Enabling is idiot compassion, not mindfulness

Derek Beres, BigThink.com, 10/30/13; Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Will I ever fall apart? I'm a hippie; I'll be a nun (Pema Chodron as Deirdre Blomfield-Brown).

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IDIOT COMPASSION AND MINDFULNESS

Compassion is an important concept, and an even more important practice, to integrate into one’s life. Like all big ideas layers undergird its meaning.

One of the most fascinating ideas is what [cult leader and] Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche termed "idiot compassion." His famous student, American Buddhist nun and author Pema Chodron, explains:

"It refers to something we all do a lot of and call "compassion." In some ways it’s what’s called enabling. It’s the general tendency to give people what they want because we can’t bear to see them suffer."

Ani Chodron exposes the danger in this: instead of offering a friend real medicine, bitter though it may be when consumed, we feed them more poison — or, at the very least, we don’t take the poison away from them.

This, she says, is not compassion at all. It’s selfishness, as we’re more concerned with our own feelings than attending to our friend’s actual needs.

Granted, saying uncomfortable things to someone close to us is no easy task. If they are depressive or violent or suicidal, criticism could send them spiraling.

Yet, enabling is not good either. Stepping up and being a teacher in challenging situations requires great tact and care, and it does not always work out how we intended it to.

As I [Derek Beres] have been exploring this concept this week in my yoga classes, I began thinking about the ways we enable ourselves as well. We are extremely good at self-deception, using bad habits as crutches for some future good we imagine is right around the corner.

We trick ourselves with the "one more" syndrome: one more cigarette, one more joint, one more drink, one more email to the ex who refuses our pleas. The issue is really expectation: We fear upsetting our friend, or ourselves, because we don’t want to make things "uncomfortable."

We choose

Pema Chodron's classic masterpiece

short-term avoidance over what we perceive to be longer-term suffering. Since we don’t inherently know what the future state holds, we choose what we think to be the most comfortable path, persisting in our folly without becoming wise.

The hardest part is not imagining the future. Hypothesizing is what brains do, which is why [the understanding of] suffering lies at the heart of Buddhism.

Two things keep us locked in a perpetual state of conflict -- expecting reality to conform to what we want it to be and demanding the future unravels as we hope it would.

When one or both of these projections fail, we blame the situation rather than our expectations. One powerful form of changing these habits of enabling is mindfulness meditation.

As neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson has written, habitual manners of dealing with emotions are the product of both genetics and experience. Some of us are genetically inclined to be more resilient and compassionate than others, but it is our life experiences that define our outlook and how we treat others (and ourselves).

As he writes, "Mindfulness retrains these habits of mind by tapping into the plasticity of the brain’s connections, creating new ones, strengthening some old ones, and weakening others."

In his research Davidson has found that mindfulness practitioners... More