Continent of Compassion: Lessons from 6 Months in Asia
Driving a Tuk Tuk in Sri Lanka is not an activity recommended for the faint of heart or for foreigners, generally. Street-dwelling cows have a turn radius that far outpaces a 3-wheeler. Elephants are far less cute when they’re standing between your open-doored vehicle and their baby.
On Day 3 of our country-wide road trip, Izzy, Aamyneh and I threw our bags in Tammy’s “trunk” (for lack of a better term) and left Kandy. Having learned to drive a manual Tuk Tuk in a 30-minute lesson the day prior, our adrenaline was chronically high. Tammy in first gear, our nerves peaked as we rolled down a steep and very urban hill.
In Sri Lanka you drive on the left, except when a cow, elephant, peacock, dog, monkey, lizard or sheet of drying corn is on the left. Then you veer right. This time, a bus travelling significantly faster than our humble vehicle rounded a 178° turn and landed very, very left. We swerved, testing Tammy’s sub-cow turn radius. Unfortunately, we hit a large white van before we could hit the brakes.
The driver made intense eye contact with us as his arms swung violently out of his van. He was yelling something we didn’t understand. One glance at his bumper confirmed that anger was justified. To put it mildly, we took a bite out of his van. I reached for the door handle to exit our Tuk Tuk before remembering it didn’t exist. Time to negotiate a Sri Lankan car payment. Completely out of my wheelhouse, I’d never felt so prepared to be tourist-taxed.
With one foot on the pavement, I thought I was hallucinating; Was he shouting “go”? His arm continued to swing with a finger pointing down the hill. “Go, go, go”, he chanted. We offered a counter-point: “Look at your car!”. He nodded, and again, “Go, go, go”. We wiggled Tammy into neutral and headed down the hill, checking our side mirrors in disbelief that he wasn’t following in a fit of rage.
This was one of many profound instances of generosity we experienced in Sri Lanka. This moment in particular stood out as one of compassion. Before caring about his car, he cared about three scared and confused 20-something-year-old women in a manual Tuk-Tuk who just successfully dodged a rip-roaring bus.
I am inspired by those who are compassionate by default. When I moved to Bangkok this summer to begin my 9-month stay in Southeast Asia, I did not expect to learn so much about this under-valued trait. This is a sliver of what I’ve gained from the seven countries I’ve visited so far.
First, direct compassion inward
I cried in every vehicle you could imagine this summer. Car, metro, plane, train, back of a motorbike, boat, Tuk Tuk, jeep safari. Once, my Grab motorbike driver looked back and said, “We’re almost there”, thinking I was petrified of the Bangkok traffic which I had long grown used to.
My favourite cries were always on planes. Completely disconnected and never having the foresight to download a movie, there was nothing to distract me. There’s a weird phenomenon in the sky where intense emotions feel more allowed; Deep, melancholic feelings don’t feel so over-the-top when you’re 31,000 feet in the air.
Sitting with emotions, undistracted and unobstructed by expectations of how I should feel allowed powerful emotions to surface. When bubbles reach the surface they have no choice but to dissipate. They rise, sometimes sit a while, but eventually vaporize, their energy disassembling.
This summer featured some rocky emotional periods. The most valuable skill I gained was to sit with my emotions. Letting them bubble and dissipate. Letting energies that did not serve me flow out and transform. It’s the first law of thermodynamics.
Judgement
June 2024 — My coworkers linked arms, forming a chain to cross the scooter-logged Bangkok street to my favourite noodle place. My colleague asked what I wanted, and I just tilted my head because she already knew. She scribbled my order in Thai on a square of paper and gave it to the very busy 70-something-year-old woman running the decades-old restaurant.
I strongly believe that Bangkok has the world’s highest $1-meal-that-will-change-your-life per capita. I also believe that this lady’s red, soupy, meaty, fishy and endlessly customizable noodles are the best $1.17 you’ll ever spend. Yet, as I sat and slurped, I grew anxious. $1 meals that will change your life don’t have a glowing reputation for their nutriousness. I was anxious about my health. More than that, I was angry at myself for being anxious. Why can’t I just enjoy the noodles? Why do care so much about my fibre intake? Why am I thinking about glucose spikes when I should be thinking about how tom-yummy this is?
That evening, worries about my digestion and skin overtook my mind as I ran on the treadmill. I tried to focus less on my echoing thoughts and tuned back into my podcast. Right when I did, they posed a question I had never before considered: “How do you relate to your emotions?”. I was hit with the realization that my anger toward my anxiety was more profound than the anxiety itself, and utterly unproductive. I was making emotions out of emotions.
We often shadow negative emotions with self-judgement. We feel shame for desire. Judgement of our jealousy. Fear of our sadness. We immerse ourselves in stories about our pain — about how valid or invalid it is — instead of experiencing it. Instead of letting it bubble and dissipate.
Spiritual leader Pema Chödrön says, “When the resistance is gone, the demons are gone”. As oversimplistic as this seemed when I first heard it, I gave resistance-free feeling a try this summer. I sat with my anxiety, anger, and sadness and tried not to judge. And I’ll be damned… it helped.
As an emotional-processing noob myself, I adopted a short method to stop making emotions out of emotions.
- I adopted a mantra from author and meditation teacher Tara Brach: “This too belongs”. I whispered these words to my anxiety, stress, sadness, and heartbreak. All emotions are valid. All belong.
- I ask myself, “Where in my body do I feel this?”. Most emotions are associated with some bodily sensation. Locating their physical inhabitance encourages, if only for a second, mindfulness and presence. It is a reminder that they are simply energy, and energy eventually flows and transforms.
It pays to take refuge in what you feel rather than what you believe you should. Have the compassion to accept your emotions as they are, because the counter-intuitive alternative is stronger, redundant emotions.
“When, after a heavy rain, the storm clouds disperse, it is not that they’ve wept themselves clear to the end? “— Mirza Ghalib
Sitting
My mind is forewards-leaning. I naturally have a strong bias towards action and thought and I struggle to be still. There is inertia in thinking, planning, doing—A mind in motion stays in motion, and I am always moving.
Our 10 days in Tammy featured many 5–7 hour drives. With nothing to do but sit and think, my brain eventually grew tired of the latter. So I just sat. Somewhere along the bumpy roads of Sri Lanka, my mind found the counter-forces to slow it down. Tammy rolled, and I was still for the first time possibly ever.
This illuminated how much time I spend away from here. Out of my body, worrying about tomorrow, planning my next meal. My mind often tumbles old thoughts, redundant and obsessive. Stillness is the only remedy I’ve found for the inertia of my annoying-ass mind. It is the only practice that surfaces deeply buried thoughts and emotions that cannot be encouraged by doing anything, even journaling. Stillness is key.
Here in Singapore, I have a 90-minute commute from my university to downtown (I can see Malaysia from my dorm room window). I cherish this time as my nothing time. I sit and listen to the MRT jingle, the man’s headphoneless TikTok scroll to my left, and my own thoughts. My inertia needs a counter-force, and I’ve found 90 minutes of just sitting to be forceful.
“Happiness cannot be found through great effort and will power, but is already there, in relaxation and letting-go. Don’t strain yourself, there is nothing to do… Only our search for happiness prevents us from seeing it.” — Lama Gendun Rinpoche
Meditating
August 2024—Every morning in Luang Prabang, Laos, Buddhist monks parade down the central street to receive donations of rice and crackers. Eager to donate, Izzy and I silenced our 4:45 AM alarms as quickly as possible to avoid disturbing our hostel-mates (despite their very loud 2 AM conversation about Lao Doritos) and headed to town.
We bought a bucket of rice and a basket of crackers and found a place on the curb. At 5:30, a line of orange robes approached. Scoops of rice in hand, we thought ourselves very prepared for the exchange. What happened next was humbling.
One cannot overstate how fast these monks move. They sped past with their bowls extended, only stopping long enough to make terribly awkward eye content as we fumbled with our bamboo containers. Shovel as we may, we could not match their barefoot pace. Some grew so impatient with our scooping that they gave up and walked on. Apparently, our speed was so inadequate that they would rather pass by than wait for their only source of daily food. For those 35 minutes, I really felt for Drake and Josh.
For a reason I’ll never grasp, these men seemed in quite the rush to begin their 8-hour meditation days. Their keenness is, nevertheless, inspiring.
Regular(ish) meditation, although not my strongest habit, has helped me immensely to acknowledge thoughts without giving them power. The unproductive and incompassionate thoughts that tend to get regurgitated hourly or daily into my consciousness can become clouds. I aspire to be a mere cloud gazer.
Thoughts and emotions are not prescriptive, but they are intoxicating. Without the simple awareness that thoughts can be clouds and feelings can be bubbles, clouds become storms and bubbles become explosions.
For meditation, I love the Waking Up app.
“Attention is the most basic form of love. By paying attention we let ourselves be touched by life, and our hearts naturally become more open and engaged”—Tara Brach
The prerequisite to compassion
When the Dalai Lama first encountered the concept of self-hatred, it took him 10 minutes of discussion with his translator to comprehend the term. His life focus is to unlock compassion among people, but in that moment, he realized that self-judgement must be tackled first. The prerequisite to interpersonal compassion is self-compassion.
Emotions do not need to compound–They are inevitable and deserve to be treated as such. Bubbles and clouds deserve appreciation and attention. Over the last 6 months, Southeast Asia has extended many olive branches, but most importantly, it has taught me to do the same for myself. The Tuk Tuk taught me to sit. Noodles taught me to listen. Monks taught me… to scoop rice quickly. I am forever grateful for my experiences in the continent of compassion.
I owe an infinite thank you to the Cansbridge Fellowship, Ivy Xu, Gabi Foss, and William Yu for making this summer possible. Thank you also to Izzy and Aamyneh for getting in that Tuk Tuk with me.
