Compassion as Liberating Power

This week’s words are from the book, Awakening Through Love, by John Makransky. In this section, he is writing about Compassion as a liberating power and specifically letting our meditation and our daily life inform each other.

Some of us turn away from the daily news because we feel so helpless in the face of such misery. But if we do so, it feels as if we are hiding from the realities of our world and therefore ultimately from ourselves as part of that world.

When we do daily meditation on compassion and wisdom, instead of experiencing the daily news as enemy, it can be received as the means to inform and deepen our compassion. In a session of morning meditation, we wish beings to become free of their sufferings. Then, throughout the day, when we see or hear of the terrible difficulties that others are undergoing, we can take that knowledge into our practice on the spot, wishing them freedom from their suffering, from every outer circumstance and inner layer of it. We can do this when we encounter the tragedies reported in the morning paper and the evening news. And we can do it whenever we come upon anyone in our life that is suffering or grieving.

In this way, rather than hiding from the world, we learn increasingly to open our eyes and hearts to it. Then when we sit down to meditate the next morning, the sufferings we saw the previous day inform the wish of compassion that we extend to others.

Of course, this is much easier when you have a regular practice that connects you with a field of care and compassion that can establish a strong secure base of love and compassion that you can reconnect with many times during the day.