The Art of Compassion

The Art of Compassion

A Poem by Mike Defreitas

Am I feeling anxious? Yes. Too much. I can't stop looking at myself because I cant stop sensing - perceiving at a fundamental level - too deep for me to probe, it seems - that something is wrong.

Unbelievable. My face. My movement. I seem to be pushing it all away. Yet trying to stay in it. To stay with it all. The world - but I feel it impinging on me - myself exposed to myself - each crystallization of myself screaming louder and louder deafeningly strong "you're weird" "you're strange" "you're unlikable" and still something else I can't quite give words to.

It is oppressive. It commandeers - absolutely - my powers of attention. I feel something "happening to me"; How can I function like this - when I don't know how I'll be - what I'll enact: to just tolerate it all, and see myself as I am - I'm THIS! - it's painful and shameful so I push it all away, instinctively, at a level so deep it beguiles my capacity to still it.

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I try to act. I try to be. I conceptualize myself and formulate it as a "picture" - myself to myself, this is how I should be in this situation. I see myself, I embody myself, I become narcissistically aware of myself. And I feel shame. From whence? Don't know

Did the narcissistic self experience bring it on? Or did it come because I drank too much coffee at too late a time on an empty stomach? Does this always happen? It doesn't. Though the body is constantly integrating details that form our experience: diet, sleep, chemical withdrawal (such as vitamin d) I have to pay attention to that. Try not to drink coffee past 6 pm.

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The shame is crippling. As the ocean underscores the boat, the trauma underscores my perception. As if an army of arrows flying into me - my gaze bemused - my frame of reference - my pointedness of mind - lost, discarded, subsumed in the bodily terror, shame, and totality of debility.

What can I do or say, to calm it all? To allow myself to be - this, that, - to feel secure in insecurity - a paradox, yet I've done it, I know it, it exists as a state of awareness. This beside that, suffering, yet blissfully ok with it. But it somehow diminishes the suffering. The idea of the suffering - the self experiencing vulnerability, ok with it. Patient with it. Compassionate.

The Heart feels open to others; not fearful. But loving. Kind. Aware. A deep intake of some voice; a power, derived from some place deep - inapproachable - though beckoning awareness. It calls, it sees, through me and is me. Yet I'm me. I feel me. I know me. Yet I am empowered by a love to ignore me. To be - with others - and feel free with them. Free to be.

The place of calmness. The light of awareness. To sit with it - with all - with life - with process. Flowing with the river of existence, not questioning, but exploring, with each breath, the secret to it all. Brought out through me - through my vectors of emotion. Entering time, and Healing.

© 2014 Mike Defreitas


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Added on August 7, 2014
Last Updated on August 19, 2014
Tags: pain, trauma, emotion, stress, shame, frustration, anxiety, angst, inwardness, reflection, meditation, contemplation, healing, psychology, crisis