According to Buddhist scriptures, compassion is the “quivering of the pure heart” when we have allowed ourselves to be touched by the pain of life.
If we are engaged in actions that cause pain and conflict to ourselves and others, it is impossible for the mind to become settled, collected, and focused in meditation; it is impossible for the heart to open.
May I be given the appropriate difficulties so that my heart can truly open with compassion. Imagine asking for that.
When we let go of yearning for the future, preoccupation with the past, and strategies to protect the present, there is nowhere left to go but where we are. To connect with the present moment is to begin to appreciate the beauty of true simplicity.
We need a repeated discipline, a genuine training, in order to let go of our old habits of mind and to find and sustain a new way of seeing.
Love creates a communion with life. Love expands us, connects us, sweetens us, ennobles us. Love springs up in tender concern, it blossoms into caring action. It makes beauty out of all we touch. In any moment we can step beyond our small self and embrace each other as beloved parts of a whole.
True emptiness is not empty, but contains all things. The mysterious and pregnant void creates and reflects all possibilities. From it arises our individuality, which can be discovered and developed, although never possessed or fixed.
Most people discover that when hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with their own pain.
When we struggle to change ourselves we, in fact, only continue the patterns of self-judgement and aggression. We keep the war against ourselves alive.
Strength of the Heart comes from knowing that the pain that we each must bear is part of the greater pain shared by all that lives. It is not just ‘our’ pain, but ‘the’ pain and realizing this awakens our universal compassion.
As we willingly enter each place of fear, each place of deficiency and insecurity in ourselves, we will discover that its walls are made of untruths, of old images of ourselves, of ancient fears, of false ideas of what is pure and what is not.
It is the place of feeling that binds us or frees us.
At the end of our life our questions are simple: Did I live fully? Did I love well?
When we have for so long been judged by everyone we meet, just to look into the eyes of another who does not judge us can be extraordinarily healing.
Since death will take us anyway, why live our life in fear? Why not die in our old ways and be free to live?
The trouble is that you think you have time.
The present moment is really all that we have. The only place you can really love another person is in the present. Love in the past is a memory. Love in the future is a fantasy. To be really alive, love – or any other experience – must take place in the present.
To live in this precious animal body on this earth is as great a part of spiritual life as anything else.
We as human beings have the amazing capacity to be reborn at breakfast everyday and say, “This is a new day.”
We can always begin again.