Do I have a working definition of compassion? What associations come readily to mind?

Critically Investigate Compassion

We’re going to treat compassion (alongside some kindred virtues and capacities) as something serious — that is to say, something that can withstand tension and conflict and critical interrogation. Settle in by opening a journal and/or starting a conversation with someone in your life, asking them to be a conversation partner and sounding board as you walk through this retreat.

Am I, somewhere, openly metabolizing how the last few years have shaped me?

Voice Questions as Maps and Guides

“Our communal repository of questions may be the closest thing we have to maps and guides right now in a world that is without maps and guides.” – Krista Tippett

With your conversation partner(s) for this retreat, give voice to the questions that are maps and guides for you — and work on them, hone them, question the questions themselves, set them intentionally to carry communally and return to for discernment and sharpening in the time ahead.

How would I describe my relationship to grief, right now, whatever that means?

Ponder the Notion: “we are all one”

With your someone(s), interrogate your gut feelings about the notion that “we are all one.” And then investigate what has been present, what has happened, in times and places where you’ve experienced something like “oneness” or wholeness to be realized, robust, and as complicated as life itself.

What is compassion, through the story of your life — or maybe a story of your body?

Examine the Complexity of Compassion

“The beautiful notion of compassion — like the beautiful notion of unity — is all truth and all paradox. Flesh and blood struggle and absolute miracle. Symbiosis and independence, sometimes at odds. Utter vulnerability and total fortress. We find ourselves with compassion in the realm of bedrock reality, and incredible mystery.”

Discuss.

How does the word “ecosystem” land in my imagination?

Immerse in Ecosystem Imagination

Ponder this list of qualities of ecosystem vitality and wonder, together with others — how they might begin to show up in what and how you organize, partner, or collaborate:

Entanglement, reciprocity, tributaries, dying, composting, regeneration, mutation, underground life support, nutrient cycling and recycling, circulation and exchange, hierarchy and mutuality, absorption, detoxification, photosynthesis, biodiversity, germination, flowering, efflorescence, recombination, endosymbiosis.

Who comes to mind when I hear “tenderness in interplay with power”?

“Be a blessing.”

“Be a blessing.”

Remember the practice of compassion as Roshi Joan so hopefully took it apart for Krista on her first day in Dharamsala — the idea that compassion is not a thing you can point at: “compassion always looks like this, or compassion always does that.” It’s more an intention and orientation to be compassionate, and then will be discernment in any moment about what that looks like with the particularities of the person or the situation in front of you.

“Being a blessing” is the same thing. It is as much about modeling and presence as it is a defined offering or action.

Begin.

Blessings.