In the first stage of awakening, and before, emotions are reactive and automatic. Primarily what you feel can be sourced in a memory, a past trauma, a scenario which made a lasting impression on you. In the second stage of awakening emotions are responsive, alive, no longer proscribed; they emerge in spontaneous receptivity and sympathy to the circumstances.
Inner work up to the Threshold event has been characterized by clearing the residue of reactive emotions. Emotions become more translucent, lucid, and vibrant in the second stage. The individual who has crossed the Threshold becomes a beacon to others, attractive for her feeling sense and her sensitivity to emotional life with a rich emotional life to share.
Most people are unaware of the depths of our emotions because they don't breathe deeply enough to experience them. During respiration they retain a portion of inhaled breath called "residual volume," so that some air is always left in the lungs even after they have exhaled. When they breathe in again they are inhibited from filling their lungs to full capacity. The result is that they live with a chronic background depression: their chest becomes chronically, energetically, and even physically, concave and a full breath into the abdomen and pelvis is habitually inhibited. As a result emotions and relationships are merely reactive since feelings are mechanical, contrived, and automatic, with little or no emotional spontaneity or authenticity.
To truly care for others, we must feel our emotions, we must truly love ourselves and be centered in ourselves. Only then can we become attuned to the flow of love that expresses itself through compassion.
Compassion - the Stirring of a Greater Love
Compassion should arise naturally, beyond our control, not subject to our individual will. It is not sentiment, neither is it manipulation. In the second stage of awakening compassion has an impersonal quality because its power is greater than the small self. In the depths of our heart we feel the stirring of a greater love. This stirring is a natural outcome of having shed attachments to the past and of deepening into new freedom and inner stillness. It is the result of our alignment and balance in body, mind, and heart. In our innate authenticity we simply care for others as ourselves.
When we act out of genuine compassion, as we begin to notice, we set ourselves aside and give to the situation what is required. There is an immediacy, a spontaneity, a heart arising volition in response to suffering. Over time we will learn the truth that true compassion is only present when we are not. The low level emotional life of the first stage, dimmer now in our memory, has blossomed into an expansive strength... of real love. Real emotion is stronger than the small self and overwhelms the very presence of the illusion of separateness. In deep understanding we are increasingly able to witness the good in all things the light in the dark, the love in the anger, the selfless inside the selfish as we dare to see the world 'as it is.'
Compassion appears out of the background of dissolving the ties that bind two together and seeing that we are connected and ultimately one. Having owned our shadow and evolved into inner wholeness acceptance may be extended to others in compassion. Such compassion does not equate with gentleness and less with cloying sentiment. Indeed the wisdom of compassion calls for appropriateness expression in action.
For more about Richard Harvey and his grounding-breaking approach to depth psychotherapy, Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT), please visit this page on the Center for Human Awakening's website... https://www.centerforhumanawakening.com/SAT-Online-Training.html.
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