We are exploring here the quality of Compassion or Loving-kindness, which manifests as a sensitivity, an empathy, an attunement that is necessary for inquiry. This attunement of the Green diamond of the Diamond Guidance is so completely selfless that it has an unlimited capacity to see us exactly where we are. This gives a precision to our discriminating capacity. However, there is a difference between how ego sees attunement and how Being does. What usually passes for attunement is to see where a person is and then to give them what they feel they want. What the soul actually needs is an attuned understanding, one that not only sees where she is in the moment but also recognizes where she is in relation to her true nature. The attunement of the Diamond Guidance provides this understanding and then guides the soul to her true nature, for that is what she truly wants. – Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey, ch.20
This openness of the compassionate heart is a doorway to an intimate connection with all of life. Ultimately, compassion goes beyond awareness and empathy to the recognition that you are not separate from everything around you. In the openness of a truthful heart, there are no boundaries, no walls against the flow of life, inside or out. You can know the experience of other people, of flowers, trees, and squirrels, of the wind and rocks, because your heart is completely awake, open, and undefended. At its depth, compassion creates a disarming capacity to touch and be touched—a quality essential for allowing your sensitivity and contact with your experience and your world.
The judge must always keep a distance from you and your situation in order to stay in control. Compassion means no separation between you and the hurt; you feel it with no reactions and hold nothing back. Pity and sympathy, on the other hand, create distance, separation, and often a feeling of superiority. When you have compassion for yourself, you heal the splits perpetuated by the judge—me versus you. What remains is the simple truth of where you are. – Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within, Ch. 15
As anger can be the barrier and doorway to true strength, so hurt can be the doorway and barrier to compassion. If you are unwilling to acknowledge or be with your pain, it will be hard to experience compassion for yourself or others. The judge specializes in attacking you for feeling your pain. “What good is it to feel pain? It won’t change a thing! . . .You are such a crybaby. . . .Watch out, you might lose it and start crying; then we’d really be in a mess. . . .Feel your pain? Are you some kind of masochist? . . .Your pain is a joke compared to some people’s. . . .You want to feel pain, that’s your problem. Don’t expect me to feel sorry for you. . . .I know it hurts, baby, but cheer up. It could be a lot worse, let me tell you.”
Compassion is a direct antidote to the judge’s poison. That poison is neutralized by the soothing warmth of an open heart. Tenderness dissolves the harshness; allowing undoes the rejection. The critical stance loses its grounding and falls away. Where there was structure, now there is spacious holding; where there was belief and knowledge, now there is truth of the unknown. – Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within, Ch. 15