Compassion – you may think you know what it is but do you really? I didn't...
Once upon a recent time, I worked with the Wicked Witch of the North. She was captivating, charming, funny and lived in the North of the country. She also has a sharp wit and was very clever in her use of words and communication. People liked her and we had a good laugh.
However, working closely with her, I also experienced her Wicked Witch of the North side. This side of her was backbiting and bitchy. She bitched about and found fault with everyone - behind their backs. She would go into military sergeant mode and bark orders and try cunning ways to get what she wanted. And when that didn't work switch into trying to bully people who were not under her spell. Her way of doing things was the best way and she was always right.
Maybe you know a Wicked Witch of the North?
The Wicked Witch of the North had an amazing gift named after a god-archetype and called a Mercury Star. In the hands (from scientific hand analysis), the Mercury Star gift marking appears under the little finger and is very, very rare.
In Greek mythology Mercury (called Hermes in Roman mythology) is the winged messenger to the gods. Mercury is an adept communicator with the ability to communicate with people at different levels. In mythology, mercury easily inhabits and travels between the realms of heaven, earth and the underworld. It is said that Mercury was born in the morning, invented and played the lyre by noon, stole and hid the cows of the god Apollo in the evening(eating two of them because he was hungry) and by night-time he was back in his cradle playing innocent and believing that he had covered up his tracks.
Mercury is both the messenger and the trickster and represents quick mental thinking and agility as well as shrewdness and craftiness. This gift marking is about ingenuity, cleverness, inventiveness.
When you have this extra potential talent you have a keen and quick-witted mind and the special ability to come up with clever, out-of-the-box solutions and ideas.
In Hand Analysis, gift marking have two sides to them.
The master path is when you are using the gift and it is working well for you. For the Star of Mercury, it means you use your ingenuity, shrewdness and cleverness to help yourself and others. You communicate with ease and strategies and solutions come easily. Your eyes light up brightly and sparkle when you are being ingenious because you are in your element. The Wicked Witch of the North can be like this and it is delightful to see. People become spellbound when they experience this aspect of her.
The other side of the coin is the Student path when the special talent is not working well. Then you can be crafty and cunning. You may feel overwhelmed by too many ideas and challenged to make decisions. You may feel clueless and cleverness can seems elusive.. Others can see your ingenuity but you cannot see it or do not trust that you are ingenious.
What has all this got to do with compassion?
Well, when the Wicked Witch of the North gets on her Student Path she can cook up sabotaging and damaging ideas in her cauldron. So with guile and cunning she moved data into the wrong places in the database, completely corrupting the data and 'innocently' moved on to greener fields. For a while, no one was aware of this.
Then...
It was time to wrap up the project and we started to notice that some of the information being reported did not make sense. It was my job to investigate and correct this as I had extensive knowledge of the data and the data was a significant delivery to the clients.
As I pored (some times very crossly) over pages and pages of data, I started to wonder how and why someone would deliberately corrupt the data. The way information was moved about, suggested that it could not have been done in error. It did not make sense.
I admit that I was condemning the Wicked Witch of the North and justifiable so it seemed. But I was uneasy about my condemnation because I kept wondering what could be happening to make her Witched Witch of the North side come out to play.
In my coaching work, one of the approaches I use is called Clean Language. It was devised by the innovative therapist, the late David Grove. He said:
“I'm interested in what's not there,
but would need to be there,
for what is there to make sense.”
I was curious about just this; what would need to be there for this sabotaging act to take place.
Above my desk, I have the following written on a piece of paper and pinned to my noticeboard:
“How does my inner being feel about you.....who I'm condemning?”
I came across this in a YouTube video I watched of Abraham and Esther Hicks who do a lot of masterful Law of Attraction work. Abraham's suggestion is to ask the question and listen for the answer so that you can come back into alignment with your inner source.
So I asked the question and waited. And also still remained curious about what was “not there.” The missing information that would allow us to make sense of the situation.
I woke up early one morning, at 5.30am, and as I needed to complete what was in essence a quite tedious task that needed to be done, I hopped out of bed and went to work on correcting the corrupt data.
And again I wondered, what could be happening to someone, how could they be feeling about themselves and others to do this. Suddenly, I felt a shift inside. It was a knowing that she is okay. It's hard to put into words but I knew that it was compassion and the answer to my question.
I will probably never know what led the Wicked Witch of the North to behave in the way that she did with the potential for causing harm to others Nonetheless, she is okay, like the rest of us, and not in need of 'fixing.'
Wikipedia says this about compassion:
“...compassion" is Latin, meaning "co-suffering." Compassion involves "feeling for another" and is a precursor to empathy, the "feeling as another" capacity for better person centered acts of active compassion, in common parlance active compassion is the desire to alleviate another's suffering.”
Compassion is a concept and now that I am considering it, I probably never really understood what it meant and it will mean different things to different people.
So I have to thank the Wicked Witch of the North for the learning and self -knowledge I have gained.
There is a Wicked Witch of the North in L. Frank Baum's book The Marvellous Land of Oz. Her name is Mombi. Mombi is known for her powers of transformation and disguise . She enslaves a king, transforms the princess she was meant to be protecting into a boy and treats “him” as a slave as well as joining in a war to overthrown the ruler of the land. She is a mistress of disguise and transforms herself into many different forms - maid, a rose, green girl and griffin – to trick and escape from the Good Witch of the South, Glinda. Glinda eventually made Mombi drink a powerful portion that stripped her of all her magic powers.
This kind of witchery goes on in many guises all over the world. I believe that we all shape-shift in everyday life as a matter of survival. I daresay most of us have within us our Wicked Witch of the North and Good Witch of the South. Often the Witch of the North is our own fluctuating mind. Just think of your own inner critic – what a wicked witch?
It's Halloween tomorrow.
The central theme of Halloween is death . Death symbolises endings and Halloween is a time to reflect on death as well as living and to take stock of your past - those things that have passed out of your life such as relationships, jobs and other significant changes in life. It is a time for coming to terms with the cycle of life and death in order to move on and look forward to the future saying “Yes” to life.
Sogyal Rinpoche in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying says that “the purpose of reflecting on death is to make a real change in the depths of your heart” and that “often this will require a period of retreat and deep contemplation, because only that that truly open our eyes to what we are doing with our lives.”
The “Say” Yes to Life, Limitless Retreat that I am running in Goa, India in March 2018 is about opening your eyes to who you are being and what you are doing with your life. I invite you to join me. Go here to find out more...
Happy Halloween!
