Integrated Awareness^®
Compassion: The Path of Responsibility and Grace
Dale G. Alexander Ph.D. L.M.T.

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Expanding into responsibility allows you experience the grace of compassion.
Sounds good, but how does actually start this process?

The path begins in your heart… with a decision to accept the wholeness of yourself and the fullness of life, the beauty and the ugliness, the stinky and the clean, punctuated with loving moments and the intensity of separation. Compassion grows by holding the spectrum of life’s polarities. The following four decisions can help.

The first decision is to embrace your embodiment of spirit into flesh. Recognizing that you have individually chosen to here on earth. None of us are existential victims. You sign up for the movie of your life without knowing the storyline. The opportunity for us all is to grow our compassion by making choices. Often, the tougher the choice, the more you learn. Few of us do this willingly, yet this is the path. Opening to light and shadow equally for together they are the gestalt. Embrace your embodiment.

The second decision is to commit to occupancy within your body. Occupancy involves consciously engaging the fulcrum of time and space. Notice when you separate from your structure spatially or temporally. Nature has endowed our human species with an ability to dissociate in either direction of this fulcrum. However, we are where our body is geographically located, yet so often, our consciousness is not. The moment to choose is lost, or at least delayed. Occupancy is a decision to experience each moment regardless of whether you like what’s going on. Commit to your occupancy.

The third decision is to dedicate evolving your congruency. Being congruent infers that your intentions and your behavior resonate harmonically, like dynamic oscilloscope waves which blend together into oneness. The irony is that being open to your inevitable moments of disharmony is where you learn the most about your inner spirit… where you allow the grace of compassion to nourish your heart. Dedicate to evolving your congruence.

The fourth decision is to expand into your presence. Your being and your behavior will affect others whether you want it to or not… by what you feel, say, or do and by what you don’t do, say, or feel. There is no real way to hide on earth. Your presence impacts others. Accept this and responsibility grows naturally and the grace of compassion flows to you. Expand into your presence.

Consider the following as an intention, one that you gestate within your heart.

I choose to be here on earth. I am willing to experience life moment by moment. I am open to learning. I accept that my choices will impact others and I accept that others’ choices will affect me. I honor in authorship my decision to be responsive to a world I only partially create, yet, do co-create by my responses to it.

I have choice in every moment.

Reference:
1. Integrated Awareness Trainings, 1989 – present, Cotati, Calif.

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