Step 2: Look at Your Own Family

      Step 2 was the February step.  It's now March.  I didn't write anything on step 2 in February, not because I wasn't doing it, not because I wasn't thinking about it and living it and looking at my own world every day, but because of this part.  The Family part.  I really didn't know what to put here.

       My quest to become more compassionate in some areas of my family life began long before I ever heard of Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.  A million years ago, back in college, it one day dawned on me what a selfish wench I had been as a child and a teenager.  Sure, I was a good kid for the most part - near the top of my class, deferential to authority figures (ok, there were a few particular exceptions to this, but they were completely justified), rarely in trouble.  I didn't rebel in any outrageous way*.

      That said, I was still a selfish wench the way most children are and don't realize it.  I picked on my little brother mercilessly.  I griped about having to do chores.  I was completely focused on my life, my friends, my schoolwork, etc., with little to no regard for what was going on with the rest of my family.  When I was around 16, we moved out of the house I grew up in to a much nicer house.  My parents were very happy about this move.  The new house didn't need tons of work the way our old one did; it was on a lake; it was great. 

     I hated it.  I felt like a sellout moving to an HOA on a man made lake, and I resented moving out of the house I grew up in.  I'm sure I drove my parents nuts referring to the lake as "the Gay Lake" (which I would NEVER, EVER do now!!!  I detest when people use 'gay' as though it's derrogatory, but I was young and stupid and grew up in a backwoods area where people still think being homosexual is a choice).  For the entire time I lived in that house until I left for college, I complained about hating the lake and the neigborhood, even though it was actually a really good situation and a big life improvement for us.  My parents didn't have to stress about fixing things all the time.  The lake made my mom so happy.  It signified something really great my parents had been working toward.  It was a triumph for them.

       Now, looking back on it, I cringe a little thinking of how self-centered I was.  Sure, I can cut myself some slack and say that all kids are like that.  Children don't develop empathy until they get older, and most teenagers are pretty wrapped up in their own worlds.  Everything is SO important when you're a teenager.

       NotDonna and I were just laughing the other day about how surreal it is to talk to teenagers and young adults these days, to just want to shake them and say "that doesn't matter!  Really, it doesn't!  Not at all, I promise."  But there's no point, because they don't get it.  It's one of those things you have to learn for yourself.  So we just sit back and smile.  And yes, we still calmly say, "you don't get it.  This really doesn't matter.  In 10 years, you'll see."  And they look at you like you're so far out of touch it's a wonder you can dial a phone.

      Yeah, everyone's like that when they're young for the most part.  Still, it makes me cringe.  And when it first dawned on me, it didn't dawn on me as a humorous reality.  I was horrified.  I felt aweful.  I still apologize to Boo a few times a year for what an aweful older sister I was.  I was plagued with guilt.  I still am a little bit.

       So I started working to be more compassionate with my family, even though I didn't recognize it as exactly that at the time.  I just knew that I needed to see things from their perspective to be a truely supportive family member and make up for my jackass youth.

      And now that I have a family of my own, that extends even farther.  Because let me tell you, just because I had become reflexively empathetic with my parents, brother, and closest friends, the doesn't mean it came naturally with MacGyver and Punky.

      MacGyver is such an amazing husband that he makes it easy to take him for granted.  He is always doing sweet little things for me, picking up the slack when I'm overwhelmed; cleaning out my car or filling it up with gas; mailing the letter I've accidently left on the counter for a week; ordering the item I keep talking about but never get around to actually getting for myself.  Rarely a day goes by when he doesn't do something just for me to make my life easier or make me happier.

       I actually have to work to avoid expecting him to do those things.  To appreciate every single thing he does.  To fill up my own gas tank once in a while.

      And doing those same sorts of little things for him?  I suck.  Really.  In my head, it's because I'm so damned pressed for time all the time that it's hard to fit in those little things.  In reality, it's because they don't spring to mind for me the way they do for him.  I have to stop and consciously ponder, "What can I do for MacGyver today?"  And sometimes, it's really hard to think of anything.  Sure, that's not exactly compassion, but it ties in.

      I suppose compassion ties in more not when MacGyver is being super sweet to me, but when he's totally fed up with me.  MacGyver can be a little gruff when he's stressed, and he pushes himself to do so much all the time that occassional stress is unavoidable.  Early on, I did not help matters.  When he'd get gruff with me, instead of recognizing that he was stressed out (even though I knew he was), and trying to make him feel better, half the time I'd get pissy, which would only make him feel worse.  Lovely wife, aren't I?

      Now, it didn't take long at all for me to make the stress-gruff connection.  But was my first instinct to help relieve his stress so wouldn't be gruff?  Hell no.  My most serious relationship before MacGyver had been an emotionally and (to a lesser degree) physically abusive one.  As part of recovering from that, I had told my self that I would NOT take any crap from any man, period.  It took a little time (and a lot of patience from MacGyver) for me to clue in to the fact that being compassionate with my partner when he was stressed was not the same as letting someone walk all over me.

      And now I feel like an ass for having gone so far in the opposite direction in the first place.  But I've got it now, and that's what counts.

      Compassion with Punky has been challenging at times, too.  I was never really all that fond of children.  Realizing what a jerk I was as a kid didn't help.  Children are, by nature, needy, self serving little monsters.  They lack reason and empathy.  Lacking reason is a big deal.  When I first became Punky's mom, a psychologist friend of mine told me I was going to have a tough road with her because I communicated on an almost completely rational level.  (That sounds good, but it's actually not really normal; most people communicate with a mixture of reason and emotion; I have been called, by more than one psychologist, "hyper-rational."  Making communication with kids and very emotional people feel un-natural to me).

      She was right.  While Punky and I got along wonderfully when playing games and running around together, I still found myself getting repeatedly frustrated with her irrational behaviour.  "If you liked peanut butter yesterday, then you like it today!!!"  I also thought she was completely spoiled from having been an only child to a freaking awesome single father.  She didn't like to play by herself, and she expected near constant attention from me.

       I had lived quite happily alone with my beloved dog for years before this.  Punky was a big change.

       And as it turned out, she wasn't [abnormally] irrational or spoiled.  She was 4.  And I was an adult.  And I was the one not dealing with it. 

      It didn't take me too long to figure out just what a great kid Punky really was.  I don't know how I ever could have thought she was spoiled (well, I do - because I was being unreasonable and probably a little spoiled myself).  She knew what she wanted and she asked for it because that's what kids do.  But she didn't throw tantrums.  She was sweet and polite and loving.  Looking back, and having a whole heck of  a lot more experience with kids now, I realize that she was actually an amazingly well behaved 4 year old.  At worst, she had a little bit of only child syndrome, but there's not much that could've been done about that.  she was an only child.

      Being compassionate with Punky meant looking at things from her perspective - her irrational, child-world, need-based, not in control perspective.  I STILL have a hard time with this once in a while.  She's 9 now!  The thing is, she keeps changing!  It's hard to keep up with just what her perspective is!  Ha.  I have to remember when she goes on about boys and rants so dramatically about the goings-on between she and her friends what it was like to be that age and to enjoy play-acting these roles and not really knowing what they mean.  I have to remember that maybe when she's 16, I may want to shake her and say, "None of this matters at all!  Really, it doesn't!  Not at all, I promise.  It's not that important.  It's not important at all."  And she still won't listen to me.  But right now, she doesn't even understand what "it" is.  She just modelling; playing at being the people around her. 

      And I have to remember that I'm the person she models most.  And I have to remember to be something worth modelling.  So I have to bite my tongue and nod sympathetically when she tells me that Emma stole Aspen's man.  And tell her that he doesn't sound like a very good man if he's that easy to steal.  And wonder just how long before I can divert her attention with anything caked in glitter.

      This was supposed to be a post about how I am practicing being compassionate with my family now.  About what I saw the last month when I looked around at my family.  About where they stand on compassion and how we can all get better.

      Guess I didn't quite get there.  Maybe in the next post.

*I did get a little while my last year or two of high school, drank a lot on the weekends, was serially cruel to boys, worked hard, partied hard, and made it look easy.  But I NEVER got behind the wheel drunk, stayed a virginal, never touched drugs, and didn't let all this effect my grades.  By most standards in my town, I was a good kid.  I graduated High School with a scholarship to college, excellent SAT/ACT scores, and no babies.

Step 1: Learn; Compassion in Paganism

      The First Step, Learn About Compassion, included two basic overall charges:  Learn about Compassion in faith traditions you don't know much about and learn about Compassion in your own faith tradition.

       I split this up even further because nothing can ever be that simple in my life ;-).  I split the "other" category into other religions and Compassion in general - ie, the value and effects of Compassion as measured empirically, scientifically, psychologically, neurologically, anthropologically (under which heading I placed motherhood), etc.  I pretty much had to split "my own" faith tradition in two since I'm a UU Pagan.  While Unitarian Universalism and Paganism are completely complimentary religious, they are still two separate faith traditions.  Each has it's own history and it's own - calls to action, we'll say.

       I already touched on some of my very enlightening discoveries about Compassion in other religions, especially Christianity, here.  You can find a variety of posts throughout Cheap Wine and Cookies that touch on empirical studies of Compassion/Empathy because it is something I have been interested in for quite some time.  One of my favorite discussions of this was Vegetarians Make Better Lovers.  I also discussed it in the introductory posts of this, the Compassion blog.

       Now it is time to delve into my spirituality; my faith traditions:  Unitarian Universalism and Paganism.  I will start with the latter because, frankly, the presence of Compassion in UU is more than obvious.  I mean, come on, have you seen the Unitarian Universalist National Campaign?

      Please click the button and check it out.  It's an amazing campaign and full of moving stories and stories to get you moving.  So, yeah.  The Compassion is there, right on our sleeves.  I could (and still might) write a long post about the particular challenges of Compassion in a religion that so heavily touts it, but for today I'm going to touch on the less obvious:

      Compassion in Paganism

      Paganism may or may not be considered an organized religion, depending on your take.  It is definitely a valid and widely recognized religion/faith practice.  I would hazard to say, though, that it is one of the more "disorganized" of the "organized" religions.  With no single creed, work of scripture, or overall text - or even collection of texts - it's hard to have anything to point to and say "there; that's it; that's Paganism."  Sure, there are 65 million different takes on and interpretations of the Bible and it's meaning(s), along with all the other major religious texts, but still the texts are there.  They are written out in black and white.  There is some skeleton, some structure to be seen.

       Paganism today - in my opinion - is more of an interweaving of a number of faith traditions from the past.  The so-called "Old Ways."  Earth, Moon, and Goddess centered spiritualities stretching far back into history, and even pre-history, spanning the globe.  From each of these ancient traditions, a thread, or, more appropriately, a vine, stretches forward to today, intertwining with the others, weaving the loose structure of Paganism.

       Like any other religion, Paganism means different things to different people.  One day, I'll write a nice, long post about what Paganism means to me, even discussing Wicca.  But that's not what today's post focuses on.  To get to the bottom of where I feel that Compassion falls in Paganism, all you need to know about my feelings on Paganism is this:

      Paganism is the modern renewal/re-embracing of ages old Earth Centered religions.  The cycles of nature and the Wheel of the Year are at its center.  It is from the powers and cycles of nature that the most basic precepts of Paganism spring.  The majority of Pagans I know hold two basic concepts near the center of their belief systems.  They are:

      An' it harm none, do what you will (also called the Pagan or Wiccan Rede); and

      What  you send forth comes back times three (also called the Rule of Three or Threefold Law).

       This is not a lesson in Paganism, but I'm having trouble resisting the urge to explain these things before getting on to the Compassion component.  The Rule of Three is often read two ways.  The first way is as a sort of Nature-enforced karma.  Whatever you put out into the world will come back to you (or your kin or descendants) with three times the magnitude you put out.  The second is that whatever you put out into the world will come back to you in the realms of mind, body, and spirit.  I believe the two interpretations work coincide.

      In the past, I've taken a little bit of issue with the Pagan Rede because it doesn't sound all that moral on first read.  I mean, really, doesn't it kinda sound like, "If you're not an ax murderer, you're good"?  It's in the application that you discover how truly rooted in Compassion this rule is. 
  
      It's pretty easy to get behind the first clause, "An' it harm none," ("If it harms none,"), similar to the opening of the Hippocratic Oath, "First, do no harm."  I think it's a darn good starting point, and if you really think about it, and keep that thought in the front of your mind, it's not as simple as it sounds.  It's a lot more complex than simply refraining from smacking around people who tick you off. 

       If you keep that thought, "do no harm," in the front of your mind you start to question very minor things that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.  That snarky comment.  That little bout of road rage.  Needlessly squashing a spider.  Even buying inhumane meat or shopping at stores with unethical practices.  "Do no harm," is a pretty freaking tall order when you really think about it.  Sometimes, it can take some real concentration and focus on the moment to fully live that belief.  Sometimes, it can take a full on restructuring of the way we think and live.

      The cycles of nature that Paganism reveres are by their nature free of malice.  One might see the lion eating the gazelle as doing harm, but it is harm without malice.  The lion takes no more than what she needs to survive and support her offspring.  She does not kill out of anger or spite.  Even in fierce competition over mates where there is fighting not for food, there is still a restraint to the lowest degree of force necessary to succeed.  Death and even permanent maiming are rare.  So it is with nature.  So it should be with us.

       But, of course, it's not.  Our culture sometimes grooms us for cruelty, for spite, for that "me first no matter who I trample" mentality.  I believe that those drives and behaviours are incompatible with Paganism.  They do not fit with "An' it harm none..."

      "... do what you will."  Well, that sounds a little selfish, doesn't it?  Well, yeah.  But if your focus is on the "do what you will" part, you're missing the point.  You have to fully embrace harming none before you ever get to "do what you will."  I, personally, don't think I'm really there yet.  I'm getting closer, but I still have a lot of work to do on harming none.

      Once I get there, though, it's not a free-for-all.  First off, harming none, as I've said, is harder than it sounds at first blush.  But then the Rule of Three comes into play.  It should really say "...do what you will, but be ready to pay for it," or, put more positively, "...do what you will and it will be returned to you threefold."

      The Rule of Three reminds us that our actions do not exist in a vacuum.  Every word, gesture, and action has an effect, and we are responsible for those effects.  And whether it's obvious to us or not, we will face consequences - positive and negative - for those actions and effects.  Perhaps a cruel word uttered to a stranger won't result in immediate rebuke, but it plants seeds of negativity - both in the life of the person we spoke to and in our own lives.  We may get a little buzz of self-righteousness when we "put someone in their place," so to speak, but is that really something good for us?  Is that really something that feeds us?  No, slowly, little by little, acting like that eats away at us, it sets a pattern, and it makes happiness and contentment that much harder to find and to embrace.

       But if we act with kindness, with Compassion, if we act responsibly, we plant positive seeds.  We move slowly forward.  We grow.

       Have you ever had a stranger compliment you out of the blue?  Have you ever done something nice for someone just because you were there and you could?  Positive seeds.  Good feelings grow from that in both parties.  Your day is lifted.  More positive things come from those positive seeds whether they are directly related or not.  And the more positive seeds you plant, the more they produce.  The growth is exponential. 

       It is like Samuel Clements (writing as Mark Twain) famously said:  "I could live for two months on a good compliment."

      Start by refraining from harm.  Move forward from there.  Plant positive seeds or negative, but be aware that you are paving your own path, you will reap the consequences - positive or negative - times three.

*   *   *
      The Compassion in Paganism can further be seen in our reverence for the Earth and the Goddess.  Personally, I see the Goddess and God as aspects of the same overarching power, but different Pagans see it different ways.  The Goddess is also divided into her three personas: the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone.  While the Maiden represents youth, potential, and exuberance, it is the nurturing, Compassionate Mother and the Wise, Compassionate Crone who are most revered. 

      In each of these personas, she is the bountiful, selfless provider.  As the mother, she is fertility, she is nurture of the helpless, she is nourishment and love.  As the Crone, she is wisdom, caring for the community, family, and world as a whole.  She is enlightenment.

      The Goddess is often seen as synonymous with the Earth.  Whether they are seen as separate entities or the same, the Earth is also the perfect example of selfless love.  The Earth provides.  The Earth gives.  The Earth knows no malice, nor even any defense.

       And as responsible stewards of the Earth, the better our treatment, the better our rewards.  Planting seeds, literally and figuratively.

       Paganism is NOT about cold steel and spell casting and attention grabbing eye makeup.  It is about Compassion.  For the Earth and all living things.  Compassion is central to Paganism.  And anyone who says otherwise, I would hazard to say isn't digging deep enough.

Why Compassion?: It Fits

      I have written on Empathy before.  I feel very strongly that the ability to put one's self in another's shoes, so to speak, is crucial to compassionate human relationships.  Compassionate Life emphasizes and refines that point.

       Compassion is key - for personal enlightenment, for global justice, for right relationships.  It is something we have evolved for.  Compassionate Life discusses at length in its beginning the evolutionary journey that has molded us to be compassionate beings.  The author discusses the war, so to speak that takes place between our different "brains." 

      There is the "old" or "reptilian brain," our basest core, the brainstem, devoted strictly to survival - obtaining food, fleeing from threats, and propogating the species.  It in from this brain that the "fight or flight" respose is programmed.  Mindsight discusses this same concept.  It is the "old brain" that takes over when we "loose our minds."  When we find ourselves controlled by anger or fear and reacting without - or apparently without - thought.

      The old brain is at war with the "new brain," our thinking, reasoning, neocortex.  The neocortex gives us rationality, language, creativity, and control.  It is our "higher functioning."  This is also the area that gets "hijacked" when we are overcome with rage, lust, fear, etc.

       The most disturbing point Karen Armstrong makes on this topic in Compassionate Life is about the consequences when we direct the abilities of the new brain to the service of the old brain.  When we apply our advanced intellect to pursuits driven by anger, fear, or lust.  It is from this "co-opting" of the new brain by the old that the most horrifying attrocities known to mankind have happened.

       And, on a smaller scale, human beings are often known to use the behaviours of the old brain as an excuse.  I don't know how many times I have heard the claim made that men are "genetically hard wired" against monogamy.  There are dozens of arguements that run along similar lines used to justify or excuse all sorts of unsavory behaviour.  And it's all freaking BS.  With the neocortex comes the ablility to override the old brain.  Just because I was genetically predisposed to start breeding at 16 years old in no way meant I had to or would.

       The story of the two brains reminds me of an old parable (which just happened to be related during the story for all ages at our church this Sunday): 

An old Cherokee chief was teaching his grandson about life...

"A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy.
"It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves.

"One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, self-doubt, and ego.

"The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.

"This same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather,
"Which wolf will win?"

The old chief simply replied,
"The one you feed."

      And THIS is where learning true compassion is key.  Nurturing that wolf, so to speak.  Armstrong points out in Compassionate Life that compassion is like any other innate human ability in it's potential for growth.  Just as one can enhance the abilities of their body through excersize, their intelligence through study, and even their language through poetry, so too can practice and effort be used to expand and hone human capacity for compassion.

       So we have these two warring brains - these two opposing motivational centers.  Are we then always doomed to internal conflict and struggle?  Must we spend our whole lives beating back the cries of the old brain with the new?  And if the new brain is focused on rationality and intelligence, how is it that compassion, and with it love, is the answer?

        The answer to that, as posited by Armstrong, lies in a third, more recently discovered "brain" - residing in the limbic system.  Please refer to the book (or any recent neuropsychology text) for more detail, but the simplified answer, what I took away from it, is this:

Motherhood

      The origins of compassion, altruism, and love lie within the evolution of motherhood in warm blooded creatures.  The practice of rearing young, of sticking around to ensure their survival, carried with it evolutionary benefits.  The genes of animals who were taken care of in infancy were passed on more effectively than those that weren't.  Care for the young became an ingrained trait.  At the same time, among some mammals, particularly those on the lineage of Homo sapiens, began to develop bigger brains.  Bigger brains also equated to better survival.  Bigger brains had more successful genes.  As brains grew, so did skulls, and consequently infants were born earlier and earlier in thier development.  Today, human infants are born so early that their first 3 months of life is usually referred to as "the fourth trimester" since they remain virtually fetal at that stage.

       Infants being born more and more helpless combined with the predisposition to care for young gave birth, essentially, to maternal love.  It has been posited by many scientists that the love between a mother and her offspring is the original form of love from which all others have developped.

       There is nothing more basely selfless than the mother of an infant who is willing to put every one of her own needs to the side in order to attend to probably the most demanding creature she has ever encountered.  Ignoring - and sometimes not even feeling - her own pangs of hunger and exhaustion, mothers are become wholly devoted to sustaining a life other than their own.  This is the origin of selflessness.  This is the origin of compassion.  This is the key to the struggle between the wolves of the old and new brains.

       Of course, here I am talking about archetypes.  There are mothers out there who are far from selfless (trust me, I know this all too well).  And just because motherhood is the biological origin of love does not mean that it is the only true love or that women are in some way more capable of love then men.  That is not AT ALL what I'm saying.  Remember, we're still talking about brain systems here, and men have limibic systems, too.  It just happens that the example of motherhood rings very very true to me.

       When I gave birth, something in me changed.  Something I still don't quite understand.  It's a change I'm sure millions of women undergo in their lifetimes.  One day, I will do a whole post about it, because this synopsis will not do it justice.  When I gave birth, I was already a mother.  I had been caring for Punky for years, she was (and is) my daughter.  But she was never a helpless infant in my arms.  I met her when she was 18 months old, but even then was not too close to her since MacGvyer and I were not all that serious.  I did not become a mother to her until she was 4.  She was far from helpless.  While I underwent much transformation in that first year of caring for her (indeed, in every year of being a wife and mother - I am ever evolving), it did not compare to the shift in me after I gave birth.

       I have always been a caring and sympathetic person.  I am the first to assume that when a person acts out, it is because they are in a negative place and may need help (some exceptions to this - like cruelty to animals - clearly apply).  But after I had Flintstone I began to feel pain for others in an unbelievably acute way.  I found myself unable to listen to the news or even remember some cases from my past without a sharp sense of mourning.  To that degree, I had become obsessive, which is not a good change.  But, as we will see farther into this journey on the 12 steps, appropriately developped compassion can even help with that.

      Most of the change, however, was good.  I felt awakened to a sort of spiritual truth about humanity.  And that truth was this (or something like it):  Putting your own needs aside for the benefit of others is a doorway to inner peace.

      Of course, there a caveats.  Of course, there's more to it.  That will come in time.  But the lesson is there, and it comes from the limbic system.

      And it tells us that the struggle inside us is not a struggle between two equally powerful wolves.  There is a third, intrinsically wiser, mother wolf ready to aid the compassionate wolf, the new brain.  We just have to learn to feed them.