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Originally Posted by brendannz  The only reason I'm not 100% compassionate all the time, is because I want to avoid being bullied by and tooled with by other people |
Yes, I think that's a common concern. Here's the thing, though - you know that old saying, "what you resist persists," don't you? Avoidance is a powerful form of resistance, and it serves to powerfully keep what you are avoiding INSIDE your experience. D'oh!
Avoidance is a good short-term coping tactic -- getting away from someone who is strong-arming or manipulating you is a great tool to have in your belt. But if you continually rely on avoidance as your only tool for managing your experience in the matter of bullying, you lame yourself -- you prevent yourself from learning how to reach mastery in the matter. One way that shows up is habitual thinking -- you train yourself to be a highly defensive person, continually on red alert for bullyers and toolers, your nervous system continually in parasympathetic response (freeze, flight or fight). Parasympathetic response is really, really good and useful for authentic threat, but if you dwell in it, it takes a pretty rough toll on you. Worse, it keeps you in a perpetual state of limited choice of three options (freeze up, run away, or combat the person). If you were to practice letting go of your resistance to being bullied and tooled, you would allow yourself to go into sympathetic response and in that calm, resourceful state, you'd suddenly have so much more choice and opportunity.
After all of the ordinary, common sense teaching that if you're faced with a "negative" person, the best course of action is to avoid them, but in my view, relying on that as your only or best choice is for beginners. It keeps you at the effect of people you view as negative; it maintains you as a reactive pinball in your life, and when society chooses avoidance as a default method for coping, it keeps world society reactive, like a planet full of frogs in the blender.
I don't know if this gives you more access to compassion, but the bullies and the tools only use their low-level tactics because their own inner resources are quite limited -- they haven't developed their own resources past Level 3 (survival) values. You won't really help them, or your self, to move past those values until you fully accept them, both in yourself and in others.
I know it may seem very scary to consider Accepting bullying, because it sounds like Acceptance means condoning or rolling over on your back and urinating like a puppy -- but it doesn't. Actually it means quite the opposite. When you really accept people, granting them space and freedom (in your own head) to be exactly as they are and exactly as they are not, you suddenly have exponentially more flexibility in your response to someone who is behaving in a way that doesn't work well for you. You suddenly become the most influential person in the interaction. You are not limited to freezing, flying, or fighting -- you are not at the effect of a bullyer, but rather, now you have access to actually making a positive difference and feeling really good while you do it.