Last week I wrote about the importance of realizing that love is a verb. By turning love into an action, we bring love into the present moment and provide a call to action to build a more loving the world.
There is another very important feeling related to love that I want to talk about this week. This incredible feeling is also a verb, although many people do not realize it. That feeling is compassion.
By recognizing that compassion too is a verb, we begin a lifetime journey of opening the heart.
To help better understand just how compassion can be a verb, it will help to understand what are known as the four components of compassion. Sometimes called the four dimensions, core aspects, or levels of compassion, understanding each component will help us bring more love and compassion into our daily lives.
Those four components are:
- Cognitive awareness of suffering
- An emotional response to that suffering
- A wish for that suffering to be relieved, and
- A readiness to act
These levels can be summed up as Cognitive, Emotional, Intentional, and Motivational.
Before we get into each level, it will help to understand what we mean by “suffering.” Suffering is a term well understood in Buddhist communities, but when the Sanskrit word dukkha gets translated to English, certain ideas get lost along the way.
First, what is Suffering?
There are many different definitions to suffering, including dissatisfaction, unease, or distress. But the one I use most often is, “when anything happens that you do not want to happen.”
This definition applies both big and small things in our lives. If a loved one dies, that is suffering. If we get sick, that is suffering. However, if we go into our favorite ice cream store and they are out of our favorite flavor of ice cream, that is suffering too. Nowadays, the WiFi going out causes a lot of suffering.
In each case, we wanted something to happen and the universe had other plans. When I interviewed compassion teacher Mary Doane on the Learn to Love podcast, she said suffering is “when things are not what you wish them to be.” Sometimes that manifests as frustration, disappointment, or pain, whether it be physical or emotional.
Compassion is our heart’s natural response to suffering, whether in ourselves or in others. The four components of which are as follows:
1. A cognitive understanding that someone is suffering
Our first level of compassion is simply recognizing that somebody else is suffering in some way. If you are sitting at a bus stop and you see someone fall off their bicycle, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that person is probably in some pain from the fall.
Similarly, if someone is hungry, in the hospital, or their business just went broke, we can understand they probably did not want these things to happen.
Cognitive suffering is important to compassion because we can apply it to people and experiences very different from our own, including things we have never experienced before. In this way, reading books and memoirs about other people in order to understand another person’s perspective can really grow our ability to see things from another person’s point of view.
This first component of compassion is what you might call the cognitive, intellectual, or mental level of compassion. But to truly encompass all that compassion has to offer, we have to go deeper.
2. A sympathetic concern to suffering
The next step to compassion involves empathy. This level is not the cognitive empathy of seeing someone’s point of view, but a deeply emotional one where you actually feel and sense someone else’s suffering in your own body. This is sometimes called the “affective” or “emotional” component of compassion.
The root of the word compassion comes from the latin word compati, which means “to suffer with.” Our emotional component to suffering involves a shared feeling.
Our sympathetic concern should not be confused with pity, which is looking down on someone from above. Rather, we enter the same emotional space that they are in.
When somebody is telling you that they are sad because they got fired from their job, you would use active listening to not only understand what they are going through, but feel and empathize with their sadness.
Compassion has mental and emotional components, but it does not stop there. Since compassion is not just something you think and feel, it is also something that you do.
3. A wish to see the relief of that suffering
Our next step is to bring our compassion more into the world by setting the intention to want that suffering to end. In this way the third component involves a wish or desire for the suffering of another to end.
This is a natural capacity that all human beings have. Even babies have shown comforting behavior to another baby that is crying. To tap into this component of compassion, we have to open the heart a bit and discover this desire that arises naturally.
This intentional level is important. Even though it is step number three, that does not mean we have to wait for the mental and emotional responses to occur. First thing in the morning we can set an intention to be more compassionate that day. Before we make a challenging phone call, we can set the intention to make our responses as compassionate as possible.
Once we set our intention for others to experience less suffering in their lives, we are ready for the final component: action.
4. A responsiveness or readiness to help relieve that suffering
The fourth component of compassion involves a motivational level, where we are ready to act. This step involves letting our desire to help manifest as a concrete action.
Last week I wrote about this basic idea that love is not something that you feel, it is something that you do. This same idea applies to compassion. It is not simply an inner movement of thought and emotion but an outer movement of intention and action.
So yes, compassion involves actually doing things to make the world a better place.
There you have it: think, feel, intend, act. Put differently, awareness, empathy, intention, action. Or as a psychologist would put it: cognitive, emotional, motivational, behavioral.
No matter what you call each component, it is important to recognize each one is a skill that can be improved and developed. If any layer is lacking, your compassion will be lopsided and incomplete.
There are many times when someone acts on their compassion without actually empathizing with the person they are helping, and as a result their help is the entirely wrong method for the situation. There are other times where we might recognize suffering but not actually do anything about it.
There you have it, the four components of compassion. What do you think? How do you think about and bring compassion into your life? Comment below.
(To hear more, check out my learn to Love Podcast Interviews with Mary Doane, Lodro Rinzler, or Victoria Brattini.)
