When we go to the Great Threshold and meet with the Gods on this 4^th Holy Night, we are transfused with compassion. 

 

Why has it taken me 17 years of devotion to the Holy Nights to come to the verb “transfuse”? The Holy Nights are a time of spiritual transfusion. The Gods pour into us gifts of spirit so that we can pour into others, the world and the future wisdom, freedom and love.

 

Trans means across. Fundere means to pour. During the Holy Nights something from the Gods is poured across the Great Threshold into the I-consciousness of human beings. From the Gods into you! 

 

The Gods transfuse and I am infused. The Gods do not pour over! They pour into! Is your soul ready to be infused?

 

So far over these Holy Nights, we have been infused with spiritual safety, holy calm, and spiritual clarity. Spend some time contemplating each infusion. Ask yourself, if you have been an open, receiving vessel, a grail? This is about your soul, your heart, your consciousness, your thinking, your feeling, your willing. Do you take each transfusion into each quadrant of your humanness: your contributions, your relationships, your well-being, and your inner development? Journal and imagine. Question and imagine. Write a poem. See each infusion as a painting of colors. Make movements. See each transfusion dance with these different parts of your own existence, so you can then bring it into a dancing with all differences. 

 

Are you open to being infused with compassion on this Holy Night?

 

Feeling Holy Compassion

 

Compassion is the highest form of knowledge as it is a deed of pure spirit and beyond the narratives, dramas, wounds, disappointments and desires of space and time. To understand this we need to distinguish compassion from empathy and sympathy

 

When I feel empathy or sympathy for another I am feeling their story as story. I really feel it as my story in that my biology mirrors their biology and I am feeling/mirroring the emotions of their story. I am relating dramatically and I am dramatizing the story. Sympathy and empathy are entanglements.

 

The Shepherds and the Kings were not disturbed or confused or horrified that the infant King of Kings was lying in a manger in a barn surrounded by animals and their sounds and smells. The Shepherds and Kings model compassion. The Buddha experienced profound suffering with compassion and went on to sit beneath the Bodhi Tree teaching and radiating compassion. 

 

With compassion, there may be co-suffering or co-joy but there is no identification or attachment. The comforting that compassion offers is the understanding of karma and destiny. Compassion, grounded in safety, calmness, and clarity reveres the meaning and purpose in the drama without dramatizing it. 

 

Compassion is the experience of I-consciousness of self to the I-consciousness of the other. Compassion celebrates and nurtures the process of becoming, regardless of circumstances in space and time.

 

Empathy and sympathy exist but they cannot rule as they are mere identifications and reactions. Compassion is understanding beyond identification and reactions. Compassion is ever-present love beyond all differences.

 

Just before I began writing this message, I received an email from a client who has been struggling with her maternal empathy and sympathy for her adult children. Here is what she wrote: 

 

“You instructed me to “write and write” on Christmas afternoon after the family dispersed about the distinction between caregiving and loving. I wrote four pages – would you like to read it? 

 

It worked. I understand now. I’m behaving and feeling differently. I feel the support of the Holy Nights and it is such a miracle. I want more! “

 

Yes, we must all explore through words, images, movement and all other forms of exploration to understand the difference of love as caregiving motivated by empathy and sympathy and love as understanding motivated by compassion.

 

Compassion always empowers and leaves others free. Compassion surrounds with divine wisdom and serves the unfolding meaning and purpose even when the process is through darkness. Compassion is always full of Light!

 

Take a cleansing breath and then speak these five phrases. 

 

I am Spiritually Safe. I feel Holy Calm. 

I want you to be Spiritually Safe. I want you to feel Holy Calm. 

Facing the unknown future, You and I are Spiritually Safe and feel the peace of Holy Calm. 

With spiritual clarity, I see myself, I see you, I step into the future.

Holy compassion opens me up to right relationship to all differences. I love you with holy compassion.

I dance with all differences.

 

Of course, you can compose your own Holy Nights verse. Please share it.

Everything and everyone can fall apart or be driven to extremes, which means everything and everyone needs the kindness of containment.

 

When part of me explodes into pieces, other parts of me kindly hold the shattered part of me together, gather up the pieces and sing me back together. I contain myself.

 

When my thoughts or feelings get too active, too fierce, too complex, some part of me that is beyond my dramas, wraps my soul in stillness, softness and simplicity. I contain myself.

 

But sometimes, when it is all too much, too intense, too big an explosion, too many pieces, I need a little help from a friend or the gods or art, or nature or my sense of a different future. I seek the kindness of containment.

 

When I am containing, I don’t become a container like a jar or a chest used for storage…I am a force for containment. This force is a dynamic balance both tender and powerful like the balance between a parachute and gravity when you leap from a plane. Containment slows and grounds a process.  How wonderful to ask yourself if what is going on needs the slowing power of a parachute or the grounding power of gravity.

 

What in your thinking, feeling or will, if not contained, would be destructive, dangerous, chaotic, or out of control. What in your sense of self would become egotism if not contained? Can you see what needs to be contained in others and are you able to contain them kindly?

 

Containment offers the right space, the right span of time, the right mood, the right organization, the right meaning, the right purpose. Containment allows for focus and creativity.

 

Containment does not condemn, reject or repress. It is not an indifferent or isolating cave, closet, or cage. It is not confinement or an off switch.

 

Like cultivation, containment often appears as the right question, the right observation, the right admonition. Containment is beautiful and harmonious.

 

We never stop needing the kindness of containment. We always need to feel that beyond our own boundaries, there is something of extraordinary kindness that cools, soothes, orders, and encompasses.

 

Tonight let your soul contemplate your relationship to the kindness of containment, to being contained and to containing.