Q: I’m exploring being compassionate. The deeper I go, I’m learning more about openness. I’m learning more about my ability to listen. I experience more vulnerability and I’m not sure how it serves how it serves what I’m up to with humanity. I’m curious about my relationship with being compassionate and compassion.

John: Your being doesn’t move with compassion. When your being moves, your being moves as love. Compassion is the movement of your being through your self and through a deeper level in your self. As your self becomes a little bit like your own being, compassion opens. That’s also like kindness in your self. Your being doesn’t move as kindness; it moves as love. Your being opened into your self accomplishes a kindness in your self.

Compassion is the movement of your own heart understanding. With a heart understanding, you’re familiar with your self. You’re familiar with the level of your self and with the self in others, with love infusing that familiarity. When you open and soften in your heart and that openness and softness of heart opens up into your self, your self doesn’t first move as love. Your self moves as kindness, heart understanding, and compassion.

Q: I’m curious how to transform. It feels very powerful what you said.

John: When you focus on compassion, you’ll focus on your self. You’ll relate to your self with the value of moving compassionately. That removes you from your being, and the part of your being that opens up in your self, making your movement in your self compassionate, becomes thin, and compassion quickly turns into a performance. You begin to feel compassionate instead of being compassionate.

When you’re opening and softening in your heart in the midst of your self and you see another self having a difficult time, the openness and the softness of heart, which is your being, infuses how you feel in your self toward someone else. It’s a beingness that moves in your self and you can feel it. It makes you deeply feel for someone else, but as soon as you’re focused on being compassionate, you isolate the experience of compassion, so you move as the feeling instead of the beingness that produces the feeling.

When you move as the feeling and that person to whom you’re being compassionate hits a line in your self, your openness and softness will be gone and you won’t feel compassionate; you’ll feel provoked. But if you’re opening and softening in your heart and you’re moving as that openness and that softness toward someone else, you’ll have the feeling of compassion, and when that person touches a line in your self, you won’t be provoked. The openness and the softness that you’re moving in and moving from, that will be touched and the compassion continues, even though a line in your self is touched. When you’re relating to being compassionate, that compassion will be tested. When you’re opening and softening in your heart, that openness and that softness can’t be tested.

Compassion is a hybrid. It’s the result of you being openness and softness of heart in the midst of the movement of your self toward someone else.