Marc Ian Barasch on "The Compassionate Life"
04:21 min
CLEAR ALL
From the session: "Dark Nights of the Soul" | 2018 Festival of Faiths Camille Helminski is codirector, with her husband, Kabir Helminski, of the Threshold Society of Santa Cruz, California.
James R. Doty, M.D. is the founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University of which His Holiness the Dalai Lama is the founding benefactor.
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1980's. Ram Dass gives lecture on internal and external suffering. He says that resisting our suffering creates more suffering for ourselves and for other people. We need to practice listening, and to observe the way the mind responds to somebody's story.
If what it is you want it to simply to be done with this woundedness then you will continue to search for something that temporarily at least makes you feel better.
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Buddhist roshi Joan Halifax works with people at the last stage of life (in hospice and on death row). She shares what she's learned about compassion in the face of death and dying, and a deep insight into the nature of empathy.
All Masters have said, “Aham Brahmasmi” (I am Brahman) and “Tat Twam Asi,” (You are that). Disciples then perform constant shravanam, mananam and nidhidyasanam (listening, reflection and internalization), and through this process they reach the depths of these statements.
"This life that we think we're living is a failure of the imagination. It's too small for us. It's not who we are." Compassion requires a movement outside and away from our usual preoccupation with our self.