By Tara Brach — 2017
I have been hearing from a lot of people lately that something has broken open and it’s harder to ignore the suffering around us.
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Today’s climate activists are driven by environmental worries that are increasingly more urgent, and which feel more personal.
Compassion gets a lot of attention in positive psychology, and for good reason – it’s a major concern of many religious and philosophical leaders, including the Dalai Lama and Pope Francis.
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Most genetic studies completely ignore the science of epigenetics, which is how the environment actually turns certain genes on or off.
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Loving-kindness meditation and compassion training boost empathic resilience.
As human beings, our predominant agenda is to survive. The instinct is deep in our DNA. Of course we want to stay alive, but now this instinct has become more of an emotional response. It's less about a threat to our actual existence and more about the barrage of perceived threats to our ego.
It can be powerful medicine for both your mind and relationships.
“Accepting and sending out” is a powerful meditation to develop compassion—for ourselves and others. Ethan Nichtern teaches us how to do it in formal practice and on the spot whenever suffering arises.
If you approach your practice as a path of love, the rhythms of life will teach you moment by moment how to proceed. Each little discovery about what breathing feels like will give you more access to your inner life and the secret power of recovery built into your body.
Every day, we have to do the impossible. We have to submit to the magic reboot of sleep and then get up and line up all our selves into a unified being and get on with it. Nearly every day, new qualities of our selves come online to join in with all the others. This is a creative act.
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Some people harbor the illusion that rest is a luxury they do not have time for, but the reality is that rest is a necessity.