Principles for Transforming Compassion Fatigue

Introduction:

In my seminars on: “Transforming Compassion Fatigue Into Flow and Peak Performance,” I share three basic governing principles of the Healer-Warrior philosophy. These principles provide the foundation for each seminar and have been a guiding light for my own personal transformation; Self-honesty, personal responsibility, and self expression.Each of these principles contains elements essential to the process of personal transformation.

Courageous Self-honesty

Self-honesty is the key. It is the primary, essential process that allows a depth of access into parts of your personal self that cannot be attained any other way.

In this context, self-honesty means self-transparency—the ability to look inward to cultivate “in-sight.” Self-honesty is both a process and a skillful activity that can be learned and nurtured.

What is most essential to developing self-honesty is a courageous willingness to suspend judgment, to halt the automatic response of immediately categorizing a concept or idea according to an already existing category of what may be right or wrong, good or bad, possible or impossible.

It’s not an easy thing to do; it requires courageous willingness. Temporarily suspending your belief systems can cause you to feel uneasy, even lost. This is because most people rely on their unquestioned beliefs to try to make sense out of a world that becomes ever more unpredictable and traumatic.

Unquestioned beliefs have remarkable powers to shape our perception. What we attend to physically, mentally, and emotionally is selected and shaped to a great extent by what we unconsciously expect to experience.

To become aware of and suspend these beliefs is to invite you to look clearly and intently inside yourself as you read the words written in this article with as much courageous transparency as possible. Resist the temptation to immediately judge and classify the ideas shared before you have the chance to “try them on.”

Personal Responsibility

Personal responsibility is the continual willingness to take ownership of my personal experience. The problem I usually run into with personal responsibility is my willingness to surrender the need to be right.

The need to be right is one of our strongest and most strongly defended intentions. This is because the need to be right supports and enforces the ego-illusion that I alone am special, different, and somehow more entitled than others. It is the basis of our misguided concept of what it means to be independent.

Personal responsibility is the degree of my willingness to take both individual and collective ownership for my perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and behaviors; my communication with self and others; all my relationships; and the conditions of my life that I am now experiencing.

This is not self-blame. To blame myself I must split myself into both; the part of me that is doing the blaming and the part of me that is getting blamed. This splitting of my self into opposing parts weakens my sense of self and distorts my perception of others.

The action of personal responsibility is looking, listening, and letting go. This is the art of surrendering.

Surrendering is the Warrior’s art. To surrender is to give in, not give up. Giving in is accepting the reality of the situation as it is without meeting my ego’s demand to be right. To surrender means, to bring my ego-perception more into alignment with my here and now, in the moment— in my body experience.

Authentic Self-Expression

Self-expression is the magic of transformation. When you become clear and open to the intuitive signals— the music of your Natural Self—you will begin to experience a deep sense of enjoyment and empowerment. Self-expression is the dance of energy and enjoyment of the Authentic Self when allowed to play.

The Authentic Self is that place of connection between mind, body, Energy in MOTION, intuition, and insight that is in a constant state of flow; it is both in the heart and from the heart. To express myself honestly and with responsibility is to engage and empower my Natural Self to create and re-create itself spontaneously in my life.

The Authentic Self is a wise, gentle, powerful, and playful being inside each of us that is usually invisible to the ego’s eye. This is mostly because the Authentic Self lives in the heart and the ego lives in the head. The Authentic Self perceives the world in terms of “us,” while the ego sees the world in terms of “me.” The Authentic Self senses connection and commonality while the ego notices separation and specialness.

Self-expression becomes the action of clearly tuning into the music of the authentic Self and allowing that music to move you moment to moment as you dance in ever-growing harmony. Self-expression is the spontaneous alignment of who you are with what you are doing.