Essay 4: Is It Compassion Fatigue, Sympathy Fatigue or Empathy Fatigue?
Why differentiating between Sympathy, Empathy, Compassion & Pity is essential for counter-colonial spiritual praxis and energy work.
This is a continuation of Part 3: De-Centering Empathy (link)
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Contents
Essay 4: Spiritual Praxis
connects all of this to discernment, non-attachment & energetic diet
Word Count: ~2,365 || Reading Time: ~10 min
Text-To-Speech: https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/
Additional Essays in This Collection
Essay 1: Clarifying Energetic Fatigue explains the differences between sympathy, empathy, compassion & pity and the value of differentiating them
Essay 2: Spiritual Reward clarifies the role of "spiritual reward," ego, survival & thriving in “showing up.”
Essay 3: De-Centering Empathy centers dignity over suffering & offers nuance on personal decision making, upholding systems
Essay 4: Spiritual Praxis
Here’s we left off:
Without centering a grief practice and honoring what we lose when we shift from an ethic of pity to an ethic of compassionate care, we strengthen our attachments to the oppressive systems that cultivate the suffering that overwhelmed us in the first place.
So what does this have to do with a spiritual practice?
Well, everything really.
Regardless of background or cultural context, every spiritual practice is, at it’s core, an enactment of values that grounds us in a sense-of-self and a sense-of-place, which together form a sense-of-belonging—in both the material world we inhabit and in some form of “the beyond,” which we either sense directly or simply believe in. This enactment typically takes the form of rituals, which are both born of and create our attitudes about what is right, wrong, possible and impossible.
Rituals are central in grief practices precisely because they allow us to repeatedly witness alignment and misalignment in a somatic, visceral way. We move beyond what we are told is true and into our inner knowing, our constant connection to Pure Consciousness.
Ritual can help us feel misalignment course through our bodies, which helps us develop an acute understanding of how fully we have been misled by the attachments we are learning to let go of. We become capable of recognizing how the narratives that we were taught meant one thing actually yield a world that counters our stated values. These transitions can be devastating because those attachments—ideologically flighty as they may now seem—were tethered strongly to loving memories, to family, to land, to home.
When we transition our ethics, it can feel like becoming spiritually homeless.
What do we lose in this transition to an ethic of compassionate care (which requires us to extend compassion to folks with whom we don’t share empathy)? We lose a sense of certainty, which—no matter how false—reinforced our sense of belonging. Unfortunately, that sense of belonging is easy to weaponize against our actual values. Rituals that can crack open our “certainty” and allow us to tolerate a brief spiritual homelessness become essential when we are bombarded with mixed messages that both align with our values…and don’t.
Without discerning spiritual rituals, it becomes difficult to know which messages to trust; worse, it becomes easy for us to attach ourselves to ideas that simultaneously strengthen our sense of belonging and ironically destroy the world we believed we were creating. People freshly introduced to Israel’s nearly 75+ year role in Palestinian genocide may feel this keenly as of October 2023.
Learning how to trust our alignment in the face of muddied truth ultimately boils down to the elevation of discernment itself as a spiritual practice: a constant questioning of why each of us chooses to invest in a particular idea of the world and to divest from another.
Discernment, rooted in both theory and practice, is what helps us reliably identify sympathy and empathy and appropriately enact compassion and pity. As communicated earlier in this essay series, confusing sympathy, empathy, compassion and pity often leads to denying our own and others' full humanity while increasing our own suffering. Often, we struggle to accurately discern which energetic sensations and movements we are experiencing because we are unable to let go of the inaccurate narratives that have solidified our senses of belonging.
Rituals that strengthen our discernment allow us to develop clarity energetically (rather than just intellectually), empowering us to more easefully engage in a radical politic of indigenous sovereignty, rematriation, ancestral connection and personal accountability. Clarity—not certainty!—is energetically efficient.
It’s like wearing a pair of tinted sunglasses that literally change the way we see the world. When we take them off, the vivid flower that captured our attention is not quite as pink as we thought it was, and we may experience disappointment that the reality doesn’t match the vision we had just believed—and even loved.
When we accept that we’ve made decisions based on the the pink we were “certain” we saw and not the pink that was actually underneath our tinted shades, it becomes easier to tell the difference between certainty and clarity.
These narratives we were certain about may have been picked up passively through our environment or actively through schooling, religion, and our families’ beliefs. Maybe we were told that transphobia is essential to Christianity, that zionism is essential to Judaism, that veganism is essential to Yoga, that emotionlessness is essential to manhood, that softness is essential to womanhood, that ability is essential to wholeness, or that patriotism is essential to citizenship. All of these narratives colored our vision and, in most cases, determined what we were willing to validate as “truth.”
Grief rituals sharpen our discernment: we strengthen our capacity to unravel the lies while honoring the truths that taught us to both make sense of ourselves in this world and to love ourselves in it.
In doing so, we create space to shift and to learn, to experience the world anew again—and in this space, our energetic fatigue wanes and our energetic empowerment waxes. We create more aligned rituals & narratives, ones that nourish us rather than deplete us.
Discernment is a critical and foundational counter-colonial spiritual praxis because:
it allows us to challenge our own indoctrination as well as that of others.
it helps us recognize people as fundamentally human, regardless of what identities they hold.
it allows us to defy propaganda that might lead us to engage in behaviors that directly contradict our stated values.
it allows us to resist into compassion work when we are being politically and socially pressured into pity work.
it prevents us from believing that our particular vision is pure & perfect, and that everyone on “our side” is, too.
it prevents us from repeatedly reproducing the very foundations of the problems we seek to remedy.
it requires that we hold ourselves as accountable as we expect to hold anyone else.
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