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hey this is Leo for actualised dot-org and in this video I'm going to be talking about feminine versus masculine compassion compassion a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering in his book big heart big mind Zen master Dennis Jen PO Myrtle has a really beautiful story that explains the two sides of compassion that I wanted to share with you it's the story of the horses and here's how it goes basically there's a mother horse who's giving birth to a baby horse and horses live also they live in a group so there's not just one horse there's a whole bunch of other females and there's also the the lead male horse of the troop well I don't know what they're called anyways so they live in a group and the mother is giving birth to this baby and the baby is born and then four horses the baby is supposed to stand up and start walking around on its feet really fast after it's born so this baby though is struggling and it can't quite get up on its feet now the mother looks at the horse she's feeling bad for the for the baby horse she wants to help it along so she nudges the horse with her with her head trying to help it up and the horse little baby horse just can't get up keep struggling falling back down so the mothers doing everything it can and it's not working then some of the other female horses come from the group and they try to help the baby horse to to get up and they keep nurturing and encouraging it and just nothing seems to be working and then finally the main male horse he comes over and he grabs that baby horse by the back of its mane and he takes it over to the boulder over there on the ground and he smashes its skull into the boulder and that right there is a perfect illustration of compassion as being both masculine and feminine it's got those two flavors to it it's interesting though that when we talk about compassion we typically assume the feminine version of compassion not the masculine so that's what I want to talk a little bit about more in this video the lesson that I draw from this story and I have some examples that I'll share with you and also some vivid examples in my own life where I run into this issue of trying to be compassionate but being compassion in the wrong way so the lesson from this little story is that there's different ways that you can be compassionate that you can help other people sometimes you take the soft hopeful approach which is the feminine approach sometimes you take the harsh realistic pragmatic approach which is more the masculine approach and I mean these are stereotypes right these are stereotypes obviously men and women can both use both approaches so I'm not saying here that the woman always uses the feminine approach and the man always uses the masculine approach they can vary so it doesn't have to do anything with your physical gender but there's leanings right it's gender gender stereotypes so there's there's leanings and kind of probability clouds that we gravitate towards depending on what gender we're in and whether we associate ourselves with masculine or feminine tendencies but these are two valid lenses through which to see the world and through which to interact and try to ease the suffering in the world right and you have to have enough judgment and wisdom to recognize which approach is going to work better for example personally for me one of the things that I've been running into is I've been shooting a lot of these videos with Ashley's I work for over a year now and I have this option about how to deliver this content to you guys I could either deliver it sometimes in a more masculine harsh pragmatic way sometimes I can deliver in a more soft hopeful feminine way and initially when I shut it off shooting my videos I kind of side it on the more masculine harsh approach you know where I would kind of yell at you and browbeat you and accuse you of things and this kind of approach and that can be great because sometimes the best way we learn is like we're up in our lives or we're just kind of stuck in a rut and then someone comes over and says hey stop up get your together and go accomplish that thing right there and sometimes that's enough to trigger and you this oh yeah have been up I have been lazy I should go do that and you just go do it sometimes that's all you need but sometimes that doesn't work sometimes you're just like in such a bad state or whatever and instead what you need to be like the more soft loving kind of approach where it's like Oh tell me about your feelings let's take a look oh it's going to be okay don't worry about it yada yada yada yada right and so there's that more feminine compassionate approach so it's been interesting for me to kind of go between these two poles and trying to kind of navigate that and I'm still trying to find you know what the right balance is I think what I've discovered is that it really is kind of on a case-by-case basis it really helps to know what the prop the person's problem is in order to help them out one of the challenges with trying to help you guys out through you know videos or through a comment on on the Internet is that there's so little information that I know about you as I'm trying to deliver this material it's a lot easier with kind of like one on one coaching client but anyway so that's one example for my life another example that I found very interesting is I had this relationship a while ago which was causing me problems because I kind of knew early on into the relationship that it wasn't the right relationship for me this girl had emotional issues I just saw that stuff wasn't going to be clicking for us long term I saw that by kind of continuing to drag this relationship on that it would be doing her a disservice it would be doing me a disservice but on the other hand I didn't have the balls to just cut it off and why is that well because I didn't want to like come off as the and I didn't want to be the one that caused extra pain for her and I mean of course for myself so it wasn't just there's a selfish motives in there too but even if you take it look at the more selfless motives um the issue there was that like I didn't want to take the harsh masculine approach in that situation so I kind of waffle then I was a little soft and I was kind of being understanding and I was trying to kind of make it work I've tried to be hopeful and then that relationship you know dragged on there's a lot of needless misery and suffering and all this both for me and for her and so in that situation it would have been better if I took the masculine compassionate approach and I just made a clean cut yes it would have been painful for both of us but in the end I think there was more pain in dragging the whole process out because a lot of suffering accumulated through that process which is exactly by the way the reasoning of the male horse in that horse story right because if the if the baby horse couldn't walk then chances are would probably get picked on and mauled by some wolves or some coyotes or whatever right so is it really appropriate to late let this baby horse endanger the group as a whole and then also to allow to be you know mauled by some vicious animal um so that would have been probably even worse of a fate for this baby horse than getting its skull smashed in on a boulder so that's why that approach was a you know a valid approach even though it seems kind of monstrous and cold-hearted and harsh another example is how about something like hiring a new employee let's say you want to hire some person so you hire a person and for your business and then you think like okay this is great you're all excited but then a couple of weeks in you start to see that this person isn't quite working out there's some value conflicts maybe they're showing up late occasionally or they're not doing stuff the way you thought they would be doing it and basically you start to suspect that this person might not be able to handle this job that you've got for them well as the manager or the boss you've got really two options one is you can make a clean break and you can do kind of the dickish cold-hearted thing which is just to fire this person call them into your off and say hey look it's not working out pack up your stuff and leave so there's that the other approach is to be more kind of caring and be more hopeful and maybe offer this person some feedback and try to work with them and kind of go through this whole process okay so which one is better well you're not going to know it all depends on the specific circumstances of the situation but you can clearly see there that in this situation there could be both a masculine approach that might be valid there could also be a feminine approach that might also be valid it might be the case that this employee is just kind of struggling to understand certain rules you said and that maybe if you work with them for a month they'll become an amazing employee so you have to develop that judgment in you that wisdom to decide how about the example of disciplining a child how should you discipline a child should you take the harsh masculine approach or the feminine compassionate approach right you've probably experienced both as a kid and you can see that there's there's merit to both but it's also possible to discipline the child in the wrong way with both approaches like if the child is not doing their homework sometimes you need to yell at them and maybe that'll work or maybe yelling at them will even worsen the problem so you have to use a little reverse psychology on them or go talk about their emotions and what's wrong and then be more kind of feminine compassionate with them be more loving with them and maybe that will get them to do their homework or whatever the situation is right and again require good use of judgment and how do you build judgment through experience so a lot of times it's by being in these situations and then miss calibrating making the right the wrong choice right maybe you make the wrong choice and then through a series of wrong choices you develop the wisdom and experience to know what the right choice will be the next time so this is like a skill that you need to develop and what I found is that probably you're more skilled and competent with one of these poles than the other so maybe you're real good at using masculine all the time but not so good at feminine or vice-versa and then your default strategy is to use the thing that you've always used to fix the problem even though sometimes it's quite obvious that that method won't work so it's kind of like trying to use you know a hammer just because got a hammer to hit everything that can be hammered even when it shouldn't be hammered you don't a hammer in a screw you need a screwdriver for that so you know different tools for different contexts but we can become a little rigid sometimes that's what I've been finding in like the way that I do the personal development delivery right and so that's the kind of switch up approaches so I'm going to give you an exercise to do just at towards the end of the video but just want to make a couple of last points here one is just as a warning this whole idea of masculine compassion should not be used as an excuse to be an or to be unkind or inconsiderate or other people and the way that you know whether you're being an or not in using this masculine compassion is you got to ask yourself are you doing it for their good and don't try to rationalize it how really you're doing for their good but actually behind the scenes it's actually all for your good like you got a you got to be very genuine about it right is this decision you're going to make actually the right decision in the situation both for them for you so like if you're deciding whether to fire an employee right you got to ask yourself well if if this job is not going to work if they're not going to be able to fit into this job and that's going to be bad for them because in the end they're going to lose months of their time and having high hopes and then I'm gonna have to fire them in the end anyways so it's better for them if I fire them now but you have to be genuine about it it's interesting also another point that I want to make which has been on the top of my mind lately because I've been to a lot of study on enlightenment and about increasing one's consciousness as we do personal development and one of the things that comes out is that as your conscious awareness increases your compassion increases very interesting and the reason that turns out to be the case is that compassion comes naturally when you identify yourself with more and more of the world so if all you do is you edify yourself just with you with this personal body this ego right here then you're going to feel like it's you against the world and that you have to take from others to feel good about yourself and so in that low state of consciousness you're very identified with just this very local phenomenon happening right here and so your compassion is very limited now as your awareness increases and you can get to the point where your awareness increases completely and totally which is what an enlightenment experience is then literally you have compassion for everything now not because of some moral standards but because you see everything as you in a very literal and physical way so imagine for example that you thought that I was no different than you and that the chair you're sitting on was really no separate from you as an as an identity imagine you identified yourself with all of nature all of humanity all the animals all the insects the cosmos the stars the air the water the trees everything the entire world entire universe if that was your identification that's what you identified with rather than just this local body here imagine how much compassion you would have for all those things even physical objects you would treat them in a very different way and one thing that really brought this home to me is that I was at a retreat where we were doing a lot of consciousness work it was an Enlightenment retreat and one of the participants there at the end of the retreat he shared a little experience with me that he had I kind of was asking about hey so you had some enlightening students who's had enlightening experience I just got very curious asking people questions and this guy started telling me a little bit about one of the first experiences that he had and what he told me was that he was sitting there they were doing exercises it was like two people doing exercise he was sitting there with the other person they were both looking at each other the other person was talking and he was sitting there and all of a sudden he had this enlightenment experience and as he had it his field of awareness expanded to the point where he became the other person not in the sense that he could see through his eyes but just that what he was looking at he didn't perceive as separate from himself anymore so imagine if you're looking at me right now and you get this moment where you start to realize that this this thing here is not separate from that thing over there and it was um it was amazing what he told me because he told me that that person that was talking that he was listening to was describing some painful divorce situation or whatever that happened in his past and some suffering involved with that apparently and so that person was feeling kind of sad about it and this guy who was having the alignment experience he felt so identified without a person that tears started rolling down his eyes tears of compassion because he literally felt what the other person was going through as though it happened to him because he became that other person for that brief minute or so and so that's where true compassion comes from compassion comes from expanding your field of awareness very interesting kind of eye-opening when you hear stories like that right tells you like oh man there might be this whole field of awareness and raising of consciousness two levels that I had not previously thought possible that seem kind of mystical or spooky or woowoo or supernatural they're not supernatural they're very natural it's just that these are higher states of consciousness that we very rarely get to experience unless we deliberately go and pursue them which most of us don't tend to do because we assume that they're not there so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy right low consciousness assumes that low consciousness is all there is it assumes that there is no high consciousness because well I'm already as conscious as I could possibly be but when you start to explore the possibility of higher consciousness that you start to experiment with yourself then you start to see that there's a whole vast ocean that you can expand into and it's really amazing and inspiring so I just want to share that for you as a little maybe motivation for it lastly though what I want to do is I want to give you an exercise so here's the exercise identify which pole you side with more masculine compassion or offender and compassion and what I want you to do is I want you to make a commitment the next time to be aware of which one you're going to naturally want to use and use the opposite one so maybe your spouse comes home from work and he or she's angry because something bad happened there and normally what you would do is you would use the masculine approach or the feminine approach well now what you're going to do is you're going to switch it up and see how that works or whatever your situation is right so that your building balance in both these faculties that you're able to use both and you're able to jump between them and then you're developing experience with both and then you're going to be more flexible so that in the future situations come up and you're going to know which approach to use best all right so go ahead practice that I'm signing off go ahead post me your comments down below click the like button please share this video with a friend and finally come sign up right here to my free newsletter at actualized org I release new videos about self actualization topics every single week I'm really excited about giving you a giant blueprint of how to put together the amazing kind of life that you want to put together emotionally relationship wise business-wise career wise with your passion with your hobbies with all this stuff because I think that that's where the greatest appreciation of life comes from is when you're able to put your own life together like that that allows you that to expand your consciousness not just to yourself but then to the larger world too so if you're on board with that idea then sign up right here and I'll see you soon you