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The opening chapter focuses on the author questioning his own practice after his client asks him if he is just going to sit listening to peoples troubles for the next thirty years. The accusation made the author feel his own approach to life "involved some horrible dimension of slacking off.".

While describing his client of a year and a half (three sessions a week) he continues describing his own thoughts and feelings that were brought about by the client’s insinuation of a pathetic future. He discusses his reply to his client and then wonders if he has revealed too much to him. This revelation is ironic as Dr. Lewin describes his client at one point as functioning by never telling anyone about himself so as not to endanger his future in some unpredictable and unimaginable way. The author suddenly saw the end of his life as near and palpable and felt disappointed in himself without knowing why. The author put many questions to himself, among them:

Dr. Lewin goes back and forth between his own thoughts and what his client is going through. Though the thirty year question brought about a quandary of self doubt he reflects on what the patient was actually asking: Where will he (the patient) be in thirty years. As the patient was often bothered by his inability to foresee or plan and control things, he was asking the author what his plans and goals were in the hopes of finding himself..

The likelihood that most psychotherapists question themselves at some time or another is probably quite high. In fact it can happen more than once in the course of treatment of a single patient. It’s what is done with this reflection that is important. Dr. Lewin refers to this reflection time as meditation. During his meditation he found that there is nothing rudiment regarding the chair and that a therapist could just as well council with a patient while walking along a path outside. He also describes psychotherapy as "one of those rare activities that is at once high-tech and high-touch" and with each patient is found a new presence within ourselves. This comes from the very important aspect of therapy, listening. Listening requires a state of mind where the therapist is attuned to an ongoing flow of feeling and information.

Dr. Lewin has labeled a difficult part of listening as the Pygmalion Paradox. He feels that in getting to know someone the therapist must make up an image of that person, their concerns and possibilities. Usually this is done unconsciously, in response to cues received by the other person. Through the listening the therapist must read between the cues and try to connect them, thus, essentially creating the other person. The danger in this is that when a person is made up, even from their own cues, we tend to figure them in our own dramas. As a therapist begins to think they are attuned the patient it is important to remember not to fit them into our own style of perception. Unlike Pygmalion, the psychotherapist must strive to work in a medium that is much more readily reworked. It must be understood that psychotherapists are working with illusions whose reality is nonetheless telling.

Another area of listening involves the therapist maintaining his own life outside therapy but having the ability to mesh it with what is being heard from the patient and yet keep it separate. Listening to and accepting what the patient has to say will open new areas in your own mind and life. This can be painful but it can also lead us to love, appreciate, and enjoy much more than we would normally have.

However, listening to peoples distress leads us to hear more of the pain and suffering in the world. Because of that it is important to realize that therapists need support. The author feels that the "complex of attitudes that I regard as decisive for therapists’ capacity to hold and sustain themselves as they sustain their work is best described as compassion.

Compassion is an orientation toward whatever comes our way in life."

If the work is to be vital, it must be founded in the personal ethics, politics, and aesthetics of the therapist. The author does not feel it is possible to practice therapy without discussing politics, ethics, aesthetics, and religion to some extend although it may not be so labeled. This is what constructs the bridges between the therapist’s own life and the patients’ life.

The remainder of the book will be dealing with efforts of the therapist to take care of him/herself. To understand and maintain their own balance in the world while working within the confines of the consulting room.

Chapter two

Compassion is the whole ball of wax that comes from a considered appreciation of knowing an other. It depends on the understanding that we are "more simply human than otherwise." Why be compassionate? Because we are each one involved in the other. When we close our hearts and turn our backs on others we are actually hardening our hearts and turning our backs on ourselves. The final consequence of the lack of compassion is a sense of inner impoverishment and terror often with a bitter sense of having been cheated.

Some would protest that being compassionate brings no personal advantage. This objection only demonstrates a failure to understand one of two things; what is truly personal or what genuine advantage is. Virtue nourishes growth from inside. We can please ourselves by living well in a way that gives us strength and sustenance. If we fall into the habit of believing that rewards can only be external and material, we have abandoned any real respect for the human spirit.

When compassion involves sacrifice, sacrifice is not without its rewards and the rewards are not necessarily masochistic in nature. This is because we may discover:

that our needs are much less or different than what we originally thought

what is truly essential in us and to us

we enjoy the pleasures of traveling lighter and so having more inner room for maneuver

that what we gave up, even though we had to struggle hard to give it up and missed it, was actually a deadening force in our lives

Freud is considered the most distinguished of the "dark enlighteners" teaching that even the most apparently selfless acts have a selfish underside. Freud taught that the best and worst in people cohabit in profound and disquieting intimacy.

Freud performed a useful service with this thinking. No person of feeling or decency can fail to have been moved to a measure of despair by the record of this century of thinking. This type of rationale continues even today. If material poverty kills by pressure, material wealth often destroys by moral vacuum as the things get the upper hand and exercise a tyranny of numbness all their own. This tyranny of the thing is one of the forces that we spend so much of our time and energy trying to combat in therapy.

It is just as bad for those who have too much as it is for those who have too little.

The dark enlighteners had only a part of the story. Their pessimism and self-deprecatory sentimentalism can serve to excuse us from responsibility. How superior we can sometimes feel if we give up before we have even begun. But we must not use this as an excuse. We cannot afford a pessimism that makes us forget that to do even a little in dire circumstances can be very satisfying. A fundamental resource in a discouraging hour is the capacity to imagine and work for even a slightly more encouraging one.

Human history is not simply the history of advances in cruelty and destructiveness. There has been an enormous series of advances in the capacity to conceive kindness and practice it, to conceive the broadest human kinship and give it practical meaning. We need the milk of human kindness to make us grow, to help us develop immunity against the blandishments of cruelty.

Acts of compassion counter acts of aggression and neglect. Acts of compassion have the capacity to demonstrate the ultimate futility of neglect and aggression. Acts of compassion enrich the local human environment in ways that are real and practical and the reality is of the mind and heart, not merely "thingish." Acts of compassion build on one another.

Compassion helps people feel safe in their minds and hearts, with themselves and with others. If we are not safe inside ourselves with our impulses and urges, we will not be able to find ways to make our surroundings safe. This interior safety is the work of a lifetime with an ongoing reward.

One of the beauties of compassion is that you can’t standardize it. It resists mechanization because it is about people, not machines. It is an expression of human freedom and feeling built deeply into our natures. If we forget this, we have lost sight of an inner beacon whose guidance we very much need.

Compassion flows from a practical intuition of the unity of life and all living things. It rests on a sense of kinship that embraces the whole fragile earth.

This relationship is both elemental and fundamental. We are literally the children of the earth. Without our ties to it we would have no meaning. To take care of a creature without taking care of the environment has no meaning.

Compassion is essential to who we are, what we are here for, where we come from and where we are going. Without compassion, the process of what we are is negative. We will find ourselves always stopped by barriers and both our reach and our grasp terribly cramped. With this kind of knowing there is always a sense of bleakness, emptiness, and even desolation. This negativism can be a part of a subtle and pervasive paranoia, as the person feels surrounded by so much that he is not. We must be able to listen to the song of our own hearts and hear the changes and rearranging, registering the real joys and real pains of real life. We must be able to accept that we can both matter to ourselves and know how small we are.

Compassion can be taught, but is must be taught in such a way that it can be caught. The teaching of compassion involves a transmission of spirit, not simply an initiation into the intricacies of another technology. The teaching must be done in a spirit of compassionate respect for the spirit and freedom of the learner.

Compassion is best taught from the very beginning of life simply by being compassionate. When we act compassionately, we present a series of creative examples. Compassion takes pleasure in discovering new ways to produce kindness and solace and pleasure.

Compassion is learned through watching and wondering. It is learned by trying to imitate. Thus the importance of teaching compassion by doing in front of children.

We have all experienced the pleasure of being treated compassionately and want to share that feeling with others. When we give, we also have the opportunity not only to relive the experience of getting but to explore and extend it. Giving makes what we have received more meaningful. The individual who sets out to help a bitter and mistrustful person will have the opportunity not just to get to know the other one better, but also the chance for more self-knowledge.

To be moved to be compassionate we must know what suffering is. To know what suffering is we must also have known joy. These are matters of experience, not matters for theoretical knowledge.

Compassion explores the inward and interpersonal frontiers of feeling and doing with which ordinary days and hours are made. Compassion meets the here and now with a measure of confidence and trust, not with disdain and despair. Compassion is attentive. It listens before it speaks, questions before it answers, and revises its positions. It operates by trial and error, often relishing the acknowledgment of error, because such acknowledgment represents a much more important gain.

Very importantly, compassion has the force, fervor, and ferment of passion. Like all passions, it remakes the one that it touches in its own image, usually by the combination of strengthening and refining. In a spirit of love and appreciation, not greed and ambition, compassion tries to make the most of what is and what can come to be for.e.

Chapter three

Why is it that in our culture the topic of compassion is so neglected? If we can understand some of the reasons we think and talk so little about compassion this may put us in position to explore a different kind of awareness about our practical tasks in living.

Compassion is not a thing. It matters, it counts, but it cannot be counted. Our society makes the mistake of believing that if we cannot count something, it does not count. An example of this is when a psychotherapist is asked to send a treatment plan in to an insurance company for review so that benefits can be paid. The form asks for short term objectives in behavioral and measurable terms. It asks for a much more coercive and administrative approach, recasting therapy as something to be done to a patient in a specific technical manner to produce specific results defined in advance. What it neglects is how much in human relationship and human development is neither quantifiable nor easily predictable.

The effect of the compassionate act, of compassionate caring, is subjective. It may have objective consequences, but these may be remote from the immediate compassionate act.

Certain interpersonal atmospheres dispose to kindness and compassion, but there is no obvious way to draw a detailed blueprint.

Compassion depends upon subjective judgments of value, which in turn depend on complex series of highly individual acts of appreciation. The capacity for appreciation gives value and asserts human creative freedom. We must be comfortable with what is more abstract, less concrete, and more internal.

Regardless of the amount of money that could be put forth, compassion cannot be bought. We can see from the enormous amount that has been spent on education we seem to have forgotten what there is to learn beyond technical skills. As we can also see that we have spent a large amount of money in healthcare but we seem to have lost the art of caring. Less money with more human commitment and understanding will produce much more than more money with less human commitment and understanding.

The fate of a society depends on the quality of its vision and the pattern of its values as it actually enacts them. What we are able to value determines what is valuable to us. We must struggle to stay in touch with the abstract.

We may be reluctant to think and talk about compassion because we’re afraid it will put us in touch with ourselves, our own hurts. We begin to realize that we are vulnerable. To think and talk about compassion is to realize that we need others, we cannot be an island.

If we don’t do for ourselves what we can, nothing can compensate us for the loss of self-esteem we are bound to suffer. However, it is not true that we are well served by being only self-serving. Interdependency is the rule of life. Compassion is about the acceptance of dependence and the responsibilities of being dependable. If we want truly to examine our lives and ask "how" to live in a practical way, we must - together and apart - look thoughtfully and with feeling inside ourselves.

Enormous cultural investment is required to sustain knowing about feelings and using them to inform choices, commitments, and actions. Just as babies will not learn how to walk unless provided with the correct support at the appropriate developmental moment, learning to know and name and bear and explore and respond to feelings is not something that a child can do alone. It requires a shared commitment among the generations. It calls for a long and sociable voyage of inner self-discovery.

Compassion means feelingful contact. A culture that turns away from a practical day-to-day engagement with the possibilities and difficulties of human feeling deprives itself of the essential resources for compassionate mutual engagement.

When we talk about compassion we are talking about being able to dip in and out. We are talking about becoming engaged with the situation of the other without becoming so overwhelmed by it that we lose a clear sense of where the border is between ourselves and the other. Sometimes we will become too involved ,just as other times we will not be involved enough. What is crucial is that we be able to observe our reactions and strive to move toward a more appropriate and sustainable middle ground, one that can accommodate not only the needs of the other but also our own. Compassion is as much about letting go as it is about taking hold.

INDIVIDUAL vs. COMMUNITY: Whenever we try to talk about the individual and the community we come up with a paradox. The individual contains the community that contains the individual. The community depends for its existence on its presence as a life-giving idea and illusion in the mind and heart of the individual.

What would it be like to live in a culture where we thought and talked about compassion as much as we do about our incomes now? Pause for a minute to consider that compassion might be a form of income. Can we consider that it might be a form of coming into our own, at once emotionally and spiritually and biologically and practically, that goes beyond the power of numbers to measure?

If we pause to reflect on this possibility in the stillness of our hearts and minds and hopes, then we have already taken the first step to breaking our cultural silence about compassion.

Chapter four

We as individuals suffer factually and in our imaginations just as we cause suffering both factually and in our imaginations. Our pretending can and do take on the force of realty for us. We imagine our experience and experience our imaginings.

With compassion we are able to know the situation of the other as meaningful and compelling at the same time that we do not lose the knowledge of our own separateness and limitations. With compassion we find a way to live in empathy with our surroundings.

Compassion uses a deep understanding of the capacity both to hurt and be hurt, not as alien experiences but as intimate features of the human heart; to generate a resolve not to hurt but to assist, not to go from pain, anger, and bafflement to vengeance but instead to healing sorrow and reconstructive hope.

In life we all lose and we all hurt. It makes a crucial difference whether we can hold onto what is our true selves, what is good and generous and authentic in ourselves even through this enraging and humiliating process of losing and hurting. It makes the crucial difference if we can lose and hurt without losing ourselves and hurting ourselves, and if we can maintain allegiance to ourselves to loving and living rather than seeking to resolving our problems and hurt through various forms of aggression.

This allegiance is tough to maintain and depends on remembering always that there is a dimension of inner freedom, that we always have at least a small degree of freedom in choosing our responses to our situations. This sense of freedom is crucial to the sense of responsibility.

Compassion involves being intimate with our fears and insecurities. It involves keeping faith and hope without becoming pompous or vindictive. It involves knowing the hurt is there but not having to act on it in a vengeful way. Compassion involves knowing how to regret without regressing , being able to bear feeling of disillusionment and futility, of defeat and doubt, without losing sight of the human aspect of hope and possibility on an intimate scale.

Our creativity can be put to bad use just are our anger and how to take things apart can be put to good use. It’s easy to get "caught up" with others around you and go along with the crowd no matter how incorrect and self degrading the decision may be.

Why is there so much suffering in life? Suffering is universal. Everyone experiences it during their life. Although pain, suffering and lose of life may happen as incidental or accidental, there is nothing incidental or accidental about the place of pain, suffering and loss of life. They are as deeply rooted as DNA. To try to trick ourselves is keeping away any real intimacy with ourselves and others.

We can ask why there is certain pain and suffering in the hopes of eliminating the cause of the specific incident. However, it is useless to ask why, in general there is so much pain and suffering.

We can look at the golden rule to see how much that has done to improve humanity. Charity has made a noticeable difference. However, even if all humans were better with charitable needs there is no escaping human limitation or mortality. In other words, we may fight certain sources of pain and suffering, but pain and suffering will always remain, if not today, then another day and we must know that we can never rid the world of all pain and suffering. But we must continue with the golden rule, if not we will be advocating a dour and pessimistic approach to life.

Communicating with others depends on our capacity to communicate with ourselves and visa versa. When we feel hurt, we will be quicker to let our anger drive us to action if we experience the hurt more globally. We must have a capacity for both inhibition and for understanding; to tolerate frustration in order to achieve understanding.

Compassion involves being honest about what we have done and what we are capable of doing. It requires being honest about who we are and what our inner tensions are. We cannot mask our anger, for if we do, it may not be far away. We must use it as a starting place and mix love, rage, anger and constructive urges into our everyday life. This blending begins very early in life and with guidance.

We must learn to appreciate both what we have lost and what we have not lost as well as what we stand to lose if we let sadism and our vengefulness take us over. We must understand and accept the futility of trying to effect repairs by destructive means.

We are creatures of enormous powers to understand and shape the environment around us. We can imagine complex sequences of cause and effect. We can plan, scheme, sequence, delay, disguise and persevere. We can invent, improvise and revise. It is all of this that makes us so dangerous as these capacities are at once

our promise and our peril. We can end up endangering ourselves through our efforts to protect ourselves. The depth of our understanding is limited by our understanding of ourselves and of our own motivations and intentions.

Compassion depends on an internal mental poise. A deep awareness of our vulnerability, of our urge to respond by controlling, by hurting where and when we are hurt, gives us a set of choices about what not to do. How not to channel our being. After facing all of life’s difficulties of pain, suffering and sorrow we can learn to use our extraordinary energy to look for new channels and opportunities with a more constructive twist.

The way to compassion involves accepting limits. It involves knowing the difference between our wishes and desires and what is possible given that we are mortal humans. It involves looking at our own suffering and through that trying to bring balm to others who suffer.

We can be present in the face of human suffering and hurt without adding to the hurt. This requires courage and creativity. In this creative work, we will discover that we find many different kinds of closeness, many forms of encounter not only with others but with ourselves. It will show living to us in a new light, so enriching us.

Chapter five

The relationships between compassion and joy, compassion and pleasure, and compassion and satisfaction are every bit as important as the relationships between compassion and pain and sorrow. Compassion would not even be possible if we had not experienced any good in life or were we not acquainted with what is right in life and not just the wrong. Our joys, pleasures, moments of fullness and quiet gratitude play an essential role in the development of our own compassion. If we are to protect life and the possibilities of living, we must first be able to enjoy life and all the opportunities it offers us. If we are incapable of this then the case we make for life and living of difficult and dire straits will be weak and unappealing.

Our pleasures and jots change with us through our life cycle but we are never without their accompaniment. The pleasure in learning about ourselves and about others is an important support for the development of compassion.

The compassionate person has a knack for finding himself in the presence of the good, however relative, damaged, or limited. This is a hard-won skill. The compassionate person knows that no matter how difficult life is, that pain, hurt and fear are not the whole story of life. The compassionate person does not deny the hurt nor allow it entirely to dominate the field of his inner vision. But the compassionate person needs more than a little stubbornness in the defense of what is good in life.

Life’s pain, sorrow and suffering threaten to make us forget that there is good in life, both past, present and future. The hurt threatens to make us forget that we are capable of closeness, pleasure, zest and humor. It threatens to make us forget about beauty and harmony. When an individual sees that things are not all right, it is a temptation to see them as all wrong. During this time we can find ourselves wishing that everything was all wrong and even find ourselves wishing for a death imagined as peace. Compassion must always stay in touch with the possibility of what is good in life. Without being

1

sentimental, compassion must always keep in mind the fact that people in trouble may have or come to discover surprising degrees of inner freedom. If we are to be compassionate, we must show compassion for the pleasures and joys of others.

ENVY. A subtle, powerful and complex passion. It has to do with desire and is within all of us. But envy unmastered is desire gone sour. At the root of envy is a difficulty in appreciating ourselves. We become destructive because we are out of touch with our own creativity. We must learn to enjoy the pleasures of others, which requires active imaginative participation. This must not be with the goal in mind of any kind of appropriation but more the way that we make pleasure in singing along with an attractive melody. We enjoy ourselves as we sing along. By taking pleasure in other’s pleasures we can open up whole new avenues of pleasures for us as long as we can accommodate the inner exploration involved without feeling that we are losing ourselves. In fact it can provide us with an enormous source of variety and interest.

Enjoying ourselves takes skill, practice, thought, experience, imagination, creativity, poise and perseverance. When we enjoy ourselves, we have to be able to let ourselves go without losing ourselves. We do this by letting the experience flow within ourselves, changing us as we go.

To find peace in life, a peace that is vivid and full of zest, we must be able to locate all our pieces with their diverse interests and strivings. We must be able to locate our pieces with respect to each other so that we do not become unbalanced and lose our bearings. Real peace and pleasure depend on the inner orchestration of many different instruments of experience.

Compassion depends on being able to keep in mind an image of possible ways of being whole while meeting parts. Compassion comes into play often when there is a serious hurt and the outcome is in doubt. Compassion is able to remember that the road of life has many twists and turns and that what lies ahead is often hard to see. It is able to remember that a little pleasure, a little joy can take us a long way.

Compassion understands that where there is life, there is not only hope but also risk and dread. Human possibilities cannot be prejudged.

A fundamental dynamic of childhood is a growing capacity to do for oneself and take pleasure in doing so. Under conditions of threat, duress, injury and illness, it is common for persons to be forced to travel this road in reverse. They find they are less and less able to do and care for themselves. This is a

source of anguish, rage and despair. The burden of this can make it very difficult for a person to arrive at sorrow, even if such grief is essential to finding a new way of looking at the self.

Part of a compassionate defense of an other’s solidarity and self is to help the other retain as much of the pleasure in doing for and feeling proud of himself as is possible. This is not an easy task. Under conditions of threat and duress it is an unusual person who does not go too far in the direction of insisting on doing for himself or too far in the direction of wanting things done for him. Finding a happy medium involves a series of repetitive approximations.

Compassion recognizes and explores realistic limits. To be driven from a position of more ability to do for yourself to one that involves less ability is a serious loss, not only practically and operationally but in the dimensions of relationships, self-esteem, and meaning. It places on suffering people an enormous demand for flexibility just at the time when they are not likely capable of it.

Compassion calls for great patience in listening to others’ efforts to explore where they now find themselves and the memories and fears and hopes that they find in the course of the exploration. Compassion involves an imaginative participation in others’ search for pleasure and meaning in the changed circumstances of the evolving present.

In times of trouble a sense of humor can be an enormous help in breaking the frame of reference and allowing new ideas and inspirations to surface. We take such pleasure in humor because it gives us back our spontaneity and restores our perspective. A genuine smile is a genuine success.

We are such social animals. Our sociability is built into our souls and bodies. Often the prime compassionate act is simply being there for and with another person, taking and offering the pleasures of human company.

Chapter Six

It takes love to get the knack of missing, of being able to live without someone or something lost and yet remain in contact within ourselves with what we have lost. If we cannot grieve, we are condemned to emptiness and bitterness.

Grief is a necessary part of a loss cycle. It makes us available to new experience and keeps us vital within ourselves. It is a recycling process in which those we have lost give shape to a vital inner function.

If we do not have the capacity to miss we have very little access to ourselves. We are shut up by what we have shut out.

We should be hesitant about trying to describe normative patterns of grieving. Grieving depends on the broadest features of personalities. It depends on:

• the nature of the relationship

• the way the loss occurred

• the time of life of the person doing the grieving

Grieving is a complicated mixture of creation and renunciation, enjoyment, confirmation, and disillusionment of the most radical kind.

The love we need in order to understand grief is not only the love we get from others but the love we have to give others. This includes the love we have for and got from those we have lost. It is also the love we have for ourselves that we get from ourselves. This is not a selfish love but a love that nourishes the self.

To be able to grieve we must have compassion for ourselves. We must be able to feel the sorrow and pity of the loss, without denying them or denigrating life because of them. We must be able to bind the hurt and rage with loving feelings between ourselves and vengefulness. These is no such thing as grief without a significant mixture of fury. Because every loss is an insult, a reminder of how small we are and how little influence we have on the course of the events that most touch our lives.

Many people keep their grieving shallow to avoid the inner turmoil. Sometimes it may be decades before the person is willing to know what a loss has really meant.

In order to grieve we need the compassionate support of others. We need a concern that is at once attentive, sustaining, and relatively but not wholly abstinent in terms of action or making demands on us. At the same time, grief is both private and social. In times of grief we are very self-absorbed but we need others who care about us and about whom we care to trust us to go deep within ourselves and then come back up from the dive.

Compassion for those who are grieving involves being:

Our losses are disorienting as they render what seemed definite and clear to us to anything but that. They wreak havoc with our habits both externally and internally. Grief is a mixed state that is normally very confusing and difficult to articulate.

When we think of a compassionate response to grief we must be aware that grief is:

It is not a problem that can be solved but one of the shaping and creative processes that give form to our lives.

We must grieve along with those who grieve while respecting their privacy and autonomy just as we would wish for others to respect ours. We must be willing to expend effort and thought and feeling. We must be willing to accept that life is as full of losses as of gains. To grieve together is to be alive together.

Chapter Seven

Home is not just a matter of a physical building of shelter but it also deals with shelter from the elements of unkindness, both within ourselves and around ourselves. Home has to do with the continuity of our experience not only with others but with ourselves. Home has to do with meeting and meaning as well as with eating and sleeping. It has to do with the creation of bonds of kinship and concern based not only on lineage but on love.

Our emotional needs are just as basic as our physical needs and it is useless to ask which is more important. We can not set a priority over either one as they are to closely related. Our physical needs are emotional and our emotional needs are physical. We can die of the human bleakness of homelessness as well as of the exposure. To live we need not just walls but connections. Connections make the foundations of our home. Connections are what keep the walls of houses standing and roof intact.

Homelessness therefore may be a state of being without a physical home as well as being located in our minds, in the way that we are unable to hold, contain, and comfort ourselves. If we can not get a grip on ourselves, we may be condemned to a nomadic form of existence, one in which we have no fixed abode within ourselves, no inner peace or space that we can call "home". We can feel homeless because we cannot give our lives any meaning. "Home" is not primarily the place to and from which we commute but rather the place where we seek communion. To find a home means appreciating who we are, not so much in theoretical terms as in practical terms that can be lived.

We can never go home again in the sense of returning to another time in our lives, externally. However we can resolve much of the pain by finding a way to house our feelings. We need to accept bitterness and disappointment as parts of our lives. We need to be able to use our own bitterness and disappointments to understand and feel with the bitterness and disappointments of others who have been rendered homeless.

A culture that does not know how to house itself meaningfully will have tremendous difficulty understanding the material and emotional plight of those who have no shelter.

Thirty years ago when America was much less wealthy, there were so many fewer homeless. The homeless are our kin, potentially ourselves. When we listen to their hurt and bafflement, we will feel it resonate with our own. Compassion requires a realistic capacity to perceive and assess situations both inside and outside ourselves.

Compare our culture with the so called primitive cultures. They may be primitive in some ways but so rich in others. In the majority of our homes infants are uprooted when they are just a few weeks old and shipped off to have someone else care for them, besides their parents. In the "primitive" cultures there is a large amount of social interaction between parents and their children during the very first stages of life. Children are touched and passed around and never outside of a web of social interaction that provides support and definition not just for the children but for their mothers. But in our society it is unusual for children to eat dinner together every night let alone have any bonding experiences.

In order to develop compassionate responses to the homeless, we have to ask ourselves, in a very quiet and determined way, what is important? What really makes a difference? What is enough in the way of material possessions? We have to be able to see the homeless as real people with real histories and real possibilities. See that they are not so different from ourselves. Compassion has to be activist, based on moral imagination and conviction.

Chapter Eight

Compassion is hard work because it involves noticing and appreciating and does not stop at superficial understanding. Whenever we take on the work of noticing and appreciating, we challenge ourselves and put ourselves at risk. Every creative activity involves risk, and compassion is a creative activity, one that depends on our continuous application, appreciation, and discovery of our inner resources. But we must always remember that compassion is a biological process that is rooted in our physiological process. It is a life process in human beings. Although the genetic makeup plays a part in it we must understand that it is dangerous to turn the term biological over to those who wish to use it in a narrow and mechanistic way to refer to the doing of molecules.

If we want to understand in a serious and compassionate way something about the problems of those who use drugs to destroy their changes in living, we must keep in mind that biology spans, includes, and integrates matter and meaning. It spans, includes, and integrates matter and what matters to us and in us.

Questions like the following are at the core of the drug dilemma:

Who is responsible?

Who hears me?

Where can I turn for response?

Who will help me with problems of feeling overwhelmed, empty, dead, stuck inside?

How can I learn to help myself?

It is possible for people to get to the stage where they have given up any hope of knowing themselves or anyone else and become only intimate with drugs. Drug abuse can be part of a fundamental error in the understanding of human being and doing. In time the perception becomes the reality. Since our lives are limited, all that we have, all that we are, all that we can come to be is at the stake in the passage of ordinary everyday time.

As remarkable as an individuals continued drinking, the progressive destruction of his own life, can be the consistent failure of those around him to notice. Others around him will make continuous excuses for the different behavior they may be noticing instead of taking that one step that may prove to be the crucial intervention.

Compassion for those with drug problems is a contact sport because drug use is so often both a symptom of a lack of satisfying internal contact with oneself within oneself and of lack of satisfying contact with others and a powerfully reinforcing cause of this being out of touch. The beginning of any hope of a different way of living comes in contact with the real facts of the effects of drug use. Drug use blinds people, so that they fall into the habit of blaming everything on the world outside them.

To confront a drug user successfully requires an attitude that goes beyond blame and self-righteousness. We must believe in our point of view and represent it with the same steadfast consistency we would use if we were trying to convey to someone else a fact of nature, if we are to get through compassionately to a drug user in deep personal peril. The icy cold fury can be the hardest to bear. We must remember that only the drug abuser can stop using drugs. We can only provide the opportunities, never the solutions.

Drug abuse represents a default state for so may people. Drugs are used in excess because there is so much more that an individual does not know how to use. We live in a culture that values highly an ideal of sobriety at the same time that drug use is rampant.

If we wish to respond in a clear and compassionate way to drug abuse, it is the demand for drug experiences that we need to understand. What services do states of intoxication perform in our psychological and spiritual economies? What is it that makes the undrugged life worth living? Many people turn to drugs for relief from their misery, in quest of meaning and for some way to come to terms with the essential mysteries of life.

Getting off drugs is a classic chicken and egg problem. In order to get off drugs, a person has to find another way to participate in life; and I order to find another way to participate in life, a person has to get off drugs. The individual struggling to get off drugs and stay off drugs needs a constant sense of danger that does not go beyond that to panic and hopelessness. Nothing in the long run can reassure the person save his or her own consistent actions.

Responding compassionately to drug use calls for creating practical forms of fellowship that are at once fellowships of the difficult and fellowships of hope. A fellowship of hope must be a fellowship of the difficult, and a fellowship of the difficult will not endure unless it is also a fellowship of hope. We should not forget how alone the drug abuser has been, both with and within himself. We need, in order to stay attuned, to remember the pain of our feelings of loneliness. Our biology is not a biology of isolation but a biology of sustained attachment and interaction.

If we do not have the capacity to face the facts, we will never be able to make out our own features clearly. If we cannot do this we will have a terrible time finding a future.

There are neurochemical, physiological, and genetic factors that have an important impact on the vulnerability to drug abuse and research on these is very important. Depression is more common under conditions of high danger and stress, so drug abuse is more common in environments of high danger and stress, for example, in poor and hopeless inner-city areas.

Many people turn to drugs to try to manage inner states that they find unbearable. They turn to drugs when they are subject to inner storms that interfere with them giving themselves a form they can accept.

Work is very important because it lets us give to others. Work is an essential part of relating to reality. This is where joblessness becomes such a crucial part of the culture of drug using.

The truth that compassion knows is that the alternative to drug dependence is human interdependence, that realistic and imaginative interchange among limited people that gives spirit and zest to life. The plight of drug-abusing people is that they have lost touch with their own sense of agency in the real world, with their own spirit. They have become alienated from themselves in an inner world that they cannot even call their own because they cannot reliably call it into being on their own.

Such individuals need help not only in finding the real world but in calling into being within themselves a world that is more authentically theirs. They need people to be with them, people from whom they can set out and to whom they can return, as they fight, moan, curse, struggle with everything that comes along. They need people who care for what is at risk in them but do not take it upon themselves to control them.

Why do blame and righteousness so often creep into discussions about drug abuse, why people who abuse drugs are so often seen as not quite human or worthy of our deep concern and engagement? Could it have anything to do with our own temptations?