Thanks for sharing a bit of Pema. I too gain much from her teachings.

The kind of compassion she speaks of can be very challenging for me. I do get trapped feeling pained by another's suffering. I have no strength in the face of someone in pain. I need to work on this more.

My mother had a history of abusing her medications. Emergency visits to the hospital to pump out her stomach were more regular than I care to remember. There came a point when I was in my early 20's that the doctor asigned me the task of administering her meds. It was a painful ordeal everyday as she would beg and scream for more. She would lie about having just thrown them up or cry in agony for the pain she claimed to be unbearable. It would break my heart to see her suffering. I would often give in and when the meds ran out I would be the one to talk the doc into giving her more. I hated those meds and I hated him for putting her on this path and I hated that I was stuck in the middle but once there I saw no way out because to see her suffer was too much to bare. He would play hard ball now and then and hospitalize her to get her off the high doses of meds only to send her home again with lower dose scripts to start the cycle again.

My dad and my brother and sister who were all long gone living their lives away from us would take turns telling me I was doing more harm than good when I would give in to her pleading for more and more and more everyday. They would lecture me about enabling her addiction. I hated them for that because they were not in my shoes nor were they in hers. They had turned their backs on her and all she had was me and her meds. Eventually she stashed enough of the doses I doled out and ended it all before I had a chance to save her again. When it happened I felt the release she must have felt. Shameful not just her release but mine as well.

Perhaps the more compassionate thing would have been to not enable her addictions. Perhaps I was as my 'family' said just enabling her but at the time I felt the compassionate one and judged them to be heartless and cruel.

I get what Pema is saying in terms of idol compassion being about the observer wanted to ease their own discomfort and I think I have repeated that level of compassionate care throughout my life. I never let my baby cry for example to get him to learn to sleep on his own. Ten minutes listening to him was all I could bear before I ran in to scoop him up and take him to bed with me. He was almost 10 before he left my bed. I would stay late with students to help them finish assignments they had put off completing so that they would graduate with their classmates. None of those students were successful in holding down a job after graduation. The list goes on of my enabling under the cover of kindness and compassion.

Sorry for the ramble.... but suddenly this question of compassion has revealed its many layers. I am not sure I have it in me to have real compassion. I don't do tough love very well. I feel their pain too iintensely and selfishly I guess I want my pain to go more than I really care as much as I thought about theirs.

It is interesting because much of my reason for isolation is getting overloaded by the needs of people around me. I can't see a need without feeling responsible for filling it somehow. The only way I have learned to cope is to avoid people so that I don't feel the pressure to take care of their problems for them. I burn out until I get so sick I have to retreat again. I often think I am not really enabling them, I am teaching them the way they should follow. Truth be told they don't usually learn how to do it themselves, they just learn how to get me to do it for them.

Quite the pickle.