My wife Javiera has asked me to write about compassion. I love her intuition, and how the two of us are part of the same heart. I surrender to this experience without knowing for certain where it will lead me.
When I think of compassion, I think of an invisible fabric that unites us all. I think of a healing energy that is already there. I remember everything that needs compassion: the toxic, harmful, hateful aspects within any human being.
I thought it was a problem of ego, but it's really a problem of trauma. In this text that I write, I will speak of my trauma as if I no longer have it, even though I still do. I will have to laugh at my very linear view of things, even the most mysterious things in life. In the end, I will ask myself: what does all this have to do with economics?
A little while ago Bayo Akomolafe wrote:
"Tattooed on each stone face, on each fertile leaf, on each pregnant cloud is the warning that there is no 'RETURN HOME' other than a conflicted starting point in itself, and that there are no restoration projects that are not really regenerative attempts to elude the dazzling spontaneity and vitality of the world".
So here goes my "restoration project". This is just one way to tell a story, among many possible ones.
The most beautiful thing that has ever happened to me is that someone loved me just the way I am. That someone made me feel that I am perfect, that I am pure goodness and beauty.
It is something that of course has happened many times in my life. However, I am thinking of one person in particular who made me feel this way. My Auntie Jeannie Kerrigan, who now lives in the spirit world (her book here).
The key detail of her love was that I felt that she was loving above all my absurd, monstrous parts, my fear, my ego, my false identities. That's where she focused her love on me, that's how I felt. I was embarrassed, I felt naked, I felt like I didn't deserve that love. Little by little that seed of love entered my heart, and from then on I began to (learn to) love myself. In fact, it is a seed that my wife and my children gave me, a seed that entered into multiple stories, and that was always there.
I began to want with all my heart to be vulnerable at every opportunity in life, to accept myself as a "little monster", to trust life, to be happy to be super absurd and childish. I started it.
Before this, I spent so many years trying, with all my will, to improve myself. Ten years of spiritual journey trying to "be truthful", "be humble", trying to be "someone who gives to life and does not just take"... These things are NOT attempted. It makes me angry because of all the suffering I caused myself, and that in my "restoration project" I strongly recommend avoiding.
[Uy yuyui!!!! How wise I've been to be so clumsy! How much happiness I'm bringing into my life because of all the suffering I've caused myself!]
In short, years trying to dominate my ego, my anger, my weakness, my doubts, as if that was possible. Deep down, all I was trying to do was be someone different from myself, someone that people around me could love. Because the weak, the selfish, the fearful, as I learned, it is impossible to love them: that was my traumatic life experience. It was only through extreme effort and betrayal of myself that it was possible to "surmount" oneself. Deep down, believing that life was made with flaws; that we come with factory failures.
On this path of "self-improvement " I learned a number of things. I learned to develop the observation of myself to the fullest. That inevitably led me to observe a horrible and shameful monster inside me, as well as a loving, luminous part. But since that monster was so hard to defeat, I learned, as any good heart would learn, not to trust myself.
That's right, I repeat: I learned that I couldn't trust myself
How could I trust myself when I found myself doing things so many times to gain admiration, to be more than others? It was just a matter of imagining how many times these things happened without me even noticing. But I said to myself, in the midst of this growing and suffocating pain, "at least I have the merit of realizing it". At least for that reason I could pseudo-love myself.
Actually, I was doing anything BUT love myself. Much later I would learn that sustained lack of self-love becomes a form of aggression against others, however involuntary it may be.
The beautiful thing is that these are things you do with a good heart, out of pure innocence: not trusting yourself. Since I didn't trust myself, naturally what I did was trust others above me. Others who, supposedly, were healthier, with their ego more overcome. What an absurdity, because in reality we are all the same! This is the greatest violence that one can do to one's own divinity, to one's own soul. It is a permanent self-betrayal, with consequences of a great deal of suffering.
The love I received from my aunty Jeannie was like this, a love that knows that those ugly, horrible parts, even the ones that might hurt others, even those: they all come from our good heart, from any Human Being, who is always innocent and who only wants good things for everyone. That's why it's really so easy to love, it's super simple, we're actually doing it all the time even if we doubt, even if we don't know.
I, for example, still have a habit of doubting myself. It's just a programmed response to the trauma. That's really what we have as humanity: trauma. Why do I doubt myself? Because I suspect that instead of doing good to others, I'm somehow doing them wrong. I mean, because I love them! There is nothing in life, no corner of life that is not inhabited by love.
We believed that the ego should not be loved, because if we loved it it would grow even more. That is the one and only mistake that can exist (and I suspect that even that was not a mistake). That's what I learned from the love I received right there, in what we call ego. Ego is just the callus of human trauma, it's just what we built because we didn't know how to trust life.
The only urgent task in life is to love the ego.
There' s no greater revolution than that, the revolution of compassion. When I received that love, well there is nothing more natural in me than wanting to love back in the same way. That love has always been there! I just sometimes get very passionate about it, and in the urge to love I forget that I still have a lot to love myself.
Beautiful little monsters we are. That's why we actually do this love thing together. This LIVING thing we do together, nobody does it alone. As Tammy told me: if you feel less (or more) than others you are creating separation. It's not a matter of taking the ego out of the way, it's a matter of uniting, of erasing the separation. What for? To stop suffering!
I forgive myself for being such an over-thoughtful, exaggerated thinker. I forgive myself for doubting. I forgive myself for believing that I've "come home," for believing that these traumas should never have happened. I forgive myself for making things dramatic. I forgive myself for making others feel uncomfortable in my presence. I forgive myself for being so scared when I feel lost, when I have no idea what to do, when I feel responsible for my family's happiness and I feel completely confused without knowing what to do (be) for them.
I forgive myself for having been at odds with the world, and I forgive myself for being born to change it...
And I feel so good about saying this! I forgive myself for not having a paid job. I forgive myself for not knowing what else to do to make money this month.
The External Economy is a reflection of the Internal Economy. Grateful for this opportunity to give me, to receive me. I feel joyful and hopeful about what new I can receive from life, and what new I can give to life.