Tag Archives: interpersonal skills

criticism

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The MIND

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wonderful post! thank you for sharing! 😀 namaste

Karen Wilson - AWAKEN

THE PASS

 The MIND

For years and years, I identified myself with my mind. I thought I was the mind. What a surprise when I discovered I was not! It changed everything. It was a big relief for me because as a teenager, despite being one of the smartest kids at school, I believed myself crazy. There was incessant chatter in my head, most of it unnecessary thoughts of fear and worry, and I didn`t know if it was the same for other people. That chatter was driving me insane, I wanted to go and see a psychiatrist sometimes. But it seemed that everybody found me ‘normal’, and I was doing pretty well at what I was undertaking. So I started assuming that it was just the way to be, and that I would be an overactive thinker for the rest of my life, no respite. As the French philosopher Descartes…

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truth

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“When you withhold forgiveness or love from anyone, for any reason, it diminishes your awareness of the abundance of good in your life. You are stuck in so much old stuff, new stuff has no way of getting to you. In essence, the good that you withhold from others will be withheld from you.”

Iyanla Vanzant

sarahmariepixie asked: Lazyyogi, could you speak on the difference between empathy and compassion? Why compassion over empathy? Thank you.

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Lazyyogi, could you speak on the difference between empathy and compassion? Why compassion over empathy? Thank you.
http://thelazyyogi.com/post/104337986124

Empathy is a more evolved version of sympathy and compassion is the pinnacle of all emotion.

When we are sympathetic, we are merely one step away from being apathetic. Sympathy means feeling bad for someone or something. Suppose the lover of your dear friend dies. Sympathy would mean feeling bad for that person and sending condolences but not stepping outside your worldview.

In sympathy, you relate primarily through the form of judgment and from your own little mental world.

In empathy, you draw from your own experiences to appreciate and attempt to understand the experience of others. In the same example of a friend’s lover dying, perhaps you have never known the death of a loved one. Then you can’t possibly understand that person’s grief and pain. But having experienced grief and pain in other ways, no matter how small, you can use those feelings to comprehend what that person may be feeling.

Through empathy, you are challenging yourself to step outside of the limits of your mental world. Yet since you can only understand other emotions through your own, you still don’t step outside your emotional world.

Compassion, on the other hand, is a mix of sending and receiving. Compassion recognizes that love and kindness are the means to harmony among all living things and therefore generates the wish for all beings to be free from suffering. Compassion witnesses and takes in the suffering of the people around it while giving out love, spaciousness, and healing.

Tonglen meditation is a most excellent way to cultivate compassion. Suppose you’re dealing with a nasty breakup with a lover.

In tonglen meditation, you begin by connecting with the fathomless, shoreless, ocean-like nature of your existence, and the unassailable peace and love inherent therein.
Then you return to your suffering. You open yourself to all the negative feelings of the breakup: resentment, pain, insecurity, jealousy, attachment, neediness, and so on. You inhale all of those bad things like a thick black smoke. The proceeding exhale is then a radiant and clear light of embracing love, acceptance, gratitude, forgiveness, and freedom.

In and out, you keep breathing in your suffering and exhaling compassion.
But you don’t stop there. You then imagine any friend you have had that has also gone through a breakup. You inhale their suffering and exhale compassion to them.

From there, you broaden this to anyone who has ever experienced a breakup, inhaling their collective suffering and exhaling compassion to them.

Finally, you imagine the lover with whom you have broken up. You inhale their negativity and suffering while exhaling compassion.
If at any point you begin to feel overwhelmed by the suffering, you can return to touch the empty expansive nature of your limitless existence and then resume the meditation.
In this way, compassion is not about simply understanding or sharing experiences. It’s about creating the space for something new and different to emerge by digesting all the shit around and within you while also getting in touch with your divine nature. As such, you become a doorway for communion, harmony, and transformative love to enter the world.

A book that I hold in high esteem, which teaches quite a bit about tonglen and the perspectives of dharma in the context of compassion and suffering, is The Places That Scare You by Pema Chodron.

Namaste

thelazyyogi

joyful abandon

the true practice of love

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“If you do not know how to take care of yourself, and the violence in you, then you will not be able to take care of others. You must have love and patience before you can truly listen to your partner or child. If you are irritated you cannot listen. You have to know how to breath mindfully, embrace your irritation and transform it. Offer ONLY understand and compassion to your partner or child – This is the true practice of love.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

dafsdThích Nhất Hạnh Thích Nhất Hạnh

(via purplebuddhaproject)

Create Your Own World’s Peace by Forrest Curran

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purplebuddhaproject:

http://purplebuddhaproject.tumblr.com/tagged/my-writings

Create Your Own World’s Peace by Forrest Curran

We wonder why there are so many conflicts and wars in the world and are conflicted with the World’s lack of ability to resolve itself into peace, yet many times we are at war with ourselves. When we create an image of low self-esteem within ourselves, we are bombing and terrorizing ourselves. When we refuse to forgive and cling to the past, we create a insensible war out of old grudges that should have been left in the past. When we allow stress to impend our steady flow of energy, we are creating starvation amongst the people. Peace cannot be achieved by just a single moment just as a martyr cannot bring a sense of omnipotent harmony, it must be gained and earned by the entire collective humanity. On the same notion, each and every moment of our lives must be diligently tied with the sincerity to the idea that everything is vulnerable to the force of change.

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” – Leo Tolstoy

The fear of change is a strong source of conflict, creating an aggressive attitude to any idea that contains dissonance to what has been engrained to you: what your parents experienced and are used to, the traditional thought of your environment laid down as a foundation, and what the pervading religious notion is around your area is. All these play a factor into what thoughts are created within the mind, similarly these foundational structures are those that creates many of the conflicts amongst countries.

The solution is to be open to all the moment that makes up our lives, appreciating the moments of the elation and embracing those that are woeful. Focusing on what is happening rather than what we believe should be happening. Realize that when you manifest animosity in any form, that you are giving permission for an aspect of you to invade another more beautiful facet of your mind. By the same means, as we cannot shake hands with a clenched fist, creating walls within the mind won’t prevent the enemy at the gates. If you want to see all people free, free all emotions from yourself; and if you want to see World in the state of peace, inhabit the state of peace within your mind.

Just as all wars waged are against the collective humanity, negativity of all sorts effects the World in our minds.

Consider this before your concede to warfare within your mind.

Namaste,

Forrest Curran

when we love

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“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”

Paulo Coelho (via purplebuddhaproject)