Perfecting Our Compassion: The Necessity for Examining Fear By Tara Deliberto, Ph.D

Spiritual philosophies and religions teach us that we must perfect our compassion.  But how exactly do we do that?  

The key is knowing this: our growth edge for expanding compassion is wherever our fear resides.  It is easy to be compassionate when we’re calm, unstressed, and already feeling expansive.  The real challenge is remaining compassionate when our fear constricts us into protecting our own self-interests.  Fear, therefore, is our biggest barrier to compassion.  

Let’s consider some examples.  To avoid fear of judgment, we hurt our bodies with crash dieting.  To avoid fear of rejection, we hurt others by pushing them away.  We even fail to intervene against injustices to avoid our fear of making a scene.  The list goes on; but the process is always the same: giving into fear blocks us from acting with compassion towards others and ourselves.  Without necessarily intending to, we unequivocally cause pain when acting from fear.

So how do we remedy this?  A good starting place is to adopt the ideal to - specifically - choose compassion over fear.  Simply conceptualizing fear and compassion as opposites and setting the intention to choose compassion is a helpful tool.

There is more to it than that though.  Upholding the ideal of choosing compassion over fear is not so easy in practice.  In part this is because we can have quite a lot of fear in this uncertain world to manage.    With so much fear, managing it all perfectly just isn’t a realistic goal.  It is helpful, therefore, to adopt the mentality that the best we can do is just aim to live more and more in line with the ideal of choosing compassion over time.  And looking on the bright side, life provides us with quite a lot of opportunities to practice choosing compassion.  

With practice we can learn, for instance, how to choose to compassionately nourish ourselves over fear of judgment.  We can choose to be vulnerable with others over fear of rejection.  We can choose to stand up to injustices over our fear of ostracism.  These are just a small handful of ways in which we can practice choosing compassion over fear.  There is quite a large array of fears in life.  Each one of us will have a different constellation of struggles. 

It is important for all of us to identify what specific struggles we individually have with fear. By doing this individually, we can all do our part for the collective to clean up the emotionally toxic environment in which we all reside.  As Ram Dass said, “I can do nothing for you but work on myself; and you can do nothing for me but work on yourself.”  Through the process of looking within yourself, identifying your own fears, and working towards compassion on that growth edge, you set yourself free from the bindings of fear through the practice of egoless love.  Engaging in this inherently unifying process is true service to oneself and others.

Tara Deliberto, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and the primary author of the book Treating Eating Disorders in Adolescents, published by New Harbinger. Dr. Deliberto currently maintains a private practice while providing education about body image and eating disorders. She also serves as a senior advisor at Equip, an innovate health company. Prior to this, she created and directed NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital’s eating disorder program for adults and served on the faculty of Cornell University’s medical college.