A compassion revolution

I am bringing new life to my old blog. I am revamping it to bring it more in line with the evolution my thinking and being has undergone over in recent years. The past two and a half years I have been living and volunteering in Sadhana Forest, a sustainable reforestation community in Auroville, South India. Now it seems to me that I might be moving on from there in the near future, so it is a time to reassess where I have been headed and where I want to go. I will try to lay out a road map in this post.

My journey

Alert: change ahead!

I have done many things in my life: I have been a bartender and a dj, a magazine editor, a student representative. I have lived in a Buddhist monastery and was a high school teacher for a brief while. The past years I lived in a hut in a forest, cooked lots of free vegan food for people, looked after abandoned and injured cows, planted trees, did not play any competitive games and used bucket showers and compost toilets (without toilet paper!). I co-founded a self-directed learning course called the UniverCity of Compassion and worked on editing a book on compassionate community lifestyle.

Compassion in all directions

The past months of lockdown, have given me the opportunity to reflect: is there any common thread that weaves all this together? What is my life really about? What have I been really trying to achieve? It may come as a surprise to you, but I do really believe there is a common thread that my entire adult life has revolved around (and which my childhood at times was already pointing forward to). This thread has been compassion. I have always wanted to be of service to others. In order to achieve this, at one point I realized, I also had to work on myself. I had to know myself better and overcome my shortcomings, in order to be of better service. I also had to get a deeper understanding of our human condition to figure out what was really needed and to address today’s issues at their core. 'Be the change,' as the saying goes.

Recently I have started to understand, that I do not only need to transform myself, but also work on transforming society around me. The same unscrutinizing look I used to look at myself, I also have to direct at the structures and institutions around me. What mindset is driving them? How can they be more compassionate? Will they be useful tools if we want to create a warmer and more inclusive society? And if not, how can we build systems that elicit our compassion and bring out the best in us? Our hearts can be filled to the brim with goodwill, yet if our environment does not give us the right tools to put our compassion into action, it might not be of much use. It might even have a contrary effect!

So what we need, and what I am searching for, is nothing short of a compassion revolution on all levels, both internal and external. I used the word ‘revolution’ because it implies a fundamental shift. We are not tinkering at the edges. What we are hoping to achieve is nothing short of a Copernican revolution where we bring compassion to the center of our personal lives and society around us. We want to build compassion from the ground up, compassion by design and not just compassion as a band-aid to soften up the edges of an already broken system.

This blog

Inner and outer change go hand in hand

What does that mean concretely? In this blog I will be exploring internal change through spirituality and mindfulness, based on my own experience and year long journey into the matter. And I will explore system change through looking at topics like community building, veganism, (deep) ecology, gift economy and unschooling. These topics will come back regularly as I have personal experience with them and I feel they could benefit from a little extra attention. 

I will shed light on some pressing social matters of the day. In doing so, I will always try to come from a space that is at the heart compassionate, trying to understand deeply rather than to judge, knowing that we are all connected and that I cannot understand the problems of the world if I do not see how I am part of them. Through it all, inner and outer change will go hand in hand. We need to look inside, undo our conditioning and broaden our perspective. And we have to put our insights into practice by creating systems around us that will strengthen and nourish our compassion.

This blog is linked to my Instagram page, where I will regularly post on the same topics, but in the more brief, anecdotal and photogenic way that suits the medium. I will also keep maintaining my other blog, where I will keep writing (in Dutch) in a very simple tone about my daily life and adventures in India and beyond.

Acknowledgement

Before I end, I must express my utmost thanks to those who have guided me on my journey of compassion throughout my life. I especially want to thank the two communities where I have lived (and their respective founders) and that have deeply influenced my life and my outlook on the world: First, Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) and the Plum Village community, for giving me a deep understanding of my own mind and of bodhicitta or the ‘mind of love’ as Thay would call it. Second, Aviram Rozin and Sadhana Forest, who have set me on the path of what Aviram calls ‘engineering compassion’ and have showed me how we – in a very practical way – can re-envision the world in a way that fulfills our needs as human beings and earthlings.