~Compassion....A lesson many people I know have yet to learn. from the Daily Om Compassion is much more than a state of mind. Thats because it has the power to move people to act on behalf of others. Here more than forty, first-person stories by the likes of John F. Kennedy, Jr., Pema Chodron, Barbara Brodsky, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jay Jarvis Masters, Joan Halifax, and Sogyal Rinpoche that demonstrate how compassion can be a dynamic force that achieves concrete consequences. In one story, a monk welcomes a dying child into his home, providing the boy with practical care and a sense of peace during the boys last nine months of life. In another story, a civil rights protester learns from a cellmate how to find compassion for those she once considered to be the opposition. In stories as gripping as they are inspirational, it becomes abundantly clear that intentional acts of kindness are nothing short of life-changing--and sometimes even world-changing. The writings collected here also prove that while our compassion aids others, it is also a mighty force that opens our own hearts. Pamela Bloom believes compassion is contagious. She has compiled a timely book for times worth changing. Excerpt Curing Office Rage I work as an Internet producer and have a superior in my company who simply despises me. In fact, I was thinking about quitting my job because he is so rough on me. My husband, who is a very strong meditator, told me I should consider this guy my teacher since he was giving me a great opportunity to develop patience and compassion. So I decided to bite the bullet and stay. Recently the two of us had a showdown that turned into an interdepartmental war. Before I began Buddhist practice I would have tried to outwit him, beat him at his game somehow. But since becoming involved in Buddhism, I tried to see if I could calm my own emotions by practicing Tonglen, the meditation practice in which one breathes in the suffering of the environment and breathes out compassion. Because it is such a subtle practice, nobody knew I was even doing it. After a lot of angry words had been tossed about, somebody finally suggested, “Why don’t we go around the table and say what it would take for all of us to get along?” For some reason I had to talk first and I didn’t have a clue what to say, but suddenly this came out of me: “You know, it’s not about writing a memo, it’s not about a meeting, it’s something much more intangible, like coming into each other’s office and leaving the work stuff on the side and just talking on a human level because we all essentially want the same thing. We want the project to be successful, we want a happy environment, we just need to drop our animosity toward each other.” Suddenly to everybody’s surprise, this officer who despised me started talking about his mother—how they hadn’t spoken in ten years and how they were now in relationship therapy together. We were all quite shocked, but I just kept looking at him and practiced compassion. It’s clear to me now that the atmosphere changed in the room simply because I wasn’t reverting to my normal hostile reaction. It also helped for me to think of the situation as impermanent. I remember telling myself, he is not for•ever, I am not forever, nothing here is forever. Instead, here’s an opportunity to make this moment mean something for myself and for my colleagues, rather than hanging onto a position of combat. At the end of the meeting, one of the accountants started teasing everybody saying, “Oh, I love you guys,” as if to make fun of the situation, but it really did describe the place we had all gotten to. What’s amazing is that these are not people who are into emotions at all; they are into demographics. —Anonymous Loving-kindness for oneself is the golden key to appreciating other people, even the ones that you drive you crazy. — Pema Chödrön Simple Care I was in a bad car accident in the late seventies. I arrived at Insight Meditation Society on crutches to teach a long retreat and I was having difficulty getting around. That was the year His Holiness the Dalai Lama came to visit. The preparations for his visit were intensive because we had to arrange a great deal of security for this man who is considered a head of state. Our peaceful, rural retreat center became a stronghold. Pleasant Street was barricaded off, and state policemen patrolled the roof with guns. There were video cameras and a lot of excited activity. I was feeling dismal on crutches, especially when I ended up in the back of the huge crowd waiting to greet the Dalai Lama when he arrived. The car with His Holiness in it pulled up at last and was greeted by the cameras, the people and the armed policemen. The Dalai Lama got out, looked around and saw me standing way in the back of the room, leaning on the crutches. He cut straight through the crowd and came up to me, as though he were homing in on the deepest suffering in the situation. He took my hand, looked me in the eye and asked, “What happened?” It was a beautiful moment. I had been feeling so left out. Now I suddenly felt cared for. The Dalai Lama did not have to make the pain go away; in fact he could not. But his simple acknowledgment, his openness, helped me feel included. Every act can be expressive of our deepest values. —Sharon Salzberg, from Lovingkindness If you were to ask me ‘What is the essence of Buddhism?’ I would answer that it’s to awaken. And the function of that awakening is learning how to serve. —Bernard Glassman Love without Bias Ten or fifteen years ago, I was living in a very small space in Paris, and every night I walked my dog outside for about an hour. Many times we’d go to a little garden near the Champs Élysées and I would meditate there, at the same time watching and playing with my dog. The garden was about one hundred feet from the Champs Élysées, and even though there were a lot of people walking past, they didn’t see me, so I felt I could be alone. I remember thinking about my teachers. They used to say how important it is to feel compassion for everybody without judgment or favoritism, so one evening I decided to try. The people walking by were close enough to see, but too far away for me to have any thought about them. So I began to pray completely freely for these people without judgment. Everybody was a stranger, but at the same time I felt very close to them because I could really give all my love very freely, without thinking about receiving anything in return. Suddenly I was completely surrounded by bliss. I was giving love, but in return I was feeling ten times more. I was really receiving the blessing and compassion of my masters. Often I would do the same thing in the car. Sometimes we’d get stuck in the car in traffic or be waiting for a light, and my eyes would meet someone for maybe a fraction of a second in the street. In that moment, very often I would just try looking at the person, smiling and sending my love, feeling in my heart, I love you, for example. Looking at the person and smiling at him or her without thinking was very easy because it was just a momentary glance as the person is passing by. So my love was much more like equanimity—all-inclusive, without bias. Sometimes I could really see that the person would be completely transformed by this kind of shock—that somebody was smiling at him or her for no reason. —Michel Rousseau When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it’s bottomless, that it doesn’t have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space. —Pema Chödrön Transforming Anger More than twenty-five years ago, Pema Chödrön was ordained as a Buddhist nun in the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. Today as Abbess of Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, she is known for the mixture of brutal self-honesty and kitchen-sink compassion that she brings to her teaching. I recently received a letter from a friend in which she dumped all over me and told me off. My first reaction was to be hurt and my second reaction was to get mad, and then I began to compose this letter in my mind, this very dharmic letter that I was going to write back to her using all the teachings . . . to tell her off. Because of the style of our relationship, she would have been intimidated by a dharmic letter, but it wouldn’t have helped anything. It would have further forced us into these roles of being two separate people, each of us believing in our roles more and more seriously, that I was the one who knew it all and she was the poor student. But on that day when I had spent so much energy composing this letter, just by a turn of circumstance, something happened to me that caused me to feel tremendous loneliness. I felt sad and vulnerable. In that state of mind, I suddenly knew where my friend’s letter had come from—loneliness and feeling left out. It was her attempt to communicate. Sometimes when you’re feeling miserable, you challenge people to see if they will still like you when you show them how ugly you can get. Because of how I myself was feeling I knew that what she needed was not for somebody to dump back on her. So I wrote a very different letter from what I had planned, an extremely honest one that said, “You know, you can dump on me all you like and put all of your stuff out there, but I’m not going to give up on you.” It wasn’t a wishy-washy letter that avoided the issue that there had been a confrontation and that I had been hurt by it. On the other hand, it wasn’t a letter in which I went to the other extreme and lashed out. For the first time, I felt I had experienced what it meant to exchange oneself for other. When you’ve been there you know what it feels like, and therefore you can give something that you know will open up the space and cause things to keep flowing. You can give something that will help someone else connect with their own insight and courage and gentleness, rather than further polarize the situation. —Pema Chödrön, from Start Where You Are
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 00:03:36 +0000
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