Your compassion is the most powerful healing force on the planet. The most important thing you could possibly do right now — for yourself and everyone else — is to begin to develop and/or further develop your capacity to use your compassionate heart as a source of goodness and healing in your own life and in the life of humanity. — From the Introduction to Impossible Compassion
There is a reason compassion is important in all of the world's great religious traditions, and is particularly central to Buddhism. Curiously enough, however, there are some simple self-directed compassion techniques that have extremely profound healing benefits, but which to my knowledge are not widely known about or taught.
What Makes Compassion So Powerful?
Compassion is love made conscious and directed. When you take the love that is your essential nature — the love that you are at the deepest level — and you consciously direct it toward a wound, toward a pattern, toward a part of yourself that is suffering, something remarkable happens.
The wound heals. The pattern dissolves. The part of you that was suffering finds peace.
And not only does this happen internally — the effects ripple outward into your life. Your relationships change. Your finances change. Your health changes. Your capacity to make a positive impact in the world changes.
This is what I have witnessed in thousands of sessions and programs over many years. The results are consistent and often rapid. They surprise even me.
Self-Directed Compassion
The key insight that makes The Compassion Key unique is that the compassion must be self-directed. You are not giving compassion to others. You are giving compassion to yourself — to the part of you that is wounded, that is stuck, that is suffering.
This is counterintuitive for many people. We are taught to have compassion for others, not for ourselves. Self-compassion can even feel selfish or weak to many of us.
But here is the truth: when you heal yourself with compassion, you automatically become more capable of genuine compassion for others. You cannot give what you do not have. As you fill yourself up with compassion, it naturally overflows into the world around you.
This is the third key, and arguably the most practical and powerful. In the final installment, we will bring all three keys together.