Some people think that the origin of all religious feeling and all religious systems is the fact of suffering — the big ouch! Every human being experiences and witnesses suffering and feels an urgent desire to not experience or witness it. We can turn away and think, “I just can’t deal with this”. We can postulate a mysterious, caring God whose motives for causing evident pain are unclear to us, but are not (we hope) malicious. That might allow us to ignore unpleasantness and “leave it to God”. Or we might feel that we are called to cure or alleviate suffering and do our best to develop skills that will help us to do that, even though we can’t protect everyone.

On an emotional level, we can’t help anyone, including ourselves, unless we accept the facts of suffering as we find them. We’ve been warned about old age, sickness, and death – they come to all of us, eventually (unless we die young, in which case we can avoid old age).

We can start where we are by taking an inventory of our current state of affairs. Are we ourselves, or are people we know, suffering from old age? How are we doing with that? Are we fully present with it? Is pretending to be younger than we (or they) are part of our response?

Sickness? Can we experience illness, in ourselves or others, without fear?

Death? When someone we care for dies, we are confronted with the truth that we also will one day die. Most of us deal with the knowledge of our own eventual demise with some combination of denial and resignation. Paradoxically, living “in the light of death” can bring joy to our days; our deepest fear is of facing the end of our lives knowing that we have not lived as fully as we could have.

As we investigate our own hearts on these questions, we can start to practice compassion right here. If there’s fear or confusion, we can act as our own kind and accepting parents, acknowledging the difficult emotion and letting it breathe within a safe and loving space.

“In physics, the observer effect is the fact that simply observing a situation or phenomenon necessarily changes that phenomenon.” (Wikipedia) The same is true when we simply observe our own discomfort, fear, or aversion. They cannot remain unchanged; our watching them reveals both their fluid nature, their instability, and that they cannot stay at a maximum for long. It takes a special sort of effort to keep still and let our emotions work themselves out, without our direct interference. The phrase “diligent effortlessness” was coined by a Canadian meditation teacher, Khema Ananda, and it’s one we may find useful. We don’t check out and we don’t interfere; we remain present, tuned in, and accepting.

Until we can practice compassion with ourselves, we’ll have difficulty being truly compassionate towards others.