Week 9: Recovering a Sense of Compassion

(Sorry I forgot to post this last Tuesday 🤪)

My own note: Compassion is something I found as an adul, during the 10 day silent meditation retreat - as I was getting divorced.

Compassion is seeing things as they are - not as I wish they would be.

It is to accept things as they are, and to have some understanding for how they are.

And to stop wrestling with them and trying to change them - or living with pain because I they are not how I want them to be.

To be compassionate is to see things as they are in truth, and also to accept them - which is a beautiful powerful thing.

This week is about compassion.

Our first section is called 'Fear.' In this first section we are told that we must give accurate names to what we are experiencing. And we are told that we need to stop seeing our inability to get started as being lazy, or procrastinating. And instead we need to see it as the result of fear that we have.

'Enthusiasm'

We are told that discipline is a short lived energy source, which can help us power through some things, but is tied to the ego and limited.

Instead the source of our creative energy is enthusiasm and play. We must have the feeling, similar to a child, of enthusiasm, creativity, joy, excitement, and play.

'Creative U-Turns'

She doesn't explicitly define what a creative U-turn is, but I take from the context of this section, that a creative U-Turn is the moment that we decide to reorient ourselves toward the direction of the art that seems important to us.

This could happen from the void of the blocked artist, or from the pathway of the working artist.

We are advised that it is very common to immediately give up, or self sabotage at the beginning of a creative U-Turn, and that this is due to our fear.

We must not fear the failure - we must endure it, and find ways to ride it out, to metabolize it into something helpful for us.

I really like the idea of treating our talent like a young race horse, that needs to be trained. We need to set the horse up to race appropriately skilled challenges, we must introduce it to it's peers and horses to learn for. We must treat it well and make sure it's healthy.

And so, like other places in this book - we need to rely and ask the universe. We need to turn to faith, and a perception which can find helpful and beneficial things for us - and not just focusing on what can't work.