Enlightening The World
CFEL Home
Founding Partners
Faculty & Associates
Speakers
Workshops & Institutes
Executive Coaching
Mentoring
Articles
Newsletter
Consulting
Products
Books
Client Comments
Web Links
Wellness
The Event Horizon: Essays On Our Spiritual Journey
Empowerment Stories
Networking Groups
Paul Houston's Blog: Political pH
Contact Us
Center for Enlightened Leadership
 
THE LENS E-NEWSLETTER/JOURNAL

Compassion - The View from Above
By PETER and ANNE SELBY

  Peter and Anne Selby
  Peter and Anne Selby
Associates

Compassion is a wide-angle lens on life. It is a benchmark of wisdom, empathy, and spiritual development. Compassion doesn’t always come easily, but it helps when one is able to see the big picture. It takes a big mind to view life in the raw with radical compassion, beyond our usual beliefs, opinions, and judgments. Actually, though, compassion is not complex, but rather a simple expression that typically arises in the heart. Gandhi is quoted as saying, “The simplest acts of kindness are by far more powerful then a thousand heads bowing in prayer.”

Leaders exhibiting compassion can set the tone for an entire organization through their broad view of what is going on around them. When displayed by leaders, compassion can be strongly influential, with the power to inspire loyalty, faithfulness, and commitment in others.

There’s never a dull moment when it comes to the drama that routinely raises its ugly head inside any organization. It takes an open heart and courage to model compassion and restore balance when factions are strongly polarized or someone has strong feelings about a current or proposed policy. Through compassion, leaders show their understanding that the desired change may take time and enduring patience. They can help everyone open their hearts and minds to opposing perspectives and needs through their ability to express appreciation for all positions by going beyond their own personal views. To quote Gandhi again: “Three-quarters of all disagreement and misunderstandings would disappear from the world, were we able to put ourselves in the shoes of our opponents and understand their views. Either we would come to an agreement with them or we would think charitably of them.”

Through empathy, compassion allows a person to see life from many vantage points or even as though one were looking down on the situation from a perch above all the players, including oneself. Years ago I had the privilege of treating a man in my physical therapy practice who had been resuscitated after a heart attack. Jack said he had observed the paramedics preparing to defibrillate his heart while hovering in his Spirit body by the ceiling in a corner of the room. He remembers thinking “Poor Beth” as they ushered his wife outside. He said he felt such compassion for his wife, empathically anticipating the pain that would accompany her grieving process, and he realized that meaningful relationships were what mattered to him the most. After his recovery, he radically downsized his lifestyle, selling “his mansion and all his toys” to spend more time with his grandchildren and family.

Jack’s near-death experience changed his core life values, which is typical of people who have left their bodies in a life-and-death crisis and then returned to life. More generally, when we get “beyond our skin,” we can more deeply appreciate how other people feel. Many people experiencing a near-death experience report that they sorely wanted to cross fully over, but their compassionate concern for their loved ones or a deep sense that their work on Earth was not complete brought them back.

Fortunately, hovering at the threshold of life and death is not requisite to experience compassion! Imagination and empathy can save one the drama that sometimes forces open the door to compassion. In Buddhism, meditators imagine themselves sitting on top of their coffin and viewing their current lives in order to reconnect with a broader perspective about what is truly significant and enduring.

Through compassion, we can identify in ourselves the potential to exhibit the same weaknesses we observe in others, if not actually seeing the same flawed traits. Thus compassion generates humility and promotes a sense of connectedness whereas judgment can alienate the one who is judging. Looking within and changing/healing in oneself the problem being identified in another is powerful, especially when all the while one stays focused on the positive qualities of the other person.

Mother Teresa said, “We cannot condemn or judge or pass words that will hurt people. We don’t know in what way God is appearing to that soul and what God is drawing that soul to; therefore, who are we to condemn anybody?” Anne and my full-time job is clairvoyant evaluation of people’s energy fields through higher guidance in order to observe and promote healing of the deeper causative factors at the root of their life crises and health challenges. We have been privileged to work with people from all walks of life. If we have learned anything over the years through this work, it is to appreciate the myriad sources and influences that are affecting people unawares. We’ve concluded that it behooves each one of us not to judge but rather to stay keenly aware of our ignorance, and thus endeavor to remain open and resolutely compassionate.

For instance, various life traumas have the effect of breaking people’s consciousness into pieces we call aspects or alter egos. One classic manifestation of this phenomenon is the saying, I’m so shocked or upset I am beside myself. Or we might say, I lost my head, I jumped out of my skin, I freaked out, I lost it! Due to disassociation, people can behave in unconscionable ways in which the loss of “integrity” reflects just that: namely, brokenness. Then a person becomes subject to many unconscious influences and negative mind “programs” and unconscious urges arising from their original wounding.

In addition, few people can imagine the plethora of negative entities that are attached to most all of us, from dis-incarnate ghosts to dark denizens of the underworld. Especially important to note: We start the ball rolling with our own negativity! From there we can attract to ourselves various astral energies that reinforce and amplify this negativity and even feed on it, exerting strong negative influences on our behavior. As unconventional as this might sound, entities such as demons and negative spirits have been recognized and written about in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and countless other religions and many esoteric philosophies. The average person has no idea. Given our ignorance of such phenomena, is it not best to reserve judgment and opt for compassion?

In fact, the phenomena of compassion and grace are at the heart of most religions; in our experience with Angelic healing, compassion is no stranger to that realm either. We have treated three people who admitted to being professional assassins, and we found that their Angels seemed to have no lack of compassion or eagerness to help them heal their physical diseases.

In one case, a man who told us he was working for a government agency as a sharpshooter assassin declared that he had killed more than 30 people. He had 14 different combat wounds, including a shrapnel wound that had taken out half of his pancreas. He was blind in one eye and described being in constant pain throughout his body. Two days after his treatment he called to say that his pain was gone completely and his vision had returned to his blind eye. Two years later I received an urgent request for another Angelic healing for him from his girlfriend. She explained that he was in intensive care with an acute pancreatic infection and blood sepsis so severe he was not expected to survive more than another hour or two. I commenced treatment immediately. Two hours after this distance healing his blood tests showed that his infection was completely gone. He slept without pain that night and was discharged from the hospital within 48 hours. Yet another two years later, he called to say he had participated in a medical study of people with documented pancreatic regeneration, and his pancreas had grown back the most.

I concluded once again that Angels really are not only effective healers but non-judgmental and compassionate in the extreme. If an assassin’s probable bad karma can take a back seat to compassion, perhaps we lesser beings can suspend our judgments and narrow thinking as well. Besides, it makes for a smoother ride down the road of life and hey, one good turn deserves another!

VISIT PETER AND ANNE SELBY'S WEBSITE


Center for Empowered Leadership ®
Email: info@cfel.org
Phone: 1.609.259.7911