Compassion
May. 8th, 2025 07:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
micki“Being compassionate is a pretty tall order. All of us are in relationships every day of our lives, but particularly if we are people who want to help others- people with cancer, people with aids, abused women or children, abused animals, anyone who's hurting-something we soon notice is that the person we set out to help may trigger unresolved issues in us. Even though we want to help, and maybe we do help for a few days or a month or two, sooner or later someone walks through the door and pushes all our buttons. We find ourselves hating those people or scared of them or feeling like we just can't handle them. This is true always, if we are sincere about wanting to benefit others. Sooner or later, all our own unresolved issues will come up; Will be confronted with ourselves.
“Roshi Bernard Glassman is a Zen teacher who runs a project for the homeless in Yonkers NY. Last time I heard him speak, he said something that struck me: he said he doesn't really do this work to help others; He does it because he feels that moving into the areas of society that he had rejected is the same as working with the parts of himself that he had rejected.
“Although this is ordinary Buddhist thinking, it's difficult to live it. It's even difficult to hear that what we reject out there is what we reject in ourselves, and what we reject in ourselves is what we're going to reject out there. But that, in a nutshell, this is how it works. If we find ourselves unworkable and give up on ourselves, then we'll find others unworkable and give up on them. What we hate in ourselves, will hate in others period to the degree that we have compassion for ourselves, we will also have compassion for others. Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all those imperfections that we don't even want to look at.”
“Roshi Bernard Glassman is a Zen teacher who runs a project for the homeless in Yonkers NY. Last time I heard him speak, he said something that struck me: he said he doesn't really do this work to help others; He does it because he feels that moving into the areas of society that he had rejected is the same as working with the parts of himself that he had rejected.
“Although this is ordinary Buddhist thinking, it's difficult to live it. It's even difficult to hear that what we reject out there is what we reject in ourselves, and what we reject in ourselves is what we're going to reject out there. But that, in a nutshell, this is how it works. If we find ourselves unworkable and give up on ourselves, then we'll find others unworkable and give up on them. What we hate in ourselves, will hate in others period to the degree that we have compassion for ourselves, we will also have compassion for others. Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all those imperfections that we don't even want to look at.”
