There is no such thing as compassion fatigue.
By which I do not mean that there is no such thing as feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, defeated, like you are Sisyphus carrying your boulder up the mountain every day with no help, with rows of supplicating people lining the vertical path you are trudging, pleading for a portion of your already drained energy reserves to save them. I do not deny that burn-out exists among those of us who have dedicated our working lives, and in some cases our lives, period, to the relief of suffering. There is much suffering calling out for attention, and our collective efforts joined together can only address a small portion of it.
Many of us find ourselves in that burdened condition. I’ve lived it, seen it, worked with it in myself, in the many people who come to me for relief and perspective, in students, and in colleagues. It’s real and we healers need healing ourselves. ** Some of us find ourselves exhibiting the pain and even the addictions of those whose suffering we have sought to alleviate. We have absorbed a portion of the energetic denseness and the accompanying thoughts of those who walk away from our working with them feeling much lighter, clearer and relieved. And we, after so many years of being available to that denseness, carrying it round like a backpack filled with rocks, find ourselves weighted down beyond our capacity to continue. Add to that the present global uncertainty that affects both us and those we help, and we can feel like the only option we have to keep going is to distract ourselves with television, medication (same thing), social media (same thing), or to quit our jobs.
** A healer is not only someone who works directly in a recognizable medical or therapeutic situation with clients. A healer is anyone who understands that we are created from both spirit and matter, and accordingly positions themselves in their life and work, whatever they are called to do, as a bridge between those two worlds. That doesn’t imply any religious belief or affiliation, just an intuitive understanding of underlying reality. A healer can be in any job, anywhere. A healer is a conscious helper. They can be a parent, teacher, lawyer, police officer, bus driver, gardener, etc.
All that is real. But here’s the thing. It has nothing to do with compassion. And the idea being promulgated by well-meaning but confused people that we have a limited store of compassion that gets drained by working to relieve suffering is not only factually wrong, it is dangerous to the very people who are being counseled that they have spent their compassion allotment. By diminishing compassion to a quantifiable substance, like gasoline, we are disempowering ourselves from being able to find solutions to the real problem of burn-out before we’ve even begun the conversation. In other words, the framework of compassion fatigue is faulty, and so any conversation within that false idea structure will never lead to sustainable solutions. By identifying a real problem with a false diagnosis, we are casting aside a vital tool in the healing of the healers and for the betterment of our work. And further, and maybe more important in the longer run, the idea of compassion fatigue is obscuring the most important teaching for living an authentic spiritualized life: the embodiment of the universal, eternal, un-fatiguable force of compassion.
The Real Deal
All of what I’ve described above is the result of relying on and using empathy, not compassion. Compassion and empathy are not the same thing. What is being defined as compassion fatigue is actually empathy fatigue. The discernment between them is really, really important if you want to do the job you’ve been given to do on earth with strength, clarity, protection and longevity.
The difference between empathy and compassion is the difference between burn-out and longevity, between stumbling along doing the best you can and actually doing the best you can, and being happy doing it. And in the development of the discernment of the difference between them, in the realization of how each of them feels in and acts through you, in the seeing of how you’ve used the one thinking it was the other, and then in the realization of what’s happened to you in the playing out of that confusion, lies the opportunity of you re-taking your own power of internal command. And then in the process of learning how to choose one over the other as your go-to method of doing your work and navigating your life- how to literally employ compassion as a consciously chosen embodied space of working and living- you gain the key to your own health, your longevity and effectiveness as a healer, your energetic protection, and to your own spiritual progress.
Compassion cannot be fatigued because it comes from an endless, eternally renewable source. Empathy comes from your body and is subject to the same tiredness and being drained as any other human part. What I’m going to show you is how to identify the one and the other. But more than that, I’m going to teach you what I’ve learned: how to embody and choose to engage your work, your life and your relationships from the renewable, protected, empowered space of compassion.
Where Compassion Lives and How It Works
Your entire Human Energy Vehicle (HEV) is constructed of interlocking layers of energy, from the physical to the spiritual. Each energy center, or chakra, also is divided into layers, each with its own qualities and assigned job in the maintenance and functioning of the whole. For the purposes of this essay, I am focusing on the heart center. For an overview and clear picture of the anatomy and physiology of the HEV, see The Simplified Energy Vehicle article.
All the layers of the heart have wonderful inbuilt qualities. I’m concentrating for the purposes on this essay on compassion. But humility, calmness, faith, forgiveness, patience, joy, clarity, and more all have their assigned places. In other words, as sages have taught us for centuries, everything you need is literally there inside you. Not metaphorically. Literally. One of the layers of your heart- the emotional body to be exact- contains the implanted, permanently residing vibration of compassion. It is built into the original prototype of the Human Energy Vehicle, of which your own is a customized model, a variation on the central theme of being an incarnate human that needs to interact with this planet and life upon it so as to learn its lessons, gain experience, and develop spiritually through that experience.
By being a member of the greater heart family, compassion has both its own characteristics and those of its parent. Calm, non-attached to outcome, present, attentive, neutral, holding the space for all possibilities, free of opinion; these are some of the characteristics associated with compassion. But in addition, compassion is infused with the heart’s qualities of unity, harmony, equality, accurate intuition, awareness of both the personal and spiritual aspects of humans, as well as being linked to the trans-personal realms of consciousness and to universal love. All of these qualities are built into every human vehicle, waiting for activation.
Compassion is, up until now, usually activated in us by external tragedy. A natural disaster, a shooting, a sudden illness of someone we know, will call us into our hearts, temporarily bypassing our mind, which in the instance has no solutions to even offer, and which may not even be able to grasp the immensity of the tragedy. That leaves the space available for the manifestation of compassion, which operates below the level of cognition, through the medium of heart-centered intuition. If the stimulant is of a general nature, something happening that many people are aware of, our own activated compassion becomes part of a general field of compassion, linking on the inner planes with the hearts of all those similarly called. That collective heart will temporarily infuse the general field of energy with a different quality than usual. Many people notice the different ambiance and appreciate it, often lamenting how different it feels from the vibration of dense, conflicting thought we call normal. And then the moment passes, and compassion recedes in the face of the re-exertion of the mind’s need for dominance, and waits, in your heart, for the next disaster to make its pitch for harmony, equality, and love.
When you know that compassion lives in you all the time, that it is as much a part of you as your hands and feet, you can claim it as your own (actually you share it with the whole universe) and begin the inner training of accessing it at will. When you then know where exactly its home is in your vehicle, you are empowered to do just that.
Compassion is a universal force. The universe is always renewing, always vitalized from the source of Universal Light. Some call that source God, some the numinous, some the Great Spirit; Nature, Love, Allah, Brahma…. Some just feel it, commune with it, surrender to it without naming or codifying it. Some call what is generated, recycled, renewed and sent forth without condition or limit from that source prana, chi, Light, Love. What we see and normally call reality is built of, upon, and sustained by these subtle but knowable, if you know where to look and feel and sense, forces. To those who have learned to tune into it, that force permeates everything, everywhere.
Time for a caveat. Compassion should not be confused with the religious claiming of it, any more than health should be confused with a medical system. Compassion is not necessarily the province of any religion, spiritual path, community, or point of view. It is absolutely beyond, underneath, distinguished from, any ideology or set of cognitive precepts. It exists in all creatures, in nature in general, in matter and underlying matter. It can be discussed, as we are doing now. It is hopefully accessed and invoked in groups of humans gathered for the purpose of devotion to that which is beyond and inside us, and for self- knowledge, illumination and charity. But you do not need to believe in anything except that your vehicle is a multi-layered creation of some force that you may or may not name, that you inhabit for a short period of time, to access compassion in you and make compassion your go-to place. No one owns a universal force.
The vibrational quality that compassion engenders in and around you is alive, calm, focused, alert-but-open neutrality. Compassion has no opinion. It doesn’t need to do anything in particular. It holds the space for what is and what can be. Compassion holds the space for healing to happen, but its impulse is not to intervene with a particular outcome in mind. Mind being the operative word. You may very well come up with something to say or do in relation to a person or situation held in the space of your compassion. But that intervention will not be based on your subtle need to fix that person or situation. What you may do or say will be generated by grounded intuition, which is the voice of the heart. The mind may serve to choose the right words based on intuition’s impulse. It may come up with specific strategies to actualize what compassion and intuition lay out. But when compassion is the ambiance of any relationship, the mind is relegated to its proper role of serving the heart’s plan.
Compassion is respectful and empowering of the person or situation in front of you. Compassion trusts the inner being of a person and the wisdom that is possible in human groupings. And because it is linked to and part of a universal, trans-personal, all-pervasive force, its perspective is long and wide. When we are embodying compassion, we are both completely present, here, now with the person or situation in front of us, and at the same time consciously, vibrationally linked to the inner vibration of flowing life force that is both within and beyond the actors in the present drama. Compassion engenders in us the patience that comes from knowing that each person has their destiny and their inherent strength to heal themselves, make the decisions they need to make, and that there is an inherent inner drive towards harmony and evolution in each person. Compassion holds the space for that natural, inner force to actualize in a person or situation; for the person’s own inner self to direct the process of healing. The holder of compassion may say or do or suggest or give counsel or offer healing modalities to aid the progress of the naturally evolving healing process. But there is nothing in that intervention that is serving the agenda of the holder’s subconscious needs.
You may act from compassion in any number of ways. But what can be is not governed by compassion. What can be is governed by the inherent drive of life to know itself, to express itself fully and to eventually return to its original source, having fully explored its fingers and toes, its bodies and its consciousness; having learned through the experience of being alive in a body. Compassion gives us to understand that symptoms are the result of that impulse for expression meeting the resistance of our minds, habits, addictions, karmas, enculturation, and environment. Every kind of healing modality, when held and then applied in the authentic, heart- space of compassion, is more effective, more lasting, quicker, and much, much less straining on the healer. Of course, we want to relieve suffering. It is our deepest prayer; to be of use. But we are not doing so for ourselves.
Not So With Empathy.
Empathy is an earth-based, body-based quality. It is a tool of human- to -human relationship. Of course, it is built into our vehicle, but it is like organs and limbs and body-based senses. It facilitates being in a body. And being of the body, it can be depleted and be a vehicle for depletion. Its renewal is not from universal forces, but from limited, body-based sources.
Empathy is useful, even vital to break through the tendency to stay isolated and subsumed in our own little self-involved universe. I do not denigrate empathy. Empathy is a great gift and a necessity to the task of being a full human being. I appreciate it and use it in my life and work. But I understand it for what it is, and for its limits. Empathy is a double- edged sword. It is meant to be a tool. And like any tool, it is meant to help us do a job. It is not the way, it is an aid on the way.
Empathy is an extension of human emotion. While the impulse to relieve suffering in the person using empathy may be the same as the one using compassion, that impulse coming from the heart, the tool of empathy emanates from other places in us. And coming from any place other than the heart eliminates the heart’s qualities of objectivity, calm, patience and its link to the universal forces. Empathy is generated from the second and fifth chakras, the belly and the throat. It infuses the emotional body of the empath, creating feelers that can touch another person and enter into contact with that persons own emotional body. It thereby can penetrate into the field of another person, gain intimate knowledge about them and join in the subject’s energetic and emotional state. The resulting resonance gives information to the empath as to what the subject is feeling, sometimes even thinking. It is a most valuable tool of assessment and connection. For some of us it has been the dominant way we relate to being in body.
We have examples in front of us of people who lack empathy and the damage they can do. And we have examples, sometimes in the mirror, of what can happen when empathy is applied without boundaries.
Empathy is most useful as a tool when employed in a strategic, limited capacity; as a gatherer of information, not a healing methodology. Empathy allows us to feel what another person is feeling, to know what is happening with them beyond their words, sometimes beyond what they themselves are aware is going on in them. Without empathy we would have to rely on our limited senses, falling back on the mind to analyze and come up with its finite list of solutions to a nuanced situation. And since we have the mixed blessing of inhabiting separate vehicles, without empathy we can fall into isolation and separateness as the dominant themes in our lives. Empathy can add nuance, depth, and insight, extending the range of possibilities for what might help a person or situation resolve in a positive manner.
But empathy’s strength is also its weakness. This is because empathy’s method of operation leads to enmeshment. I know what you are feeling because I literally join you in it. And eventually I get rolled up in your emotions and mental energies.
When empathy is the tool for getting information, the holding space for the therapeutic/healing intervention, and even the intervention itself, given the nature of empathy, the eventual result is burn-out. The joining with another person’s energy bodies makes the empathetic practitioner vulnerable to absorbing into their own energy bodies the off gassing of emotions and thought forms and even spiritual energies that anyone in pain, or any group in crisis, is more than happy to discharge in whatever direction is open and available to receive them. What I am saying here is not metaphorical. Energetic discharge is going on all the time, most especially in healing or crisis situations. We live in a sea of energy. Using empathy, you eventually get waterlogged and cut up on the floating flotsam of the many shipwrecks of human suffering.
The nature of empathy is to join in, to harmonize with, to become the partner of, another person. Which is great if you want to dance with someone. But the result of the use of empathy as healing methodology, and beyond that to the use of empathy as life methodology, is the inevitable loss of boundaries for the empath. That fuzziness of energetic boundaries is what creates the tiredness, frustration, and feeling of being overloaded that has been mis-identified as compassion fatigue.
When empathy is my way of helping, not just gathering information to be able to help, I join with that person, walk with them on their healing journey. We are shoulder to shoulder, sharing the burden that has been carried up until now by one alone. Many excellent therapists and schoolteachers and nurses and artists have this gift. And eventually, because in fact everyone is ultimately in charge of their own healing, its pace, its stages and its outcome, the empathetic healer will become tired and frustrated, even angry. Because no one is going to heal just like you want them to, so you can stop carrying their burden with them and feel better.
The use of empathy can seem to be an emotional shield of sorts. It doesn’t protect you from energetic overwhelm. Just the opposite. But it makes you feel safe and in control because you know what is going on with other people and so you can know if some danger is headed for you. In that way, the empath always has a subconscious personal agenda, even in a healing situation where they are helping someone else.
Extending the filaments of empathy can make you feel safe. Embodying compassion in fact makes you as safe as you can be.
Empathy employed as a fine instrument of assessment within the general holding space of compassion can allow a healer to maximize their own healing gifts, facilitate what is ready to happen with the person seeking help, and still be energetically protected and not burned out. It allows you the best of both worlds. Empathy gives you the information as to what is going on in the person or situation in front of you. Compassion gives you a literal place to sit and observe, simultaneously completely present and non-attached. In that space, how you act or don’t, speak or stay silent, wait or jump in, is governed by the heart’s intuition, which knows way more and more subtly than you do and will guide you creatively, clearly, taking into account what is in the spiritual highest good of all involved. Compassion informed by empathy makes use of all your already-gained skills and then holds the space for the opening of new levels of healership in you, calling up reserves of creativity and skill that have been buried under layers of technique. What you may do or say will inevitably surprise you and those who come to you or who are in your charge. And so besides being energetically protected and renewed by your conscious link with the universal energy of compassion, you will no longer be bored.
How You Do It
Here’s the last step in this exercise of accessing compassion. I’m going to tell you exactly where compassion lives in you and how to access and activate it.
1) Locate the center of your heart chakra. You can do this by closing your eyes and poking yourself in the center of your breastbone, moving your finger up and down a little until you know that you are right in the center. You’ll know.
2) Breathe into that place. Do it long and slow and steady until you are in that place in your awareness, not just viewing it from the distance of your head.
3) Put the heels of your hands just below that center spot and stick your fingers out straight. Make a shelf of your hands sticking straight out from that place in the center of your chest.
4) Imagine, feel, see, sense the space that your fingertips are touching in front of your chest. There is a ring at that distance that circles your whole body. That is literally, not metaphorically, where the vibration of compassion lives in you.
5) Sit your awareness on your fingers. Breathe. How do you feel? What do you feel? The longer you do this, the more you will feel the vibration of compassion permeate your whole vehicle. It will become the ambiance of your life and work. But start small and humble. Just feel the space in your heart chakra where your fingers are.
6) Imagine a moment in your work, then your life, your relationships and place that person/situation in that place of compassion. Pay attention.
7) Do this exercise consciously for 5 minutes a day. Extend it to ten, 15 minutes and eventually on into mostly always.
8) Practice invoking the space of compassion at random times. It’s like gaining any skill. Practice, practice, practice.
9) Start the practice of holding compassion for a healing/evolving process with yourself.
10)In actual situations, before interacting with a person or situation, and then many times during the interaction, call up compassion and link with it.
Learn to invoke compassion with a thought. From this activated, empowered space of compassion, look at your superpower of empathy. Call it into alignment with its new boss, your heart.
I’m telling you with the absolute surety of personal experience and from helping many people learn this simple, life changing technique, that you will feel more protected, empowered, renewed in your work, your health, and your life, and immeasurably less fatigued than you have been up until now.
There is no such thing as compassion fatigue. What does exist-right there inside your heart-is the eternal force of compassion linking you to renewal, compassion offering you protection, inexhaustible compassion holding the space for the empowered choice to heal, and for the intervention of the forces of healing and spiritual evolution, for you and those entrusted to your care. And what also exists is the tool of empathy to tell you where you are, who is front of you, and to help you feel for others. You have the best of both worlds inside your little universe. Use it well.