Times of great uncertainty and disruption call for an appropriate response. An Ecosattva is a being committed to protecting and serving all, including our precious Earth. We can all walk the path of the Ecosattva, responding to the cry of the earth with clarity and dedication to the interdependent well-being of ourselves, our communities, and all beings.

There are two things that any Ecosattva needs to cultivate to be able to meet the challenges of this moment: fierce compassion and equanimity. Fierce compassion means seeing the suffering of our times clearly, and being willing to take a stand, to act to relieve that suffering however we can. Equanimity is the spaciousness, the perspective to have our action come from a place of deep wisdom rather than reactivity. 

Compassion and Appropriate Action

In many temples in Asia, you see statues of a great being, the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteshvara Kuan Yin. A bodhisattva is an awakened being. In this particular statue, you’ll often see many arms and many hands. In each palm, there’s drawn an eye. Sometimes the bodhisattva is male, sometimes female, transgender; it is very gender fluid. This eye on the palm of each hand, is the eye of wisdom. 

That if we look deeply into the situation, then our action will be appropriate action. But if we are caught up in our own story, and in our strong emotions, our anger, our reactivity, then we won’t be able to see the situation and its depth, and its complexity and its impermanence. Then our action may actually cause more harm than good because it doesn’t have this deep grounding in wisdom. 

It’s challenging to see a situation clearly. The Buddha said that most of our perceptions are wrong. So we need to act, but we need to try to see clearly. For this we need the skill of equanimity, which is non reactivity. It’s seeing things from all sides. 

The word in Sanskrit is upeksa. It means to be able to look and see from all around, like you’re standing on the top of a mountain. You’re not caught in any one side, in any perspective. 

During the war between the US and Vietnam, there was the School of Youth for Social Service. Thousands of youth were going into the countryside to rebuild villages, schools, roads and improve the lives of people. This School of Youth for Social Service was set up by Thich Nhat Hanh.

This was important work. It was often the difference between life and death for people. Yet every week, these young social workers would take a day of mindfulness for themselves to refresh themselves, to come together and practice and to heal, to listen to each other, to share from their hearts. 

They didn’t say the work of the war is too urgent, we have to work seven days a week. They understood that in order to sustain themselves, they had to take regular pauses to take good care of themselves. 

The peace activist A.J. Muste has said, “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.” The young social workers in Vietnam were practicing peace, not working towards peace in a frenetic or frantic way. That’s not how we create peace. We need to manifest it in every step. Not running for something in the future, but being peace in this moment, because the future is made of this moment. 

The young people in Vietnam would rebuild bombed villages. In one village in particular, they rebuilt it, and it was bombed again. They rebuilt it a second time and it was bombed again. They rebuilt it a third time. I believe it happened four times that they rebuilt that village and they didn’t say, “Hey, this isn’t worth it. Let’s just call it a day.” 

They weren’t rebuilding the village because they wanted a particular outcome. Of course they would have preferred I’m sure that the village remained unharmed, but they weren’t dependent on that as their outcome. They rebuilt the village time and again because that’s what they needed to do, not because there was any guarantee that their action was going to work, and succeed in the end. That is a deep example of “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.”  

We’re not doing something with the expectation of a particular outcome. If we do that, if we say, “I’ll only do this, if this happens,” we will burn out very soon. Because either we won’t do it at all, or we do it and if it doesn’t work, then we lose all of our energy, and we fall into despair. So it’s like the difference between conditional and unconditional love. 

It’s hard to practice unconditional love, and it’s very hard to work for change without wanting things to go the way we expect. If we want to survive with our energy, and our hope, our love, our enthusiasm intact, we have to look with this eye in the palm of our hand, which sees that no action goes unrecorded in the larger scheme and the larger flow of life. That an action done out of pure intent to bring joy or relieve suffering is never lost, even if in the immediate outcome it’s not what we want, and maybe it’s even the opposite. That eye in the hand of our action is the eye that sees that all we can do is what we deeply feel and know needs to be done. 

The only way we can be truly free and deeply powerful in that action is if we do it because we know it needs to be done. That is the power of equanimity, that we need to balance out the fierce compassion that drives us to action. 

In The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology, my teacher Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of a senior nun from Vietnam, who came to visit Plum Village, his monastery in France. She had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and was given three or four months to live. She accepted this and decided to put all of her energy into practicing to be fully present in each moment for the [remaining] days she had left to live. She was aware of her breathing, of her steps. She was mindful of each of her bodily movements throughout the day. Before returning to Hanoi, where she expected to die, a sister persuaded her to go get a checkup in France. The doctors found that all of the metastasized cancer had receded to just one area. She lived for more than 14 years after she was told she had just three months. 

He tells this story as a collective metaphor. We are facing a possible extinction as a species. If we can accept that things are going to change, maybe end, and we are on the brink of real collapse, we put our whole hearts knowing this is it. We live deeply, fully as a human species, with other species, and with the earth, understanding, “Okay, we’ve messed this up. Now we just have a little time. How can we live deeply with all beings on this planet?”

This is what the nun was doing when she was determined to practice. Because she said, “Well, my life is going to end in a few months. Let me give all of my attention to this step, this breath, this moment.” She wasn’t trying to live for 14 more years, that just happened. Her desire was simply to do what needed to be done, to practice with all of her energy for the few months that she was told she had left. So she was truly free. She wasn’t thinking, “I’ll do this so that I can get this in return.” 

That is really working with the mystery, the unknown, and letting life just unfold, and hold us and teach us. So that is what this practice of the Ecosattva path is, to give our best wholeheartedly, not with any outcome that we are attached to. We never know what may come of that action. 

♦

This article is adapted from a dharma talk given in November 2023 titled “Taking the Ecosattva Path: Equanimity and Fierce Compassion.”

The post Embodying the Equanimity and Fierce Compassion of Avalokiteshvara appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Openheartedness—a state described by warmth, generosity, and care—is at the core of spiritual practice. The quality of having a receptive attitude toward people and experiences, without preferences, allows for meeting others with sincerity, compassion, and a genuine openness to connect on a deeper level. In turn, this way of being promotes a more harmonious world.

In Buddhist philosophy, heart and mind are seen as one. The heart-mind, or citta in Sanskrit, is the center that connects us to the field of awareness. Most of us face difficult challenges personally, psychologically, and externally, out in the world. Wisdom, joined with compassion, gives us the strength to find creative, intelligent, and loving ways to move forward and develop new vistas. A mindful heart gives us the foundation on which to build our awareness practices and then helps us find our way home. From a nondual perspective, our heart is the nexus that connects the personal with the universal. It is the hub that connects our personal “child-consciousness” with the universal “mother-consciousness.” When the “infant” joins with the “mother” consciousness, we are free and ready to serve from an open and loving vantage point.

Western thinking often considers the anatomical brain the only center of perception and information-processing, and the heart a physical organ that pumps blood through the body. While recent studies have shown that the heart is more than a mechanical organ and can affect one’s state of being, the conventional Western approach still focuses on and encourages us to be rational, practical, and calculating. My personal experience and decades of clinical experience as a psychologist, however, have made me realize that we need clear thinking, emotional warmth and caring, as well as spiritual openness to be whole. I believe that we function more fully when we allow the heart and mind to work together to form our perceptions, to consider their meanings, and to shape our responses. Openheartedness and the heart-mind connection is crucial.

If we live entirely from the perspective of a conventional sense of reality, we assume that at the core of our being is a separate self, apart from others, and often we feel alienated and alone. From this perspective, it is easy to suffer when our old painful patterns rear their heads. We can become gripped by difficult thoughts and feelings, worries, and desires. In our wish to heal these old wounds, we can get caught in what psychologist and meditation teacher Loch Kelly calls a psychological underpass. Our hurt parts or old painful patterns—and the attempt to overcome those wounds—can become our personal identification. We might identify with an orphan-self, seeing ourselves primarily as a victim of trauma, or as a survivor of hardship, a rehabilitated addict, or a wounded helper. 

Reducing our primary identity in this way does not respect our true essence or being—what Carl Jung called the Self, with a capital “S.” When we go beyond the separate self and all our identifications, we cross into awake awareness, wisdom, love, where the wholeness of “Big Mind,” or Self with a capital “S,” can flow. From this vast field of wisdom, benevolence, and freedom, our deepest wounds can now be met with a heartfelt love that is already there. The tension that entangles those wounds can gradually uncoil, making space for us to realize that we are and always have been a wave within the vast ocean of life. As we gradually gain access to this field of awake awareness in a stable way, we may eventually learn to hold the perspective in our daily lives.

So how do we practice from the place of our heart, where we might grasp awake awareness? First we must disentangle from thinking-managing-forehead mind, the place we focus from. Usually, the thinking mind and awareness are intermingled. But we can begin to experience how that awareness goes beyond conceptual thinking. We can allow awareness to unhook from the “manager mind” and to fill our whole body and heart. Then we can feel our heart as resonating from its own perspective. 

Brief intentions, dedications, and heart-opening meditations are a good place to start; they help us to set up formal meditations and simply embrace the day. Beginning our practice by being gentle and kind quietens the wandering or agitated conceptual mind. Like a scared child relaxes and calms down when it is held by a loving parent, our agitated thoughts and emotions become quiet when feeling the security of a caring heart. And so, heart-opening practices allow our nervous systems to feel more resilient and more interdependent with others in our lives. 

Then, through focus and emptiness-of-self practices, as well as more specific pointing-out-style practices and shorter glimpse practices, we reach into the field of awareness that is already there. Having crossed from a separate, isolated sense of self into awake awareness as our new operating system, we can embody and participate in life with full engagement and great compassion. 

Connected to the sacred and coming from that sense of fullness and richness, we can love our beautiful, troubled world and stay present with the challenges we are all facing. “Self-care” turns into “all of us–care,” as our compassion finds no limits or preferences. Or, as Loch Kelly puts it, “Compassionate action becomes our natural expression.”

With our deepest center, the cave of the heart, or the heart-mind, completely open, the aperture of our awareness is also open. And as we deeply understand and feel the inter-webbed-ness of all life, everybody and everything is family and kin.

The post The Cave of the Heart appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Many years ago, I was listening to a talk on lovingkindness by a Buddhist teacher when someone in the audience shared their experience: no matter how much they meditated and brought mindfulness to their day, they were still their same old shitty self. Although I initially laughed at the comment, it simultaneously resonated deeply with me. At the time, I too had been striving hard in my practice, with high hopes that after enough hours of meditation and retreats, I would somehow land myself in a blissed-out state of perfection. I truly felt that if I dedicated myself fully to the practice, I’d no longer have to deal with the messiness of my imperfections and would finally be able to love and accept myself. 

How many of us have felt just like that audience member? We go to all of these workshops, read a bunch of spiritual books, meet gurus and teachers, sign up for retreats, and do hours and hours of meditation only to meet the same difficult feelings, thoughts, and habits we started out with. This feeling of failure can be very discouraging and can easily become a breeding ground for self-hatred, which is definitely not the direction our practice is supposed to go in. 

For me, during that time, it felt like I was completely covered in mud, and no matter how hard I tried to get clean, I still ended up all muddy. I wondered: How can I love myself when I keep meeting the parts of myself that I hate? How can I be loving toward myself if I’m continuously covered in mud? 

The answer to this predicament came to me one day on an afternoon jog. As I was out running, I saw a statue of Budai, the Laughing Buddha, covered in mud. Although he was very dirty, he still had a big loving smile and was bursting with joy. Seeing this offered me a new possibility. What if we all were able to stop desperately trying to clean ourselves off and instead learned how to love ourselves anyway just as we are—warts and all? Could we cultivate an unconditional friendliness—embracing rather than fighting our so-called “shitty” selves—and learn how to be joyfully covered in mud just like the Laughing Buddha? 

I believe we can and that this is the essence of our practice. And the good news is we don’t have to wait for completion or perfection before we finally begin loving ourselves. We can actually start right now. 

If we want to love our imperfect selves, it’s helpful to see ourselves through the lens of the three I’s: Impermanent, Imperfect, and Impersonal. 

The “mud” of our lives, our mistakes, flaws, and imperfections, constantly come and go and are always changing. No matter how much we try to clean ourselves off, eventually more mud arrives. Yet, if we understand impermanence—the truth that everything changes and ends—then we can see our imperfections not as permanent traits that need to be hated or removed but rather as an ever-flowing stream of life energy to be embraced and worked with. Instead of disliking ourselves for being covered in mud, we can actually love ourselves anyway and create a warm, friendly atmosphere in our own being that’s spacious enough to allow all of the “mud” to come and go. 

I remember for many years in my practice not being able to stand certain feelings, thoughts, and habits I experienced daily. I used to joke that there were two versions of myself: “Mark,” with all his imperfect ways of being, and “Monk” who wanted to live a perfect, Buddhist-inspired life. This splitting of myself into two opposing versions made my life a living hell and left no room for self-love. There were times when I wanted to go out and have some casual drinks with my friends, but I had taken vows that included not taking any intoxicants. Yet, there I was by the end of the night, completely wasted. Or other times when I would say something inappropriate or allow myself to burst out in a fit of rage, even though I had made a commitment to wise speech. I would struggle and fight the urges of “Mark” and would always end up losing against them. No matter how hard I tried, I would eventually cave in and wind up hating myself, thinking, “You’ve been meditating all these years and you’re still screwing this up?” 

Trust me when I tell you I tried anything and everything to make these imperfections disappear. But to no avail! It wasn’t until I allowed all of it to be there—allowing both “Mark” and “Monk” to live together harmoniously—that I was finally able to find some ease. I realized that what I was running away from was not actually who I was, but rather was nothing more than temporary changing conditions—thought patterns and unpleasant body sensations. I didn’t have to hate them, nor did I have to indulge or get lost in them, and I surely wasn’t “bad” or unworthy of love for having normal human urges and feelings. Understanding impermanence, combined with the act of radical acceptance, helped me cultivate an unconditional friendliness in my heart and mind, allowing me to begin the journey of loving my imperfect self.

Because all things are impermanent, we will naturally be imperfect—the second “I.” Completion and perfection are not possible because things come together and they fall apart. This is simply the nature of this life, and even if we somehow managed to attain some level of perfection, it would be dependent upon an infinite amount of changing conditions, causing it to be uncertain and unstable. 

What does this mean for us? Our bodies, emotions, thoughts, habits, and behaviors will always be imperfect. We will never have them permanently be the way we want. The good news is this isn’t a problem, it’s just how things are.

Understanding the second “I” requires meeting our imperfections as expected guests on the path of being human, not as unexpected and unwelcome intruders. Loving ourselves involves accepting this truth that we are imperfect, and once we realize this, we can shift away from perfection and instead move toward perfecting our love toward our imperfect selves. Rather than endlessly trying to be “better” and hating ourselves along the way, we can work with the current ingredients of our lives, and moment by moment meet each imperfection with a wise heart and a warm, loving attention.

The third “I”—the impersonal nature of our imperfections—begins to reveal itself as we repeatedly observe impermanence in our own bodies and minds. Since everything is in a constant state of flux, it’s not possible for there to be some solid, unchanging entity we can call “me.” Our fleeting imperfections don’t have to turn into a permanent identity. They are not our fault, nor are they who we truly are. Sure, we are responsible for how we relate to them, but ultimately they are nothing more than impersonal changing conditions, arising and falling away. This understanding allows us to drop the heavy burden of our imperfections being who we are. 

It’s a lot easier to love ourselves when we can relate to our flaws with lightheartedness and a sense of humor. Our flaws are not personal failures, they are impermanent, imperfect, and impersonal expressions of life. When viewed through the lens of the three “I’s,” our imperfect selves become much lighter and freer, allowing more room for love and appreciation. We may still get covered in mud from time to time, but we can do so joyfully, with hearts filled with love.

May you all be free from self-hatred.

May you all be held in compassion.

May you all love yourselves completely.

May you all be joyfully covered in mud.

The post Joyfully Covered in Mud appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We Zen folks regularly recite the Four Bodhisattva Vows. At Treeleaf, our wording is:

To save all sentient beings, though beings are numberless
To transform all delusions, though delusions are inexhaustible
To perceive Reality, though Reality is boundless
To attain the Enlightened Way, a Way nonattainable

Each is a vow to rescue others, to free ourselves of delusions, to understand, to walk this path even though, alas, such tasks seem never-ending, infinite, impossible, ballooning, the goal always beyond reach. It seems like, so long as we live this complex human life, there will always be countless human beings suffering, countless human losses and disappointments, sometimes grief, unbridled longings, terrible fears, physical hungers, and other frustrated needs in this world. In this life, there are constant opportunities to fall into delusions of excess desire, anger, jealousy, and the like. Reality is beyond our capability to grasp, and its constituent elements infinite, so what chance to ever know it all? Enlightenment seems a dream, its promised perfection lifetimes upon lifetimes away.

Nonetheless, we vow to keep on going.

But that is not the whole story, for there is a trick to these Four Bodhisattva Vows, a way to thread the eyeless needle:

Namely, one can know the realization that, in the flowing wholeness that some call emptiness (whereby all is empty of separate self-existence), there are no separate beings to suffer, are not and never were, no separate things to be suffered, no possible friction, for there are no “two” to clash, no “loss,” for all is always all, nothing apart to fear, no going or absence, thus no death to mourn, no separate piece to lack, thus no desire unfulfilled. Getting the separate sentient beings to realize this fact (of no separation, thus no separate beings to suffer) is how one saves the separate sentient beings… including oneself. 

All of this is true at once! There are tasks to do, damage to be undone or to be prevented, yet also nothing to do, no damage even possible to wholeness from the start. It is all one truth from different angles.

We are like Sisyphus, vowing to continue to roll a heavy stone, yet also knowing stillness, completion, no need for effort.

This week, I asked our sangha members to suggest further Bodhisattva Vows to express the day-to-day tasks of their own lives and the problems and complexities of this world, often so hard or impossible, though we keep on trying. Like the original “Fab Four,” most of these vows focus on helping fellow beings who are suffering, or on improving ourselves as better Buddhists and gentler human beings. They are truly wonderful, for they represent the struggles seen both in the news and in our own personal lives. I won’t quote them all, only a sample, with more here, and I have tweaked a couple too.)

To keep our relatives sober, though relatives just keep drinking

To heal all broken marriages, though marriages are sometimes breaking

To restore lovingkindness, though family rifts are deepening

To deeply love others, though they do not love themselves

To keep all workers on, though some must be let go

To unreservedly show kindness, though kindness is not returned

To console the grieving, though grief is inconsolable

To bring peace in conflicts, though conflicts are endless

To keep our children safe, though we cannot always keep them safe

To end loneliness, though being alone is often inescapable

To end others’ pain, though pain is inevitable

To calm all crying babies, though tantrums are boundless

To relieve all the doggies’ illnesses, though illness is inevitable

To keep an open heart, though differing opinions are inescapable

To work for kindness, though anger is always burning

To make the world laugh, though misery is always arising

To feed all who hunger, though hunger is unrelenting

To see an end to all violence, though violence is ever-present

To keep hope alive, though our future appears hopeless

To live in peace, though conflict is unavoidable

To save all addicts, though addictions are countless

To cure all sick children, though some sicknesses are incurable

To offer encouragement, though one’s own doubting is endless

To patch old relationships, though wounds will remain

To heal all trauma, though the scars will never fade

To end the war, though war rages on

To save the injured, although the earthquakes keep shaking

To love unconditionally, though some are so hard to love

To always be grateful, though complaints never stop

To prevent all deaths, though death is inevitable

To face death without fear, though loss of life is terrifying

To be content with what is, though much is unacceptable

To seek health, though health is failing

…and more…

Try this yourself, making up your own vows to express the hardships in your life or your concerns for this fragile planet. Oh, and we are not changing the “official” version, so fear not. This is just a little artful exercise. But there is one common point to all the vows, new and old:

We vow to do the seemingly impossible, and the vow is an expression of determination to do something, though the odds are not in our favor.

However, that is far from the end of it. For in the peace and wholeness of emptiness, the sickness, the addictions, the hunger, the struggling children and adults, the wars, somehow are all made whole. There is nothing to fear, nothing to complain about and no complaints, a stillness and calm beyond earthquakes, no bellies in need of filling, no crying, and no struggle. The sentient beings are already safe from the start even though, sadly, they may not realize it, may not act on it, and thus struggle on.

And though all are safe from the start, nonetheless, the sickness, addictions, hunger, struggles, and war remain, so we must keep working on. In our continuous practice, every wise and compassionate act, word, and thought is Buddha realized, and is its own arrival in the Pure Land. This lesson is present in all the Bodhisattva Vows, new and old.

The post Making Endless Bodhisattva Vows appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In recent days, sangha members and other friends have written to me, sharing the fear and sadness in their lives: stories of illness and addiction, a loved one’s death, violence and war (a friend in Ukraine), lost jobs, lost relationships, and lost hope. What do I as one person, one friend, one Buddhist priest, have to offer to them? I sometimes feel powerless in the face of so much pain. 

What do I, as one friend, have to offer?

Of course, as a friend, I lend an ear, a shoulder, and some practical advice when I can. We sometimes cry together, and I share the usual encouraging words. “The sun will come out, there is hope…” It is what any friend might do or say. Sometimes, there are no words.

But as I lend a shoulder or cry a shared tear, I wonder if that is all I have to give.

I feel helpless, for the violence, illness, and all the rest remain.

Then, as one person in society, do I have something to offer?

Even as one person, one citizen, I can offer action. Individuals, collectively, can move mountains! Let us all work for a world in which there is no war and violence, no addictions, where illnesses find their cure, loved ones live long, and all are at peace. We must never give up the effort, for we can turn the tide. I look forward to a better world, somewhere tomorrow.

But in the meantime, though we march and carry signs, give money and time, better days seem yet so far away.

I still feel helpless. The violence, illness, and all the rest remain.

So, as a Buddhist priest, what do I have to offer?

If it helps someone in heart and spirit, I might pronounce mysterious words, light a candle, an incense stick, or ring a bell. I chant for someone’s health, their healing, in memory of those they love and lost. It is an act I can offer to calm their hurting breast for a time. Such gestures offering hope and strength to others are precious and powerful. Is the power merely in the heart and mind? Perhaps, yet it is a real power nonetheless. I do it, even if I frequently doubt the power beyond mere emotional effect and psychological reassuring. I do it, for giving hope and strength to others is precious and powerful in itself.

Nonetheless, in my robes before an altar, reciting strange sounds, ringing bells, and striking drums, is that all a priest can do?

Despite the chants and drums, the violence, illness, and all the rest remain.

Thus, ultimately, as a Zen priest, what do I have to offer?

Here is the real power to heal. Here is a true cure.

I have sitting, zazen, and shikantaza. I can guide folks to sit at the heart of suffering, violence, addictions, illness, fear, and sadness. To know the light and stillness that shines and rests quietly at the core of suffering, violence, addictions, illness, fear, and sadness. To know the unbroken wholeness beyond victors and victims, loss and need, and even birth and death. 

Here, there is no suffering, violence, no excess desire in addiction, no bodies or illness, nothing and nobody to fear, no loss, no sadness. Here, there is a peace that sweeps in all the world’s broken pieces, a fullness encompassing all this life’s strivings and lack, a heart that beats on as our little lives come and go. Though the violence, the illness, and all the rest remain, here they do not remain, and all is clear.

Sitting is a marvelous power. As the hard borders, tensions, battles, needs, and longings of the “little self” soften and fully drop away, it reveals this, which is precious beyond words.

As a Zen priest, this is what I have to offer.

It was so in the Buddha’s time, in the time of Dogen, the great Zen master, and in all this world’s days of suffering, violence, war, addictions, illness, loss and longing, fear and sadness. While neither the Buddha nor Dogen could make the suffering, violence, loss, sickness, and death vanish completely in daily life, they knew a wisdom and compassion that shines through it all, a serenity and flowing wholeness that can liberate us from it all—even when all remains.

For that reason, I will continue to reach for every tool I have to ease the suffering of others. Let’s do all of it: a kind word, a shoulder to cry on, shared silence, and collective social action. I will light incense, chant a chant, and ring the bell.

But, most of all, I will offer sitting, just sitting, a stillness amid the storm that allows one to see through all this life’s suffering. One encounters a realm of wholeness that cannot be broken, even amid our sometimes broken hearts.

Yes, in this frequently hard life, this world we call samsara, the violence, illness, and all the rest remain.

And yet, in the stillness and clarity shining through the strife, they never were at all.  

The post What Do I, One Buddhist, Have to Offer? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A Soto Zen teacher told me that by sitting zazen, one is taking refuge in the true self. Compassion, including self-compassion, and kindness, including to one’s self, is where the true self exists. Sitting on my cushion at the same time every day, year after year, has helped me to experience moments of this true self. This is what happened to me recently when I experienced the resolution of some unhappiness that I’d been carrying with me for many years. 

I remember, vividly, an earlier time when I was embarrassed, and angry, toward a friend I’d known since middle school. The event happened in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.  

I’d known this friend, Philip, since the seventh grade. We knew even then what we were about, and that we liked boys, though we could never let anyone else know. This was 1964 in Ohio farm country. Some of our ideas about what it meant to be gay were pretty hilarious, but somehow we made our way, and supported each other into adulthood.

On his 16th birthday, Philip was given a red Mustang convertible. He would come by my house on Friday nights, and on the way out of town we’d pick up hamburgers and shakes at the drive-through, then head for the busy airport in Dayton.  

We’d park off the road at the edge of the airport, close to the fence, where we could sit right where the passenger jets came in for landing. The planes came very close, the car would shake, and we would throw our arms around each other and yell and scream as we looked up at the huge tires. We were never boyfriends, but it felt good to get close together like that.

After college, Philip followed in the footsteps of his two older sisters, who had become flight attendants. In those days, a male attendant was very rare. He was stationed in Los Angeles, and he traveled all over the world.

I moved to New York City after college and worked in publishing, eventually as the publicity director for a major publishing house. One year, after a plane had crashed and killed everyone on board, I developed a severe fear of flying. I knew the names of several on the flight who were traveling to the same book convention that I was. The next time I had to fly to Los Angeles for business, Philip put me on a direct flight from New York to LA on the same plane he’d be working on. He took me to the galley of the huge DC-10 airliner and had me help the flight attendants stock their carts. It was a lot of fun. He’d made me part of the flight crew, which kept me too busy to be scared. What a brilliant idea. 

On our plane’s approach to LA, he took me down to the storage deck and showed me a small window that was right over the landing gear, explaining that this was for the pilot to check if there were any problems.

I lay flat on my stomach to peer out the little window for the last twenty minutes of the flight. The view was spectacular. I was ecstatic, and it brought me back to those days Philip and I sat staring up at the incoming jets. Finally, the airliner came softly down. I felt as if I had landed the plane, myself. I was, once again, a bona fide fearless flier.

Two years later, Philip lost his job. He had AIDS. Both the pilots union and the airline felt he could be in danger of infecting people, though, even then, doctors knew this couldn’t happen.  

I’d left publishing and become a clinical social worker, working with many men about my own age with AIDS. I was now traveling regularly to the West Coast, from New York to LA to see Philip, and then from there to San Francisco to see my older brother, and friends, all of whom had AIDS.

One day, I received a call from Philip’s partner, Jim. I could tell he desperately needed respite from taking care of Philip. I flew out the next week and rented a car to drive with Philip from Los Angeles to San Francisco on the Pacific Coast Highway.

What Jim didn’t tell me was that Philip was having delusions. Philip’s paranoia showed itself when we were quite a few miles along. He told me that he knew he was being followed by FBI agents, who wanted to get information from him. If they were successful, they would kill him. Then added ominously, “You, too.”

I watched over him like a bodyguard, even when we went out to visit friends. When, a couple days later, I took him to the airport to fly home, we hugged, but at that point both of us were afraid of each other. 

Months later, I came home to find a message from Philip on my answering machine.

It was urgent. He sounded happy. 

When I called back, he wanted to know if I still knew people on the Today Show. He was referring to my former job as a publicist. 

“Sure, but what for?”

“My doctor and I need your advice. I’m cured!”    

He was crying. He wanted to know what I thought. Would I handle publicity for them.  

I got excited and was already making plans.  

There was a long pause.

“Though there is a side effect. I don’t have a heartbeat. It’s a touchy subject.”

“You can’t feel it?”

“I’m getting used to it.”

I told him I had another call on the line. After I hung up, I called Jim, who told me Philip kept calling his doctor demanding to be told that he was cured. The doctor was losing his patience.

I was sad about this, but also I was angry, not just at Philip, as if he’d played some sick joke on me, but for revealing in the end that AIDS was here to stay. 

A year later, I was at a hospice in LA. I was there to say goodbye. The hospice was near the airport, and at one point a plane roared over our heads. Sitting on the bed with him, I reached over and we held on to each other. 

I often think about Philip’s call to tell me he was cured. But, thirty years later, a faraway event that had made me angry and embarrassed has now changed to compassion, tenderness, and kindness. I know that all those negative feelings were not just about Philip tricking me. The anger that lasted for decades was my unacknowledged grief. I finally found refuge in my true self.

For a precious five minutes, before Philip told me he had no heartbeat, both of us knew, and we were dead certain, that AIDS was beaten.

I imagine seeing him, my brother, friends, and all my former clients, suddenly cured back then, and alive today.

I settle back into that moment when Philip told me he’d found a cure, and I fell for it. I’m no longer angry or embarrassed. I remember it now as five minutes of joy. My heart stops. I take a deep breath, and I believe him all over again. 

The post Philip Found the Cure appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Effective altruists, known colloquially as E.A.s, believe that doing good requires deeply rational and actionable analysis. It is one thing to preach about loving thy neighbor and quite another to crunch the numbers and find out exactly how much of your income you should donate each year to which specific causes in order to alleviate the most suffering. If Buddhist practice is grounded in the twin ideals of wisdom and compassion, effective altruism is grounded in the belief that the most compassionate behavior arises from the wisest interpretation of available data. These kinds of calculations result in many E.A.s advocating for getting a job on Wall Street (or Silicon Valley) and donating a large portion of their salary rather than working for a nonprofit. Your money will ultimately be worth more than your time.

Yet, as a recent New Yorker profile on William MacAskill, one of the movement’s principal leaders, explained, within effective altruism there is a tension between addressing immediate concerns and mitigating far-reaching existential ones. When the movement began, much time was spent determining which causes could reduce the most harm now. Early practitioners found that the most inexpensive way to save a life was to donate to a charity that provided bed nets to combat malaria. However, a contrary strain of thinking emerged that took population growth into account and began to ask what a life now might be worth against multiple future lives, or even, humanity itself. This forward-looking faction is more worried about climate change (a big concern) and an A.I. apocalypse (a really big concern) than with what is now almost derogatorily referred to as the bed nets era. Whereas neartermists aim to diminish present suffering, longtermists believe that our choices now have existential stakes for trillions of future people, and donate accordingly.

All of this debate about macro existential suffering versus micro individual suffering (“micro,” that is, when held against the longtermist scope, not to the person presently suffering…) got me wondering where Buddhists would land in this debate. After all, the bodhisattva vow, in which a practitioner vows to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, usually over many lifetimes, is about as longterm a commitment there is. 

The bodhisattva vow, however, is not immune to this neartermist versus longtermist tension. It would be hard to imagine a Buddhist disregarding present suffering in order to address the theoretical suffering of future beings, no matter how many more of them there are. In some instances, Buddhist texts even highlight the radical immediacy of compassionate action, as in the Jataka Tales, which describe the lives of the Buddha prior to his enlightenment. In one such tale, Prince Mahasattva leaps to his death in order to feed a family of starving lions. 

Or take the oft-told Zen story about the monk defying the precepts in order to carry a woman across a dangerous river. This story seems to suggest that one should adhere to the spirit of the law rather than the letter, momentary flexibility taking precedence over well-considered doctrine. (Of course, when these stories were written, existential threats to humanity were more in the realm of fantasy rather than reality.)

To act not based on cold calculation but contextual interpretation is to use skillful means.

A longtermist might argue that the kind of contextual interpretation that allows a monk to choose when to obey the precepts doesn’t leave one much ground to stand on. There is no mathematical formula that can reveal the spirit of the law, so wouldn’t it be better to stick to well-considered doctrine? It is comforting to know that altruism can be a system, that precepts strictly adhered to can ultimately reduce harm, that prioritizing the totality of future suffering is more important than the needs of the moment. Yet for many, the bodhisattva vow exists as metaphor for the benefits of striving for the impossible, an acknowledgment that if we shoot for the ethical moon, then at least, one hopes, we’ll reach the moral stars—not by actually liberating all beings but by being liberated from the egoistic actions that bind us to selfish outcomes and inspiring others to do the same.

As a Zen practitioner, I found myself recoiling somewhat from the longtermist position. Part of my reaction was due to the audacity of presuming that preserving humanity at all costs is the way to alleviate the most suffering. It is hard to think of a species that has dispensed more suffering on the planet than humanity. This doesn’t mean that I endorse Prince Mahasattva’s willingness to become lion food, nor do I have a misanthropic belief in the sanctity of a planet devoid of humans. I’m a dad, after all, and want nothing more than for my kids, and future generations, to suffer as little as possible. 

But I’m also under no illusion that I should foretell and forestall this suffering at the expense of current suffering. In a telling moment in the William MacAskill profile, he admits that his number one fear is that the longtermist calculations are off. “What if we’re just wrong?” he says. Predicting the future is impossible, and from a philosophical standpoint, being wrong isn’t that big a deal. But from an ethical standpoint, for a movement allocating staggering amounts of money toward specific causes, this kind of conjecturing can be problematic. I’d rather spend my money on bed nets than wager that brilliant technocrats can predict the future. Carrying the woman across the river will always feel more urgent to me than worrying about the downstream effects of my actions.

The New Yorker piece notes that one of the forebears of the effective altruism movement, computer scientist John von Neumann, stated in 1955, “What safeguard remains? Apparently only day-to-day—or perhaps year-to-year—opportunistic measures, a long sequence of small, correct decisions.” It is this sentiment that perhaps best expresses the potential scope of radical neartermism. To act not based on cold calculation but contextual interpretation is to use skillful means. It is to value basic dignity and awareness, wisdom, and compassion. A long sequence of small, correct decisions does not require us to predict and prevent future doom; it makes such doom unlikely thanks to the scaffolded magnanimity of momentary actions.

I could be wrong. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, goes the saying. But a pound of prevention that subjugates available cures, like bed nets, as insignificant in the grand scheme, is a little too grandiose for me. Call me shortsighted, but I guess I’d rather act compassionately with the neartermists than anticipate death with the longtermists. 

The post Are Buddhists Neartermists or Longtermists? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In 2011], I hit rock bottom. I was lying on the floor, crying, and I felt like my heart was going to explode. Something clicked in that moment, and I realized that I had been lying to myself. If I wanted to pull myself out of it and build a whole new life, I knew that I needed to start telling myself the truth. At that time, I totally put my foot down and said no to any more hard drugs. But I knew that alongside this, I needed to be truly honest with myself. That’s what got me started on this journey of getting to know myself, of sitting with difficult emotions, and opening a new doorway to loving myself properly. . .

Sometimes people think that self-love is just giving yourself whatever you want. But giving yourself whatever you want can make you sick, unhealthy, and unhappy. When I think about self-love, I define it as doing what you need to do to heal and free yourself. This type of self-love can open the door to unconditional love for all beings. As I’ve become more compassionate with myself in learning about how my mind works, when I see others struggling in ways similar to how I’ve struggled, it’s easier for me to be kinder and softer with them and to meet them at their pace.

[Importantly, however], self-love is not martyrdom. Anything taken to an extreme becomes unhelpful. If you’re just constantly giving and you spend no time taking care of yourself, then you’re going to end up incredibly depleted. The Buddha was constantly helping people, but he always set aside a few hours a night when he would rest, meditate, and take care of himself. Being able to balance giving with taking care of yourself is a strong middle path that we should try to emulate. . .

Self-acceptance is [another] critical aspect of self-love. When you begin turning inward and paying attention to the fluctuations of your emotions, you start seeing some pretty rough stuff. You start seeing your own history, and you might awaken memories that you’ve been running away from. Being able to engage with yourself through a medium of acceptance makes deeper healing possible. Without acceptance, you’re not going to be able to go very deep.

Self-love is also an active mode of existence. When I hit rock bottom, I was incredibly unhealthy. I was not taking care of myself, and I would run away from myself by seeking anything that I found pleasurable, whether that was smoking marijuana to the point that I was totally numb or eating food that had no nourishment. I started building positive habits like feeding myself better, going for walks, and eventually meditating two hours a day. It was difficult and took time to build those habits. But one of the most important things I’ve done for myself is realize that I have to bring meditation into my daily life. I need to make time so that I have two pillars of my day of meditating: one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening. Having done that since 2015, I’ve realized that meditation has been a critical part of my life that everything else is built around. If it weren’t for this habit of getting myself to meditate each day, everything would be worse off than it is now: my relationships with my parents, friends, and my work. . .

I found that when I started meditating, creativity started being infused in my daily life—not just creativity in terms of art or writing, but creativity in the sense of seeing relationships and experiences in new ways. Meditation didn’t change what I had gone through. It didn’t change the poverty that I experienced as a child, or my experiences of immigration and racism. Instead, it helped take the energy away from those experiences so that they were still part of my story, but the story didn’t feel as heavy anymore. When that started happening, I was able to connect with this bubbling creativity. Everyone has access to that creativity. When you start meditating and deeply healing yourself, you’re going to be able to produce from a space of compassion, from a healed space, and from a much more creative space.

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity. 

The post The Three Pillars of Self-Love appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Since returning home from four weeks of a silent mindfulness retreat without access to WiFi or news sources, I have been feeling raw and overwhelmed by the pain and suffering in our world. The invasion of Ukraine started just before I began my retreat on February 27. On the second day of war, a young Ukranian man, one of my son’s friends from medical school in the UK, jumped to his death off a university building. He was just three months away from being a doctor. Tragedy was, and still is, everywhere. During the retreat, the locus of my awareness sank from my thinking mind, my prefrontal cortex, to my heart. It seems to me that wisdom and compassion arise from there, allowing us to engage as peacemakers with our wounded world. In other words, to become peacemakers, we first need to build peace within our own hearts—those mysterious organs of physiological, psychological, and spiritual perception and connection. 

During those four long weeks of silence, I sank deeper and deeper into my core and found myself moving from my personal concerns to a wider, deeper sense of caring. I felt as though I could feel the collective web of life reverberating with the pain and trauma shaking our world. I took time to explore what it means to be aware and to be human. For me, human conditioning is a co-arising of sensing, feeling, thinking, and doing, which leads us either to hurt or love. Often we find ourselves at a crossroad between reacting to old painful patterns and current triggers, or, alternatively, pausing, reflecting, and then responding with wisdom and care. 

According to Buddhist philosophy, all life arises out of the field quality of awareness and dissolves back into it. Conceptualizing and identifying as a separate self causes us to suffer. Ruled by fear, we get stuck in defending our self-image, our tribe, and our possessions, which leads to an “us versus them” quality of perceiving each other, often manifesting in mistrust and competition. However, the more we become aware and in touch with the immeasurable, vast, and sacred field of awareness, the more those perceived disparities fall away. Realizing that we are inter-beings, we can relate and respond in a wise and openhearted way.

The Heart’s Intelligence

Modern culture often separates awareness from a feeling quality; when people think of awareness, they think about attention and thinking. However, awareness has always had a profoundly feeling and relational quality. We might call this the heart’s intelligence. 

The thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi talks about the heart’s intelligence when he says, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” The heart intuits the whole, while the conceptual mind usually analyzes and divides. Love or compassion arises when awareness and its feeling quality are fused. A deep understanding of this dynamic helps us to become truly human, which means fully aware, openhearted, and engaged. 

Our heart’s intelligence resonates with the field of awareness—the vast, immeasurable groundless ground of everything. By bringing the personal and the universal together, we come into balance. Then we long for suffering to subside and to make space for healing. 

Settling In

Often we leap into action, usually with good intentions, before settling into our hearts. But when we take the time to practice heartfulness, or heart awareness, then whatever we do will come from a qualitatively higher place. 

As my heart and mind became increasingly quiet on this four-week-long retreat, I began to know that peace is possible. It was important for me to deeply understand this, to let it sink from the thinking mind to a place way deeper in myself. By listening deeply from this quiet place, I realized that I longed to lay my prejudices and preconceived notions to rest. The possibility opened that there is another way of seeing and understanding.

One day during the retreat, I sat on a grassy hill meditating with the warm evening breeze brushing over my face. For hours, I watched a string of ants cross a small path while going in their own directed ways, carrying tiny bits of this and that to build their dwellings. These tiny beings together make up this intelligent, dynamic, intertwined super-organism. In that moment I had a deep insight of all our interconnectedness and interdependence. 

This feeling has carried forward into now. When I shift my gaze from the wonder of this dynamic wholeness and look at our world, with horrific wars in Ukraine and Yemen, which are just the tip of the iceberg of suffering in our world, my heart breaks open and I feel such sadness. Feeling the extreme isolation, polarization and agony that follows these wars, I realize how it’s all, in a very tragic and unnecessary way, the opposite of being interconnected and whole. Seeing sorrow and agony after having tasted peace and interdependence brings me to a place of solidarity and togetherness with those who are suffering. My sadness, now rooted in the groundless ground, affords me a wider, bigger space in my heart and the desire to stay present to the suffering, no matter what. This is how we engage from a place of wisdom and compassion. 

There are many ways to be connected with others through engagement, service, activism, or quiet, contemplative prayer. Our place of engagement can be abstract or practical. In fact, it can have innumerable forms. As the Dalai Lama said when I heard him speak in Dharamsala in 2019, “I can trust my heart’s intentions.” Or, when our engagement comes from a place of wisdom and love, we can have faith in its integrity, direction, and weight. When our intentions come from the place where “our little hearts beat in unison with the big heart of the world,” as novelist Henry Miller wrote, then we can trust ourselves. With faith in our heart’s intentions, we become peacemakers in our wounded world.

***

The following are five steps that prepare us to become peacemakers, inclined to healing personal and societal wounds:

1. Recognize that peace, deep peace, is possible. 
2. Set an intention for practice, which means setting aside time to stay connected to our hearts and the great heart of the world. 
3. Listen deeply to the other side, especially when others’ opinions differ from your own. 
4. Recognize interdependence and our part in the order of things; then we know that we all are kin, we are all family. 
5. Engage from a place of compassion and wisdom. 

The post What It Means to Become a Peacemaker appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

To the uninitiated, a firefighter’s day-to-day may seem filled with five-alarm fires, car crashes, and cardiac arrests. But first responders know that emergencies come in all forms, and that the bulk of the job requires being with suffering, day in and day out, oftentimes in situations that don’t technically qualify as emergencies at all. In fact, Faith Applewhite, a colleague and the medical captain for the Santa Fe City Fire Department, noted that in an audit of over seven million records of EMT (emergency medical technician) treatments, only two percent were labeled as emergencies. Most calls require taking non-emergent patients to hospitals, handling substance-abuse cases, delivering blankets and sleeping bags to the homeless, and managing mental illness cases. And then there’s the neverending paperwork. 

The difference between what first responders think they’re signing up for and what they see on the streets can cause a lot of cognitive dissonance. That, coupled with the amount of suffering and trauma they witness—and often can do little about—leads to burnout, compassion fatigue, and declining mental health. Among firefighters, there were more suicides than line of duty deaths in 2018. One colleague noted that it wasn’t the big calls that got to her. Instead, it was the daily grind of seemingly unsolvable suffering.

The question is how can we respond with compassion to the everyday demands of a career that requires caring for others and being with suffering, in small ways and big, year after year? And if we can respond with compassion, can that help us stay calm and even less stressed?

I posed this question to my colleague Ramos Tsosie, a 25-year veteran firefighter-paramedic who works in an area with many substance abuse cases and “frequent flyers” (people who recurringly call 911 and request an ambulance for non-emergencies). After running on a frequent flyer call, Ramos told me he recognizes that he has a choice in how he responds. 

He can either blame the patient for making harmful choices—such as consuming drugs or alcohol—or he can recognize the patient’s suffering and help without judgment. When blaming the patient, frustration, cynicism, and anger typically follow. Those emotions ultimately lead to burnout. But by acknowledging the suffering and letting go of judgment, first responders can reduce their stress and better respond from a place of compassion.     

The ABCs of Responding 

When faced with a difficult situation, Ramos relies on a mental device to help ground himself in compassion. We call it the ABCs of Responding. The sequence goes as follows:      

A) Recognize the activating event. An activating event is anything that happens that grabs our attention. Activating events are often out of our control: stuff happens. In Ramos’s example, the activating event is a 911 call for a frequent flyer. Another way to look at an activating event is to think of it as anything that makes us “feel” less than positive or neutral, such as a car cutting us off in traffic. For our purposes, the key is to recognize an activating event, something that grabs your attention, and you feel tugged in a negative way.

B) Identify your beliefs about the event and challenge those that are not factual or do not align with your short- and long-term interests. It’s not the activating event that causes how we feel or act. So often, we think, “The guy who cut in front of me on the interstate caused my stress.” But as the psychiatrist Victor Frankl wrote, “there is a space between the stimulus and the response.” In that space lies the beliefs we carry about the activating event. It is vital to understand and identify the beliefs we carry about ourselves, others, and life that are not necessarily accurate, as these beliefs influence how we respond. We can choose to believe that the driver who cut us off in traffic is just selfish, or we could choose to believe that they are in a desperate hurry to get to a hospital. For a first responder like Ramos, he can believe that drug addiction is a character flaw or believe that it’s a disease. 

The key here is to surface the beliefs you have about the activating event. Are they based on facts? Are your beliefs in your best interest? For example, you don’t actually know why the other driver cut you off, so why not choose a belief that makes you feel calmer and more compassionate? Such as, “He has an emergency,” “It’s only going to delay me by three minutes,” or “I’ve cut people off before.”

C) Consider the consequences, or how you respond in feelings and actions. The consequences are functions of our beliefs. If we think, “Another drug addict who chooses to do drugs and wake me up at 3:00 a.m.,” then we are going to be angry and stressed, and we may even take it out on the patient. On the other hand, we will act with much more compassion if we choose to believe the patient is a human being with a severe medical issue. If we think the individual in the car is dealing with an emergency, the consequence is we are going to be much more understanding than if we believe he is just a jerk. Step C reminds us that the best response is one grounded in compassion. 

Most people live their lives believing that activating events cause how they feel and act—that “A” causes “C.”  But whether we act with compassion, anger, or indifference comes down to the beliefs and assumptions we hold. Surfacing and sometimes challenging our deeply held beliefs—for example, “I am the center of the universe, and people should treat me a certain way”—is a crucial step in the maturation of a human being and a Buddhist. Understanding that we can choose beliefs that can change how we act is a critical, if often difficult to accept, insight.

Here, we need discipline. If we believe that acting out of compassion is who we want to be, if we believe that road will lead us to a more peaceful existence, then there is a path we can take.     

Make Compassion Your Higher Purpose

In a 2007 research paper on highly resilient individuals titled “6 Keys to Resilience for PTSD and Everyday Stress,” the authors noted that having a higher purpose is a crucial factor for being more resilient to stress. A higher purpose (a belief) allows you to focus on what is essential rather than being distracted by inconveniences. A higher purpose sets your priorities for how you choose to act in the world daily. For example, a higher purpose may simply be “I will be compassionate.” It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that. This can then be a daily mantra, something we repeat to ourselves until it becomes a habit.

It can be helpful to make a list of all the activating events in your life that tend to throw you off your higher purpose. We all have them. As a first responder, dealing with drunk drivers was difficult for me, and a 911 call to a possible DUI crash was my activating event.  Even the smell of alcohol on a driver could set me off. Early on in my career, I believed that drunk drivers were simply bad people. I had to work hard to just do my job and not succumb to anger. 

What I needed to do was, after recognizing the activating event, take a moment to examine the beliefs I held. Were the beliefs and assumptions based on facts, or based on stuff I made up or was taught as a child?

Then, I asked myself, what beliefs could I hold that would make me a more compassionate person in these specific circumstances? I had to challenge my beliefs about drunk drivers. I reminded myself of a time when I was 17 and I drove a girlfriend home after a date in which we both had a few beers. In that instance, the only difference between me and a driver in a DUI crash was luck. That memory helped me be less judgmental. I also reminded myself that it is easy to be kind to people who have done no wrong, but the true test of compassion is dealing with difficult people. Once I reframed my beliefs, the consequence was that I could be a calmer, less stressed, and more compassionate EMT.

Whether you’re a first responder, retail worker, student, or someone simply striving to be a good Buddhist, there will be times when it is difficult to be compassionate. Everyone gets tired, frustrated, and angry. In those situations, I often return to this passage from Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the hut comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offered sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

The choices we make daily make us who we are. As today opens in front of you, choose compassion.

The post Choosing Compassion appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.