of the art of being true to yourself, you will walk in the long-awaited, more light-hearted way of peace, hope and joy.  Dare you be both truer to yourself and nobler towards others?  That is actually your natural orientation toward life.  As you learn to honor yourself you will, in turn, more fully honor others and enhance the nobility of us all.  We’ve forgotten our natural inheritance of our noble nature as givers and receivers of love.  It’s time we all remembered and received the inheritance of compassion long overdue us.  Together we will find the most promising ways for you to invest your inheritance and watch it grow.

Contact me if you want to learn more about this alternative way or orientation towards life.  If your heart is moved by compassion, you have the capacity to enter into this alternate way and share in its miraculous benefits fully.  In our modern emotionally toxic world love is the healing and restorative tonic. Compassion is our guiding light by which to find this tonic.

Contact me at 773-899-3347 or at sent2art@gmail.com.  Your first 90-minute consultation will cost only $20.  If you so desire, we’ll set up an affordable plan for future consultations according to your inclination and ability to pay.  I turn no one away for inability to pay.  That, too, is love’s way.

© Art Nicol 2016