Compassion For Humanity
When I was young, I spent a lot of time trying to figure things out. Every time I looked in the mirror, I saw a human. It was one of the hardest things for me to come to terms with. There was no fur, no hooves or feathers, no beak or long ears. I couldn’t escape that I was “one of them” and I hated that.
At some point I had to reconcile the hatred. I hated people for how they treat each other, for how they treat animals … for how they treat themselves. I hated that nothing I said or did could make them be nicer. I used the hatred to stay isolated in my own perspective, confirming and re-confirming that my view of animals, nature and how the world works was a spectacular improvement on what everyone else was doing. After all, I was the one asking the horses how it’s done, and I didn’t see anyone else being that considerate.
The horses didn’t judge. It has been the greatest wisdom I’ve received in my connection with them, and with all of life. The absence of judgment.
One day I was looking in the mirror, as I often did, searching for what was actually there, what was real, desperately trying to see beyond what was human. The longer I scanned, and the more I thought about it, the easier it was for judgment to kick in. So much thinking litters the space between awareness and clarity.
All of the judgment took hold in my body. Humans are terrible. Humans ruin it for everyone. “They” are the bad ones … but I was the good one. Wrapped in my judgment for others, studying my own face for justification of my rightness, on this day, a dam broke.
If I am judging “them” then I am, by default, giving “them” permission to judge me. I had decided that I am “right”, which makes their judgment of me “wrong.” If I can judge them “wrong” and be “right,” then they can judge me “wrong” and they’ll be “right.” But, I knew I was right! And if I knew was right when I thought I was right, then I had to concede that, in the same way, they know they are right when they think they’re right.
By a very simple logic, my judgment of humanity was open permission to judge “me.” Suddenly, I couldn’t pretend I was not part of the human community.
I didn’t want to be judged! I didn’t deserve to be judged. “They” need to be judged, but I don’t.
Every time I looked in the mirror I had to wrestle with this. How can I accept being human without constantly weathering the barrage of judgments I was justifying by judging others? At the time, I still wasn’t seeing how deeply I was also judging myself.
The human world is complicated, and every bit of it is judgeable. There has to be a different way …
How do the horses do it? How do they keep giving to humanity, to me, even when they are so mistreated, misunderstood, judged and used? How do you get beyond these difficult ideas and feelings when it seems like the very last thing anyone wants to talk about?
When I ask the horses, it’s all about feel. Horses communicate through feel first, then thought, then action. What you feel is pure communication. When felt information is honored, you have access to a kind of clarity that most people crave but don’t yet fully embrace. Intuitive information, empathic information, knowing, subtle energy and the wisdom of the heart all begin in the realm of feel before they are translated into human language.
When it became clear that I didn’t want to live my life being judged the way I was judging humanity, I realized I had no idea how it felt to not be judged, except in my relationship with animals. The space and feeling they offered me felt eternally safe, kind and open to whatever I want to bring. Animals didn’t even judge me when I was judging the rest of the world!
That … that was what I needed to learn.
I started following the horses’ lead by exploring how it felt to stop judging people for judging me or what I think. If someone thinks I am too sensitive, they are allowed to think that. If someone thinks dogs are stupid, they are allowed to think that. If the people I love push away the love I want to share with them, they are free to do that. Giving others these freedoms within my own world-view started providing me with a very tangible, very unfamiliar sense of freedom within myself.
Very soon, it became clear that offering myself and others this freedom to think and be however they are thinking and being opened a whole new space to understand why they are doing what they are doing. I started to understand why I do what I do. Invariably, the more I understood what was behind the judgments and behaviors, the less I felt like judging anybody, even myself.
Years later, I learned that the word for that perspective is compassion.
Being among animals offers a feeling of compassion so natural it’s hard to even put words to it. We call it “therapeutic” or “healing.” It is innate. It is what’s common to all of life. It is a presence that is felt before there are ever any words. It can feel like love.
Compassion for humanity is a way to love your Self. It’s a way to recognize that you are included in what is common to all of life. In compassion, you become one who offers the natural, therapeutic, healing space that is common to all of life. As you offer it, you also feel it. You reclaim and recognize your inclusion in the love that moves through this world.
As we offer compassion together, side-by-side, we walk each other through the chunky, crusty judgments that hold on for dear life, fighting and scratching and beating their drums, chanting “but I’m RIGHT … but I’m RIGHT … but I’m RIGHT.”
Horses aren’t trying to be right. They are just honest. Nature is honest. Humanity can be honest. When we are, when we take the baby steps through our heart, our relationships transform. The outside world responds differently, and the drumming to be right loses its power, swept up in perpetual waves of love.
Every time you look in the mirror you’re going to see a human. Every time you are loved by horses, or trees or dogs or sky or another human, even when you are totally convinced you’ve been forgotten, compassion for humanity includes you.
