Family Dharma: Leaning into Suffering
By Beth Roth
A great exploring on the topic of Compassion Meditation with wide range of subjects and author’s personal experience.
Excerptions :
The Four Divine Abodes are natural states of the human mind and heart, yet they are often obscured by our conditioning, habits, and difficult emotions.
Although the Pali word dukkha is most often translated into English as “suffering,” other common translations point to the comprehensive meaning of dukkha: illness, unhappiness, neuroses, discomfort, pervasive unsatisfactoriness, or perhaps most simply, stress.
The Pali word karuna, which translates into English as “compassion,” literally means “the trembling or quivering of the heart in response to a being’s pain.”
The second part of the definition of karuna, “in response to a being’s pain,” means that since every person is a being, we are called upon to meet not only another’s suffering with love, but also our own.
When we are suffering, we are as much in need of our compassion as is any other being, and we are equally deserving of it.
To recognize our suffering and respond to it with compassion is a gradual process, and it must be done with sensitivity and care. As we develop our internal resources, we may also need reliable external support – a good friend, an experienced meditation partner or teacher, a skilled therapist. This is not a path we need to walk alone......
If freedom from pain and sorrow seems impossible because of physical illness or other circumstances, we may need to experiment to find more resonant phrases. For example, “May I care for my body just as it is,” or “May I meet this suffering with tenderness and love.”
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