In The Spiral Staircase, Karen Armstrong’s illuminating memoir (in which she details her transformation from being a nun to one of the world’s most renowned religious historians), she writes, “Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment. It dethrones the ego from the center of our lives and puts others there, breaking down the carapace of selfishness that holds us back from an experience of the sacred.”

A few pages earlier, she had mentioned that she would never be suited for the demanding meditative disciplines of traditional yoga practice, but could find freedom in her studies, as well as her general attitude and behavior. (Mythologist Joseph Campbell once stated that his yoga was underlining sentences in books.) Of course, this is jnana yoga — the discipline of philosophy, or the yoga of knowledge. She takes the knowledge that the Buddha realized — that compassion is the highest quality to develop — and applies it to her own life and work.

This philosophy is not unknown to the bhakti yogi, who in his or her devotional practice applies compassion to all relationships. As a philosophy on paper, or taught in the yoga studio, this makes perfect sense. The hard part is realizing it when you’re not in a yoga studio, or reading a blog, or studying scripture. The challenge comes when you’re called to put compassion into practice at exactly the moment you’d rather do anything but — like, for me, every time I’m bumped and pushed on a subway car.

Armstrong, like many before her, understands that compassion is a quality that lies deeper in the human heart than the very common and somewhat juvenile “right/wrong, good/evil” attitude of spirituality and morality. When the yogis of old realized that the path to liberation involved intellectually and emotionally moving beyond (and integrating) opposites, this meant that the whole “ultimate good” and “pure evil” ideology was bunk. This is reflected in their deities — Shiva and Shakti, for example — who were understood not as people but ways of being and perceiving the world.

Thus compassion and empathy were the qualities to develop, and not the blame of external force that is considered “evil.” All the forces of the world are essentially benign, until we filter them through the lens of our perception. This is why avidya, ignorance, could only be overcome through vidya, knowledge. When we are aware of the continual dance of energies around us all the time, we can see how seemingly opposing tensions are necessary for the strength of the world. It is this dance that we were created from.

Bridges are suspended by tension; yogis are muscularly strengthened by it. It is the anxious, nervous, and uncertain energy we need to be rid of. The medicine offered by meditation offers a deep inner strength, but even more important is compassion. As Armstrong wrote in another book, it is our behavior, and not our beliefs, that truly define our faith. Like every aspect of the yoga practice, compassion is a discipline, and does not always come easy. But when we strengthen that muscle, we find the world supports us.