Akashic Records
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What is compassion and how is it different from love?
A simple way to say this is that compassion is love in action, or love in tangible form. What makes it tangible is that a human being feels it. It is an energy that moves through you, where love is the energy that makes you. Love is the energy that makes everything. Love is the inherent vibration of everything.
Compassion is like love in motion. It is love as it exists when it is transmitted through a person. It become human and therefore both felt and also able to be applied to the world around you. Compassion and love are the same energy taking on a different form. Compassion, we say it is inherently human and that is an important thing to understand because it helps explain one of the reasons that human beings exist.
Love already exists in the universe. In fact, love is far more readily available and easier to access when you are not human. When you are not human, you remember who you really are and you remember that you are made of love. Therefore it becomes literally impossible to act out of anything other than love because you are constantly aware that love is what you are. When you are human, you forget that love. You forget your true nature.
Accessing love or choosing love becomes a radical and powerful act. Any act based on love is foremost compassion. Compassion comes when you choose to see the world through the eyes of love. Compassion exists based on your choice to see a situation with love in your heart. To see everything that is happening as a form of love. To look for what you can love in a situation and choose to put your focus there. All of that is what makes compassion.
Compassion is always a choice. You are born with the pure energy of love but you have to choose that love in order to have compassion. So compassion is incredibly sacred because it is deeply entwined with your free will. Compassion does not happen by accident. It is always a choice. Part of the purpose of being human is to figure out how to make that choice as often and as powerfully as possible.
How can we find compassion for something that we do not love?
The way to do this is to first understand that love exists in everything, even in the most hurtful situation. Even the most mean-spirited person or the most mean spirited act has love embedded somewhere, because love is the core energy of everything. When someone is mean spirited, when someone does something hurtful, it is always in a misguided, confused effort to feel better about themselves, or in other words, to feel loved or to feel lovable.
When someone is finally led to an act that is mean or hurtful or ugly, it is only because that is their best effort given where they have come from and what they have experienced before. That is their best effort at feeling better and at feeling love again.
Of course, as most of you have learned, those mean-spirited acts might seem to provide immediate relief to feeling hurt, but in the long run, they actually bring less love rather than more love to your consciousness. Each of you is learning to let go of mean spirited activities. You are learning to let go of small-minded thoughts and continue to embrace love — to continue to choose compassion.
When you see something that you do not love, you see something ugly, or hurtful or otherwise distasteful to you, it is important to look under the surface of what you see for how anyone involved is being motivated by love. How deep down every person desperately wants to feel loved. If you can find that underneath all of the ugliness on the surface, you will find the ability to have compassion for that.
Even if you cannot understand or relate to or accept a hurtful action taken by someone, you can always embrace with compassion the sense that they are acting out of hurt. Assume that somewhere along the way that person been hurt. A trick you can use here when you are really struggling to feel compassion for someone, imagine that person as a young child. Imagine what might have brought them to this situation.
If they are behaving badly, you can assume that they have only been treated this badly or even worse, probably when they were too young to defend themselves.
If you can start to think about that and feel compassion for that imagined child version of them, it will soften you. Feeling compassion for what you imagine them to have been as a child is the same thing as feeling compassion for them in the current moment. The compassion exists either way. That is a shortcut or a way that many of you can use to get underneath what you are reacting to on the surface.
Another thing that is incredibly important here is that you, each of you, must continue to heal the ways that you have been hurt. Often when you are struggling to feel compassion it is because whatever is happening on the surface is reminding you too much of something that has hurt you in the past. It is bringing you back to a place in your mind where you feel powerless and you feel small.
When you react out of something out of compassion, it is typically because you too are feeling hurt and you end up feeling badly yourself. It is so important that you continually dedicate yourselves to noticing where you falter.
To continue to name those parts of your life where you behaved badly. Where your compassion feels out of reach. Instead of imagining your compassion is out of reach because that other person is behaving badly, consider that your compassion is out of reach because you have been so deeply hurt there that you need to back away from this situation and go back to your memories. Go back to the question, "How did I get hurt?" "How can I heal that?" "What am I carrying around with me that is just waiting to get triggered?" As you resolve those things, compassion becomes quite an easy thing to reach on a daily basis.
How do we reach complete self-forgiveness for choices we have made that have harmed others? Particularly harmed our children?
The process of self-forgiveness is very similar to the process of achieving compassion. Forgiveness occurs when you find that part of yourself that you have compassion for. Working on self-forgiveness will often lead you to looking at what went wrong and recognizing that at the time you really were doing the best that you could do. Because it really is true that at any given time, even when someone is making huge mistakes, all of you are doing the best you can given what is happening to you in the past. Given how you have been hurt before, given the resources or lack of resources you have experienced in your life so far. What you will need to do is you will need to go back and consider that when you made those mistakes you were working with the tools that you had. Some of those tools were lacking. You will need to go back even further to your childhood and recognize what you got or what you did not get, that led you to an inadequate toolbox.
When you get there you will find that you need to do some forgiving of your parents, your guardians, your teachers, any of the people who hurt you or did not hurt you enough in your childhood. When you go there, what you will have to do is recognize that those adults in your childhood were doing the best that they could do given how they got hurt. What you will do is you will keep going backwards like a domino effect. You will keep going backwards and you will find that each person is handed a limited set of tools for their life and then they do the best they can do and they make mistakes. Ultimately, forgiveness of your self means forgiveness of the entire situation.
To forgive your self, you must forgive those who hurt you, and those who hurt them. You will reach the need for forgiveness of the society that oppressed your ancestors, and forgiveness of your ancestors who oppressed your parents, and forgiveness of your parents who oppressed you and so on. This is the way forgiveness works. This is the reason it can be so tricky to attain — forgiveness does not happen at one time. It is a state of being. You cannot forgive one act you made without forgiving the whole situation that led you there. That includes all of the other mistakes you have made as well.
Forgiveness becomes more a state of mind than a list for you to check things off of. Forgiveness becomes the choice to see yourself and your life and your mistakes through the eyes of love, through the eyes of compassion — to see yourself with compassion. This is achievable for all of you and in fact, it is becoming more and more possible for all of you to live in this state of forgiveness and compassion. But it will not happen by accident and it will not happen because anyone else changed it for you. It will happen because you make the choice. Then in the next moment, you make the choice again and so on until you are living most of your moments in a state of forgiveness. (June 2011)
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The Monthly Message Preview was channeled from the Akashic Records by Jen Eramith, M.A. Permission is given to copy and redistribute the Messages Previews provided that the contents remain complete, all credit is given to the author, and it is freely distributed. http://www.akashictransformations.com
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