Do you want sweet or sour?

Karuna: Compassion, Pity and the Urge to Fix

This week we move to karuna. Compassion. The second of the Four Immeasurables.

The word comes from the Latin com, with, and pati, to suffer. To suffer with.

Buddhists say the near enemy of compassion is pity.

Feeling sorry for someone puts distance between us, and people can feel it.

And then there's fixing... The one I'm most guilty of. It looks like love. Watching someone we love suffer is almost unbearable, so we reach for advice, a silver lining, a story about when it happened to us. Partly to ease their pain. Partly to ease our own.

My daughter came up with a code for us. When she just wants me to listen, she says she wants sweet, and when she wants tough advice, she says sour (because she knows sometimes I'll ask her to see from others' perspectives or see the bigger picture).

Big love, Em x