This hit hard.

And suddenly, a wave moved through and washed away the poison of resentment and rage.

Normally when people talk about Compassion and Empathy, I cringe.

I also get annoyed and usually start judging whoever is talking.

I’ve come to a point where I’ve become so in touch with my rage and desire for justice and vengeance for the crimes done against humanity, that I have zero interest in empathy or compassion.

I have interest in revolution and violence.

IF YOU ARE NEW HERE: Please don’t freak out by that last sentence, we’re going in an unexpected direction here, bare with.

My empathy has always gotten me in trouble, anyway. Always becoming a sap for the most fucked up people to walk the earth, and later wondering why my life has burned to the ground. So I wanted to turn that shit off.

After all, the world is cold, and the trials I have faced over these years have been alone, no longer do I walk with the community I once had. That community is gone, and so am I.

This has become the autopilot way of being.

I’ve noticed. I know it’s a problem. I’ve been taking steps to getting myself out of hyper-independent survival mode.

But then…

Some strange shit hit tonight.

I’ll start at the end, kinda.

I posted this because I felt it in my fucking bones.

I’ll repeat.

Never underestimate Compassion and Empathy.

You can cure yourself from your own poison by seeing your struggle in the life of a perceived “enemy” or source of a problem.

The object of your resentment (person) may be more of a reflection of YOU than you realize…

This ties well to that saying that my sponsor once told me,

“You’re living in a house of mirrors, thinking you’re looking out a window.”

Let’s just stick to the situation so I can keep this short, I have a bad habit of going on rants. Brevity is not my strong suit.

Situation:

There’s a person who triggered immense rage and grief and sadness in me. They didn’t do anything to me. The issues are within me, the person behaving as they see fit to behave, which has literally nothing to do with me, set me the fuck off.

I was surprised by it, and I was like wow, I must REALLY be hurting in this area, more than I care to admit, if someone so seemingly insignificant to my life can cause this reaction.

I had been upset about it for like two days, that’s two days too many. It even took up my headspace when I was at work.

But before I would enter my home after the long drive back from work, something would happen.

I had a window into this persons life. I saw a pain so great, it was something this individual tried to hide, but obviusly not enough to where I wouldn’t catch wind of it, and it was unmistakable.

Why? because I relate to it. and its fucking bad. i do not envy this person at all.. but i see what they are goign through as just as much of an initiation into the next cycle of life as it was when I went thruough it. Arguably, it still is.

I won’t get into specifics but to sum it up, I saw the pain this person was in and followed the trail, and what i found was something familiar. I saw a bright love in their life, and i saw the death of that love. and now i see that person completely different.

They know what it is to have love die. I could sit here and say “I cannot imagine how much that fucking hurt” but thats such bullshit, I know exactly how much it hurts.

I found myself crying over this persons situation. It has NOTHING to do with me. I was crying because I felt how tortured that person was, and all of a sudden, their actions made sense.

DAMN homie. You are not a bad person. You’re a fucking wounded person. We are no different. You are likely tortured every fucking day and you’re trying to find a way to resurrect yourself. My god…

Thats the empathy piece that I thought I had succeeded in turning off. Nope.

I guess that’s alright. Kinda nice to have it back. Because immediately my own pain, agony, rage, resentment, it just VANISHED.

Gone. I felt energy flowing through me like a river, literally thats how it felt. I felt current. I felt movement. I’ve felt so stuck and stagnant for these last few weeks, it was such a blessing to have this melt away.

If that person needs a friend, they will find one in me. A few hours ago, I would not have been able to say that, and I likely would have hurt this person (and myself) if they tried to come around me.

I was inside my apartment at this point. I looked up at my altar, at the picture of Dylan. I looked into his eyes and remembered the times he showed up in my dreams after he died. I wondered if he was still in some way there. I wonder if he saw me, saw how I was living, saw how isolated I had become, especially in contrast to what it was with him, and what it could have been, had it not been for the way things turned out.

I am wary of disturbing the spirits of the dead, so I am not one to call upon them often. I know a lot of souls who have crossed over, but Dylan is probably the only one that I feel like if I wanted to pray to or contact, I could. That energetic tie is not dead. I too know what it feels like to have love die, it feels like an amputation of your soul and your history and your memory and your … I don’t know. something that you didn’t know existed until it was gone. I don’t have a name for it.

One of life’s greatest horrors, and by default, greatest teachers, are when the life you have and the life you COULD have had stare each other dead in the face.

I don’t think anyone has had a reality check until they’ve had that moment.

We often avoid this, but I sat with it for a long time, alone, in the dark, for many nights, after his passing. It was excruciating, but it was also a deeply spiritual time, and so necessary. It changed everything.

I can’t tell you what the finished product was because I’m still becoming it. And I’ll likely be the last to know about it. Thats usually how this shit works.

But it did change how I view life, what I value, and how I operate. It gave me more of a compass and framework for living than I’d ever had, and it made me intentional with my time.

So back to this situation.

Back to the alchemy of death.

Because of my experience with knowing exactly what it is to have love die, and how absolutely fucking savage that is, I could not only offer another person complete grace and understanding, but it also set me free from so much emotional pain and distraction.

If I would’t have made the conscious decision to open myself up to the grief process when Dylan died, I would have missed this entirely and likely wouldn’t have this ability.

It’s not like I have’t experienced death or lost love before Dylans death, I absolutely have, but there is nothing that compares to when he died. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to explain why, and I don’t know if I want to either. But for the sake of this substack and providing something beneficial to whoever is reading it, that part of the story is irrelevant.

The point of this entry is…

We are all mirrors for each other. We have many monsters inside our own labyrinths, which is why we clash with others so often.

But if we can wade through this and experience the waters of empathy and compassion run through and wash away all the bullshit, those mirrors aren’t scary anymore. They are the very things that affirm the divinity or “God” permeating and connecting everything in this universe.

How to apply this in real life? Well, we live in very heightened, triggered times. which means two things.

One, you’re going to have WAY more opportunities for breakthroughs, healing, and possibly even building a bridge where nothing but judgment, opposition and spite would have existed otherwise.

Two, it’s going to be a lot harder, for the simple fact that everyones emotions are so heightened right now, and everyone is extremely sensitive.

We live in a nation of pavlovian dog tribalism that makes most psych wards look tame.

See literally any social media comment section for reference.

Or just be like me and work in a restaurant. Holy shit.

So… when you get lit up… notice it. In time, separate YOUR trigger from THAT thing or person who triggered the thing that already existed within you.

Then see into them.

If you truly know pain, if you truly know loss, and if you truly know love… if you know the most devastating, demoralizing, defeating things you can walk through in this life… you won’t even really have to do anything. You’ll see it. That is when the compassion and empathy kicks in, let them do the rest. The shackles will fall.

Now I understand what a Tibetan monk who was being tortured, I believe by the Chinese, said…

I heard this from a Yogi I train with, for reference.

He spoke of the Tibetan monk who had been tortured for a long period of time, but eventually escaped/survived.

When this monk was interviewed about what was the hardest part of that experience his response was this:

“My biggest fear was that I would lose my compassion for them”

When he says them, he is referring to the people who were torturing him daily.

His biggest fear was that he would lose compassion for the people torturing him.

When I first heart that, I was like “alright cool, that’s why I’m not a monk, because that would never be me”. It was so far away from me that it didn’t even remotely resonate.

Well, after tonight, I thought of that thing he said.

After being reminded of the tremendous medicine of compassion, and I feel like empathy goes right along with it here, I see his point. I see why it is so important to have compassion.

The world will fucking destroy you if you don’t.

If you take shit personal in this world, if you take shit to heart and get burnt up over it, this world will eat you alive. Then it’ll have the nerve to let you live on that way for another couple years, or decades.

Does this mean I’m gonna be like this 24/7?

No.

But at least I know it’s there now. At least I know it’s something I can tap into if I choose. And at least it set me free from what I was really struggling with. At least I was able to write some shit to you guys about it too.

I’ll leave ya with that. I hope you’re having a fabulous time, whatever you are doing, and if you got something out of this, please share it with someone you think may benefit from it.

Also, if ya haven’t already, and you want to be part of the release of "Let ‘Em Know”, the rebel rising music video, and the song that I am terrified to release because it is so far out of my comfort zone, by all means, join in here… it comes out 3/31 but you’ll wanna link with it (it’s free) beforehand. That’s how these things work, living in hurricane of new information and content every day, linking to it automates you having to remember, it also helps the song in the algorithmic robot wars. K. Bye. XO. Oh yeah, you can pre-save on Spotify and click the “notify me” button on the YouTube video premiere at this link right here!