Empathy

What empathy is not: imagining someone else’s pain, thinking about how you would feel in that situation and projecting that feeling on to another.

What empathy is: Love and the practice of abiding in love.

Empathy is love in action: listening carefully, paying attention, sitting alongside someone as they go through something. Saying to them, this isn’t my pain, it is yours and I am here with you for as long as it lasts. Today is not my day for sorrow, but I have known sorrow and will again, today is your time and I am here.

Where is the peace?

You keep reading about inner peace, but where is it?

The few times that you have glimpsed it were temporary and it soon disappeared again. Where did it go?

The seeking of peace requires constant courage. It requires you to be prepared to make yourself vulnerable over and over again, because it requires you to tell the truth. Not in great outpourings of your innermost feelings and insecurities, but moment to moment honesty and authenticity.

Let me tell you - most people are pretending. They are pretending to be in control, that they are happy, that they don’t make mistakes and if you are committed to the idea of being someone who is peaceful, who tells the truth and is calm in the face of life’s vicissitudes, then you will have to be the one who tells the truth.

And other people won’t back you up.

Do you understand? You will say, I am nervous, I am unsure, I am afraid, I am sad … and other people will not join you with a “me too” Sometimes they will look at you as if you are mad.

But what is the alternative? Do you want to continue to be guarded, hidden, quiet? Is that where peace truly lies?

You know the answer lies in something very different: in the calm acceptance of your whole self, with all of its strengths, delights, fears and insecurities and the bravery to admit them out loud instead of hiding them away.

In the courage to be a speaker of AND sentences: I am brave AND I am nervous, I am strong AND I am in pain, there is joy AND there is sorrow.

Because this is a true life. And only a true life will bring you peace.

Breaking Promises

If you make a promise to your mother, or your child, to anyone you love, you don’t break it do you? Not unless you have a really good reason and it’s completely unavoidable.

So I ask you why you find it so easy to break the promises you make to yourself. The class you were going to do, the better food you were going to eat, the early night you were going to have. You know the things - yours will be unique to you, but they tend to be the vows you make to yourself when you are at a low ebb, when you see the light of how to help yourself and you pledge to make things better so that you can feel better.

Then you abandon yourself again.

I wonder why you, who would not do this to anyone else, continue to do this to yourself.

We get these little messages sent to us from time to time, these little whispers. You need more sleep, they say, you need some time alone. You need to do some yoga every day. You need to say no to that person next time. And we think we are going to do them. We really mean to do them.

Then life intervenes - things get busy, other people need your attention, you spend two hours looking at your phone.

I ask you, dear ones, to write down the promises you make to yourselves and to be as honourable towards yourself as you are towards your beloveds.

Don’t you want to feel happy and well? To burst with health and generosity? Don’t you want to smile at the world and have it smile back at you?

Start keeping your promises.
See what happens x