D.M. Kenyon's Blog

Today’s Karmic Workout – The Virtue O... Today’s Karmic Workout – The Virtue O...

Today’s Karmic Workout – The Virtue Of Compassion

Karmic Muscle Group: Awareness & Compassion
Today’s Exercise: The Virtue Of Compassion

[Photograph by Damir Sagolj]

[Author's Note: I founded a company with a friend in 2008. As I developed the business plan, I put a great deal of thought into what a business organization should aspire to cause in its culture. I have had a lot of training in practical organizational behavior and had founded organizations in the past that, at least for a number of years, flourished into exceptional, thoughtful and fulfilling cultures. When I started organizing my company, I wrote a document called The Seven Virtues Of Habitata. I have since posted this document as The Book Of Seven Virtues on this site. The main concept of these operating virtues is that work life, home life and community life should be ethically harmonious and designed to empower each other. If it does not support the life of employees, then a company should not be asking them to do it. This is not just because it is unethical to ask employees to harm themselves, it is bad for business when a company creates harm. Managers many not understand the hidden costs of harmful conduct, but it is there in every case. We run organizations understand this. The fact of the matter is that a person, a family and an organization each have only one life and it should be focused on fulfillment and the creation of benefit for all. Producing profit without this integrity is lazy, short-sided and will ultimately costly.

What I found is that what is good for life generally is good for business specifically. The employees of my company are extraordinary. We have a very diverse group of people that collaborate as a fierce and passionate family. We have some unusual practices at Habitata. Our employees make the final hiring decisions from a pool of qualified candidates based on who they are willing to be responsible for bringing into the family. The selection must be unanimous. If they are not willing to fight for the person in the beginning, then we will not have the type of employee we are looking for. They must be worth taking a stand for.

Our managers cook lunch every Friday for our workers and after lunch the entire company discusses one of the Seven Virtues. We practice high social impact hiring, meaning that we give preference to the chronically unemployed, veterans, felons and others who really need a job. We hire people in their 60's and 70's because we believe that experience is the most valuable trait in an employee. In 2011, after already having to lay off 15% of our employees, we had to make another cut. This time, we cut me, the company's CEO instead of cutting to other employees. Our management does not believe that it is appropriate to allow workers to be treated as "disposable" people and so we made sure that the pain was felt at every level of the company and not just at the bottom. Our employees are so well trained that they can practically run the company without a CEO.

The outcome of these practices is a diverse family of people who believe in what they do and believe in each other. Absenteeism is nearly non-existent. It is not unusual to see employees hanging out hours after their shift is over. We invite all our employees to company networking events and proudly have them explain our company to corporate CEOs and political dignitaries. They frequently leave mayors, congressmen and senators in shock over how our company not only works, but has survived against impossible odds. As we say at Habitata: "the impossible we do right away, miracles take a little longer."

For the next seven workout sessions, I am going to offer the Seven Virtues, one by one, in TLB's traditional exercise format. I hope that you will take them to heart and apply them to your own life. The Virtues are not only the key to right living and fulfillment, they are good business practices that cause truly great, profitable companies to stand out in a cynical world.

You may want to print out the post about the Virtue of Compassion and keep it with you during this exercise. It is best to get started on this exercise in the morning.]

Find a quiet place to read and contemplate. Turn off your cellphone. (Come on, actually turn it off. No vibrate, no hoping that it won’t ring. Turn it off as an act to create solitude.)
Establish meditative breathing for 3 minutes. Take long inhales and long exhales of equal length. Relax and clear you mind. It is important to eliminate distraction by creating focus on breath.
Take a moment to read about the second virtue, mindfulness, out of The Book of Seven Virtues post (see link above) or you can read just about compassion by clicking here.
After you have read about the Virtue of Compassion, take 3 minutes to think about how you are going to practice this virtue all day. This will require that you pay attention to what you are actually doing and thinking all day. This will be much harder than you think. We spend a considerable portion of our day steeped in self-concern. Compassion requires that we spend our day tuned into the condition of others.
For the rest of the day, we want to focus our attention on the condition of the people around us. We want to be listening for their well-being. Do not wander off. If you do, pull yourself back into your concern for others. Keep bringing your mind back to those around you. Compassion is a type of mindfulness, but with a prejudice – it is all about those around us and not ourselves.hr]

Training Note:
Compassion is a word that is often poorly understood. It is often confused for empathy and while empathy can arise out of compassion, they are not same thing. Compassion does not require that you empathize. One does not need to know what it is to be in the shoes of another to have concern for the well being of others. Likewise, compassion should be distinguished from love or what Buddhists call “loving kindness”. Love is an aspiration for the well being of another in the future. Compassion is a concern for what has already happened to another leading to that person’s present condition. In other words, compassion happens in the now and takes into account the past.

Like all of the Seven Virtues, compassion is, in reality, an awareness. Like mindfulness, it is an awareness of conditions outside of our perpetual self-concern. We have compassion for beings outside of ourselves and it is this awareness of their condition that triggers in us the desire to help and be useful to them. Compassion is an intensely powerful state of mind. It is one of the essential elements of leadership. It is the glue that binds families and communities together. Most importantly, compassion is the fundamental awareness that has us take action to aid one another thereby forming collaborations. This coming together through compassion multiplies our effectiveness and range of influence by forming a common intention among a group of people even if it is a group of two. When people come together through compassion their power to cause benefit grows exponentially.

Compassion, unlike fear, is intensely motivational. Human beings actually possess much more intention and enthusiasm when they are motivated by the desire to protect others. Fear and self-concern are motivating, but lack the potential to bind people together in tribes to face a common difficulty. Fear creates an army of one; compassion creates an army of nearly limitless human union.

Notice that distraction, fear, selfishness all destroy our ability to exist in the consciousness of compassion. In a media saturated society, one of the devastating by-products of constant stress from the barrage of news is that we give up the power of compassion to retreat into a shell of self.

Karmic Benefits:

The Power Of Giving A Damn: self-concern can only harness the power of a single person. But when we are compassionate, we focus our intentions outward for the benefit of others and in so doing create alignment and bring allies toward our cause. In the world of things, a person might try to protect a self, but compassion exists in the world of being and in the world of being, one is not limited to the container of “me”. Beings can combine like drops of water into a wave though they are generated from individual bodies.
Why We Can Move Mountains For Others: the power of compassion is a matter of simple logic. When we focus inward, we are looking into a finite and limited space. When we focus our attention outward, we are looking toward infinite possibility. A person who takes up the cause of another automatically, and by definition, is now functioning in an alliance. Two are always stronger than one. Furthermore, the love of others is a naturally stronger instinct than the concern for self. This is part of our instinctive programming as social creatures. Consider parents. Most parents would through themselves in front of a bus out of sheer instinct to save their child. This is no learned behavior. It is part of our basic design as human beings.
The Root Of All Goodness: it is axiomatic that “evil” in most cultures is defined as self-concern at the expense of others while virtue is frequently, but not always, associated with causing a benefit for others. Compassion, however, does not have a moral connotation. It is simply the awareness and concern for the condition of others. Having said that, this awareness sparks, more often than not, action that brings benefit to others and is, therefore, seen as the root of goodness in the human race.

It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.

Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.