The passage from looking down to standing beside.

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It is a relationship between equals.

(Pema Chödrön)

As your companion for reading "Without Prejudice",

we recommend Patrick Lenk's “Lo Boier":

There is a kindness

that keeps its distance, 

looking at suffering

from above, 

pretending to be

an act of love, 

saying: Poor you.

This is pity.

It requires someone to be fortunate,

and someone else to be unfortunate.

One whole.

One broken.

Us.

Them.

Pity does not merely tell what the other lacks, 

but further reduces them to that lack.

The wound becomes the identity.

And gratitude is lost.

Gratitude for the sacred life

within the person before us.

Pity looks at a life 

signaling it has failed.

Compassion looks

at that same life

and remembers

that it is still becoming.

To refuse pity

is not to deny suffering.

It is to refuse to confuse the suffering

with the one who suffers.

Pity may offer enough

to soothe the conscience,

without disturbing the arrangement

that made the distance possible.

Pity needs the divide.

The pitied must remain below

for the one who pities 

to remain above.

And so,

however gentle its appearance, 

pity preserves the status quo.

It requires prejudice: a judgment made

before the whole life has been heard.

Pity is compassion’s opposite.

Pity separates.

Compassion relates.

Between them,

empathy offers a bridge

interrupting the judgment.

It no longer says: Poor you.

It says: I feel with you.

Your sorrow

does not have

to be carried alone.

Empathy is the bridge 

bringing us

from above 

to beside.

Yet empathy must remain centred.

If I remain untouched by your suffering,

you remain alone.

If I lose myself inside your suffering,

suffering has claimed two lives.

Empathy is the middle way:

near enough to feel,

grounded enough to remain.

But a bridge exists to be crossed.

Compassion asks something more.

Compassion does not suffer 

instead of another.

It does not steal their path.

It suffers with,

sits beside,

holds the hand.

It acts,

where action may alleviate suffering,

and remains,

where nothing can be repaired.

Pity says: Poor you.

Empathy says: I feel this with you.

Compassion says: You will not suffer alone.

Compassion changes the terms of the relation, 

healing the division

that made difference 

an opposition.

Pity separates.

Compassion reconciles.

And where there are no longer opposites,

there is no one above,

and no one below.

María and I have been learning this

with our greatest life teachers: our kinship.

Realising that there is nothing we can do for them

that belongs to them to do.

We cannot learn their lessons.

We cannot forge their destinies.

We can suffer with them.

We can rejoice with them.

We can remain beside them.

We can love them

without turning love into rescue.

We refuse to feel sorry for them.

Not because we do not see their pain.

Because we recognise their sovereignty.

To pity them

would be to forget

our gratitude 

for the irreducible life 

within them.

For the deepest service any of us may offer

is to inhabit our own life fully.

Responsibility is not blame,

it is the return of authorship.

The wound may not be my fault.

The life I create around it remains mine.

And all of this begins with oneself.

How do I perceive myself?

For when I learn

to sit beside

my own wounded self,

I no longer need

to stand above

the wounds

of another.

Perhaps this is where compassion begins.

Not in saving one another.

In remembering

that no one

is beneath us.

That no one

is beyond us.

That there is

no us

and them.

There is only us.

May we see suffering

without reducing anyone

to what they suffer.

May empathy lead us

from distance

into presence.

May compassion teach us

to suffer with,

to rejoice with,

and to act with,

without rescuing,

possessing,

or abandoning.

May we stand

beside ourselves,

so that we may stand

beside all our relations,

without prejudice,

with gratitude,

with compassion.

Yo lo Creo/

I believe, and so it is