Tibetan Buddhism has a practice of love and compassion. Modern science calls it “connection”. The neuroscientist Richard Davidson names it as one of the four pillars of a healthy mind, together with awareness, insight and purpose. People who start this practice often meet one difficulty: directing these feelings at themselves. I met it too, even after I understood what the words “love” and “compassion” really mean. These words are so worn out that many clichés have stuck to them, and the clichés make them hard to understand.

At first I tried to see one nature in love for myself and love for another. When it was about me, I felt like a receiver: I needed to get love and compassion from somewhere outside. When it was about another person, I felt like a transmitter: a wish arose in me to pass it on to another being. Two different roles, two different directions.

For several days I thought of nothing else. I looked closely at the people around me and tried to see their suffering and their wish for happiness. Then I looked at my own feelings in the same way.

And then, during morning meditation, it happened by itself, naturally, without effort. I understood that there is no difference between my suffering and the suffering of another being. They have one nature, one strength, one taste, the same sensations. Not similar, but the very same. We are all one. The difference that had been tormenting me lived in the “receiver and transmitter” scheme itself: it assumed there is me and there is the other, and something has to be passed between us.

I was struck by how clearly this is expressed in the Russian word. Со-страдание (compassion) is built from “together” and “suffering”: to suffer together, to live through one pain together. If the pain is shared, there is no compassion for another and compassion for myself. There is simply compassion, and it has no object.

There was one more interesting experience. When I do not identify with any suffering, love and compassion for myself and for others feel like one and the same expression. It is as if I am watching from the side.

In English there is the word kindness. In my view it fits better than “love”: it is not mixed up with romantic feelings, and it says exactly what I mean, loving kindness.

Now, a few words on why we speak about suffering at all. In his first sermon the Buddha speaks about the noble truth of dukkha (the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta). This word is often translated simply as “suffering”, but it is wider: it includes dissatisfaction, and a subtle background feeling that stays even when we feel good.

In the traditional view there are three kinds of suffering:

1. Suffering as such. It comes with human life and with having a physical body: birth, old age, sickness, death.
2. Suffering of change. It is connected with pleasure. We try to hold on to what brings us joy, and we suffer when it disappears.
3. All-pervading suffering. This is the kind that dukkha points to: a background dissatisfaction that runs through everything else.

Compassion is the wish that all beings become free from suffering in all its forms, not only from dissatisfaction. But “all beings” does not mean “all the others”. If the suffering is one, then the wish for freedom from it is also one: it does not go from me to another, and it does not come back to me.

There is no one who feels compassion and no one who receives it. Compassion has no object, because we are one.