Level 6: Compassion

Genuine compassion is unconditional. With the understanding of wisdom, we apply compassion equally to all beings experiencing suffering, including ourselves. However, fear, self-imposed limits, prejudices, judgments and our current misunderstanding of the interconnectedness of all beings keeps us from offering unconditional compassion to ourselves and to others.

Compassion and unconditional love differ in that compassion is a response to suffering. Love, on the other hand, can be shared in times of joy and pleasure, even in the absence of suffering. Compassion and unconditional love, however, are deeply related, for genuine compassion is imbued with the understanding that all beings are equally deserving of our limitless love.

The three types of empathy are cognitive, emotional and compassionate empathy. In the first, we can understand logically what a person may feel or what they may be thinking. In the second, we relate to the person emotionally, our feelings resonating with theirs. In the third, compassionate empathy, we are moved to take action to relieve another’s suffering.

Empathy burnout is the result of an empathy imbalance. When we spend too much time in emotional empathy, absent of wisdom or compassion, we simply exhaust ourselves by dwelling in the energy of suffering. True compassion is limitless because it is imbued with wisdom.