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As part of the “Real Love with Sharon Salzberg” event hosted by Women of Wisdom and Mindful, meditation teacher and author Sharon Salzberg discussed the true meaning of love for ourselves, others and life. The following is an excerpt of her talk.

As the world has evolved, whether it’s in a personal way or it’s in a global way, we have tremendous difficulty with people. Now I did a group in Barre, Massachusetts where the Insight Meditation Society is that I co-founded in 1976. And this guy in that group said to me, “You know my whole life I’ve thought that of course we like everybody, but loving somebody—that’s like an extremely unusual, rare, rare state.” And he said to me, “You’re reversing it. You’re saying we can love everybody, and maybe not like maybe anybody.”

And I thought about it and I said, “You’re right, I am reversing it.” Because of the way I’m using the word love, which is that deep acknowledgement of connection, that our lives are connected — Which has nothing to do with wanting to invite someone to dinner, or seeing them succeed, or giving them money, or saying yes or anything like that. It’s the heart’s knowing that we are part of this great picture of life, and that everybody actually wants to be happy.

Love is that deep acknowledgement of connection…which has nothing to do with wanting to invite someone to dinner, or seeing them succeed, or giving them money.

We all want a sense of belonging. We want a sense of feeling at home, somewhere in this body, in the mind, of one another on this planet somewhere. And it’s because of the force of ignorance or confusion that we make so many mistakes. Look at what we are taught about where the greatest happiness has to be found: endless consumption or acquisition.

Re-Thinking What We Are Taught About Happiness

One of my favorite phrases to examine these days is, “it’s a dog eat dog world.” Many of us have that kind of conditioning—don’t take care of anybody because they can’t take care of you. And it doesn’t matter who you have to hurt or step on to get ahead, you know you’ll only be safe, you’ll only be happy when you’re on top, and don’t worry about anybody else.

I once semi-ruined this young woman’s life when I was teaching a six-day workshop, and the first night I was talking about that phrase.  And this woman came up to the microphone and she said, “What a horrible phrase. I never knew that was the phrase. I always thought the phrase was, It’s a doggy-dog world.” Like puppies in meadows, jumping up and down.

So the six days went by, and it was the closing circle and she came up to the mic again and she said, “I’ve decided, I’m not going to live in a dog eat dog world. I’m going to live in a doggy-dog world.”

We can see for ourselves what’s true by paying attention. Learning how to pay attention differently, more accurately, less laden with all that conditioning overtaking our perception.

So look at what we are taught about where happiness is, where strength is, how alone we are. But what’s true? This actually is one of the greatest blessings of mindfulness, is that we can see for ourselves what’s true by paying attention. Learning how to pay attention differently, more accurately, less laden with all that conditioning overtaking our perception. And we see for ourselves that maybe endless vengefulness is not that happy-making, maybe compassion is not that stupid. And we can see very directly for ourselves, there is a kind of compassion we can have for those who are caught in a dog-eat-dog world.

The post Feeling Lonely? Embrace Compassion appeared first on Mindful.

Question:

When you have realised that you are a part of consciousness, how do you get compassionate in whatever YOU are doing? Doesn’t it feel superficial?

Question:

First of all I want to thank you from my heart very much for changing my life. You put the light on my way to get to know God better than ever! Your words are just the message that God ever wanted me to know!

I have a question for long time:
In the law of karma what happens when you have been a “bad boy” for a long time, or you haven´t been who you must be (as a good father, as a fried, as a human being) but with the time you realize you have made things wrong and you regret it and decide you have and want to change your thoughts and your form of living and you become a new spiritual human being

Does it affect somehow your karma, I mean the responsibility you have to take your acts before you change your thoughts? What role does forgiveness play in all this?

I hope you can understand my question. Your inspiration helped me to start writing in English, but I have to practice more
with love from Colombia

Noted writer Irene O’Garden grew up in what seemed like the perfect American Midwestern family. Behind the scenes, however, it was anything but. In Risking the Rapids (Mango Publishing January 31, 2019), O’Garden’s revelatory account tells us of shocking cruelty, narcissism, neglect and the damage done to children of alcoholics. From her traumatic girlhood to her healing wilderness journey at age 62, O’Garden’s writing will grip you and hold you fast to this extraordinary story. An Interview with Irene O’Garden – How My Wilderness Adventure Healed My Childhood     Risking the Rapids opens with the shocking death of O’Garden’s problematic older brother in 2014. His early passing prompted her and other family members to seek emotional closure with him and their family past by journeying through the remotest area in the lower forty-eight, Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness. What was described as a genial river “float” became a harrowing whitewater experience? That chronicle is woven with the story of her upbringing in a repressed mid-century Midwest Catholic household with six other siblings, a TV personality father, an icy mother, and rivers of martinis. And surprising love. It’s the kind of absorbing literary journey readers relish.   OMTIMES: What did you take away from the river ride? Irene O’Garden: Like family, wilderness requires participation and cooperation. The reward of both is a feeling of communion. While I certainly felt a powerful sense of accomplishment, I cherish this trip for how it strengthened family bonds not only with my blood relatives but with our larger family of living things that only wilderness can reveal.   OMTIMES: How do you describe your childhood? Irene O’Garden: I was born in the middle. In the middle of seven children, in a mid-size city in the middle of the country, in the middle class, in the middle of the twentieth…

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Equanimity balances the giving of your heart’s love with the recognition and acceptance that things are the way they are.

However much you may care for someone, however much you may do for others, however much you would like to control things (or wish that they were other than they are) equanimity is a reminder that all beings everywhere are responsible for their own actions, and for the consequences of their actions. Equanimity will allow you to open your heart and offer love, kindness, compassion, and joy, while letting go of your expectations and attachment to results. Equanimity gives you the energy to persist, regardless of the outcome, because you will be connected to the integrity of the effort itself.

Frank Jude Boccio, Calm Within

By Deepak Chopra, MD

More people than ever have undertaken a spiritual path of their own, independently of organized religion. “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual” has become a common expression, and I count myself among those who struck out on their own as a seeker. My search has covered a lot of ground over the years, from mind-body medicine to quantum physics, higher consciousness, the future of God, and personal transformation.

What all of these disparate topics have in common is reality, in the sense that everyday reality is hiding from view the “real” reality that needs to be unveiled. (Readers might want to look at last week’s post, “Unveiling Reality,” which details what it means to unveil reality.) There’s no question that the five senses detect the world in a very limited way, since they give no clue that molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles exist, not to mention genes and DNA. But unveiling a deeper physical reality is far from the whole story.

The physical sciences are about the external world, while another hidden reality, which is crucial to spiritual seeking, takes place “in here,” where the mind is the explorer and the territory being explored. This sounds like a contradiction, and so does the traditional way of reaching higher consciousness, which is called “the pathless path.” How can you unveil reality “in here” when the explorer—the mind—isn’t separate from the territory it wants to explore. The difficulty emerges clearly if you ask a question like “What do I think about thinking?” or “Am I aware of awareness?”

At best these questions sound circular, like a snake biting its tail. But the contradiction is straightened out, and the pathless path makes sense, when you realize one simple thing: The active mind isn’t the same as the still, quiet mind. Every method of spiritual seeking, if it is successful, goes beyond the active mind and its restless baggage of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts, with the aim of settling down into pure, undisturbed awareness. By analogy, one dives below the churning surface of a raging river, moving through deeper waters where the currents are slower, until one reaches the bottom, where the river is almost motionless.

Here, however, the analogy breaks down, because meditation, which is like an inner dive, can reach the zero point of no motion or activity of any kind. At the source of your awareness you can encounter pure awareness. Why is this experience worthwhile? Because the field of pure awareness is the origin of traits that are innate in us: Intelligence, creativity, evolution, love, and self-awareness are chief among these.

The pathless path makes sense for that reason; it leads you, without going anywhere, to a deeper level of awareness. Once you experience the deeper level, you find that there’s a shift. You identify less with your everyday self, which is totally dependent on the active mind (along with the desires, hopes, wishes, and dreams it generates), and you start to identify more with the field of pure awareness.

In this way higher consciousness gets assimilated into who you are and how you live your life. The word “spiritual” isn’t mandatory to describe this shift; I prefer to describe the whole process in terms of awareness, which is a more neutral term. What baffles people is that the whole project of seeking gets tangled up in misguided ideas. Let me list the pitfalls one is most likely to encounter.

1. Mistaking the goal for some kind of self-improvement.
2. Assuming that you already know what the goal is.
3. Hoping that higher consciousness will solve all your problems.
4. Struggling and striving to get somewhere.
5. Following a cut-and-dried method, usually a method backed by some spiritual authority or other.
6. Hoping to be looked upon with respect, reverence, or devotion as a higher being.
7. Being tossed around by the ups and downs of momentary successes and failures.

I doubt that anyone who has honestly undertaken an inner journey is immune to some or all of these pitfalls. There is an enormous gap between where you find yourself today (totally dependent on the active mind) and the reality yet to be unveiled. Nothing less than an all-encompassing illusion surrounds us, a construct of the human mind that conditions everything we think and feel.

When it is put that way, the pathless path seems impossible or at the very least difficult and probably painful. But what’s difficult and painful are the pitfalls I’ve listed. The illusion creates all the problems. It’s crucial to see this. The actual path is effortless and pain-free. The mind by its own nature can know its source in pure awareness. By analogy, you can go through troubles, worries, everyday crises, and arguments with your children, but without a doubt you know you love them. Love goes beyond the other stuff—that’s how transcendence, or going beyond, works.

The same holds true in the process of unveiling reality, which also goes by the simple name of waking up. The ancient Vedas declare that everyone is defined by their deepest desires. Desire leads to thoughts, thoughts to words and actions, actions to the fulfillment of desire. So in a very basic way, the pathless path is a path of desire. If your deepest desire is to wake up, to escape the illusion, to unveil reality, and in the end to know who you really are, the message gets through. Your deepest desire activates a level of awareness that will lead you to the goal.

As with raising kids, the everyday stuff rises and falls, but love, caring, attention, and devotion steadily work their way. The same is true of you the seeker, even though you are both parent and child to yourself, both teacher and student, healer and healed.Because these dual roles merge into one, the pathless path makes sense, and it works.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com