Compassion: Compassion Eases Judgement’s Edge

“In separateness lies the world’s great misery, in compassion lies the world’s true strength.”

– Buddha

It strikes me that in a world consumed with social media, reality television, and celebrity gawking, we are inundated with judgements; both ours and others. From advertising, television, and social media to perhaps our own loved ones, families and friends, judgement is everywhere. Now I don’t say this to judge the judgers because I believe judgement is inherent in human nature. I believe we all judge. I even believe judgement has tremendous value in certain situations. My concern is that we have more judgement than we do compassion. My hope is that we move toward a partnering of these two traits.

Compassion is the ability to open your heart to another’s story; it is the ability to lovingly hear and understand what it is to walk in another’s shoes. Compassion comes from being educated about a situation and the various view points through a lens of warmth, support and caring. Judgement is an assessment, sometimes quickly made, based on our assumptions, categorizations, and processing of given information. It is the way in which we often make sense of information. Judging is the way many of us learned throughout school. We grouped, categorized, identified, sorted and ranked.

But we run into an issue with judgement when we don’t partner our judgments with compassion. When we judge a book by it’s cover without taking the time to look at the pages, judgement can hinder us from a good read. When we judge others solely based on their appearance, skin color, and/or gender, we create an environment of misinformation and assumption.

A recent Coke marketing campaign utilized the concept of breaking down judgement with compassion. I’m certainly not hawking Coke, but their “No Labels” campaign sends a lovely message. They placed six strangers from diverse backgrounds in a dark room and allowed them to engage in conversation. The strangers talked, got to know one another, and laughed together. Then, the lights were turned on. The participants were surprised and shocked at the outside appearances of the people they had come to know. Their assumptions of what they would look like where challenged. I’ve included the video at the end of this article. I again reference the “judging a book by it’s cover” idiom as this is exactly what would have happened had they seen each other on the street. The results of this interaction between six strangers were a strong illustration of how appearances only tell one part of our story.

So how do we foster compassion? How do we partner compassion with judgement? We need to step away from quick assumptions. We need to slow down our judging process. We need to make room for other opinions. We need to allow ourselves to consider and challenge our judgements. We need to catch ourselves in moments of judgement and reach for more information. We need to ask questions of one another and take the time to know each other. We need to find commonalities and create bridges to one another. Surely then, we will allow our hearts to open to one another with compassion.