The Strength of an Open Heart
The word “Compassion” evokes many feelings and ideas—some relatable, others unrealistic. This lack of clear definition can render it more a concept than a living, breathing experience. In Buddhism, we value experience over concepts because what we imagine is always a few steps away from what is. And while it is certainly good to study teachings on compassion, we can point to our everyday experience and see how much we are already experiencing. From there, we can become more aware of the natural goodness 0f our mind and the world.
Petting a kitten, playing with a dog, holding a child—these are simple moments of basic goodness. In these simple moments, we are profoundly communicating with the universe. Rooted in loving-kindness, these ordinary acts help heal our overtaxed nervous systems and reconnect us with the living world. Everytime we smile we turn on the lights. And everytime we turn on the lights we are building connections to life.
Compassion is something most of us experience daily, but we often don’t recognize this because these moments seem too ordinary. In fact, compassion is happening all the time, everywhere, and—to quote the movie title—all at once. Every time a flower blooms, every time a tree sways, every time birds sing from their nests, nature is alive and communicating. Yet because we are conditioned to value negative experiences more than positive ones, it’s negativity that often colors our view of the world. When I say “view of the world,” I’m referring to how concepts cut us off from physical contact with life. We live sequestered from life, locked in our minds. Like kids searching social media in a darkened basement, we scroll through the doom looking for something real. And war and hatred feel so true to us.
Birds singing are not an antidote to the horror and destruction of war, but they are also not irrelevant. The horrors of war, aggression, terror, and greed exist within the greater framework of this living, loving, eternally nurturing planet on which we live. It would be a mistake to separate the good from the bad entirely. We live in a world that frightens us. We read about it in the news, and it frightens us further. To escape, we book a retreat upstate and cultivate compassion, kindness, and love for all beings. And for a moment, we feel relief. Then we return home, and within days that feeling may wane.
But both of these experiences are true.
Buddhism speaks of the inseparability of samsara and nirvana. The healthiest and most practical approach may be to weave together the negative and the positive—to stay aware of the full picture of our existence. If we stop seeing “positive” and “negative” as opposite, and instead see them as energies—one promoting well-being, the other promoting disconnection—we can begin to use compassion to help heal both our personal suffering and the broader suffering of the world.
We will never eradicate pain, suffering, or injustice entirely. But we can be voices for balance, comfort, kindness, and peace. And “peace,” in this case, doesn’t mean utopia. It means peace within turmoil.
I love the audacity of John and Yoko’s ad campaign: “War is Over (If You Want It).” It wasn’t just a slogan—it was a vision, displayed boldly on billboards in Times Square.
The compassionate view isn’t that we can get rid of suffering, but that we can wake people up to make conscious choices. We can show others what we’ve seen in ourselves: the underpinnings of cruelty within our own psychology, and the ways we’ve worked to transform them. As the saying goes, compassion begins at home.
It’s unrealistic to think we can heal a world in chaos if our personal life is full of turmoil and imbalance. That doesn’t mean we have to be perfect. In fact, our frailties can become our bridges. Because we all share pain, our struggles can help us connect. We need to align with principles of goodness, so that our lives lean more toward openness—and through that, more wisdom can shine into the world.
The idea is simple: fully see, feel, touch, and participate in your world. Then do what you can—for yourself, and outwardly for others. We can lead by example. We can lead by sharing our journey and our pain. Not by being pristine, but by being real. We’re in the trenches with all of humanity, trying to find goodness in a world where goodness and cruelty are fused.
If we let cruelty discourage us, our energy will deplete. But if we hold our seat and secure our own balance—so that our windhorse, our inner strength, is high—then simply by being awake, alive, and available, we are helping to heal ourselves, our families, our communities, and the world itself.
We don’t need to fix the world. The world has existed for over 4 billion years and will continue long after humanity. No matter how ignorant or greedy we become, we cannot kill the Earth—we can only destroy our own possibility for life on it. And even then, when ecosystems collapse—as they have five times before—life has always returned. It is resilient. It is eternal. It grows from rock, from ash, from mud. It cannot be stopped.
But we can tune into that growth. We can learn from it. We can become like seedlings pushing through the cracks in the sidewalk—proud of our strength and capacity to grow. And as we grow, we nourish the world around us simply by being.
We are not more special than anything else in nature—except that we have been given the gift of conscious choice. But we must use that choice wisely. Trees don’t second-guess their worth. Birds don’t worry about becoming lunch. They just are. Yet we, with our gift of reflection, often turn it into a weapon against ourselves.
Let’s stop using self-awareness as a cudgel of self-criticism. Let’s develop true awareness—not self-centeredness, but self-knowledge. Let’s see clearly the tiny part we play in the vast unfolding of life, and take responsibility for our role.
We may not be able to shift or free anyone but ourselves. But every time we liberate ourselves from a habitual pattern, every time we turn our minds toward freshness and truth, we benefit the whole.
In recovery programs, they say: “Keep your side of the street clean, and take the next right step.”
We could all benefit from that kind of humility.
We could all benefit from the humility of persistence—of simply carrying on, representing goodness in a world of turmoil.
Would you like to develop this into a talk, a post, or a longer piece (like a short book)? I’d be happy to help shape it accordingly.
strength, presence, and compassion, something opens. Many of the limitations we face are fear-based, rooted in early childhood trauma or even inherited intergenerationally. Language itself, shaped by culture and survival, may carry trauma. These influences can cause us to shut down in subtle or dramatic ways, shrinking our sense of freedom, openness, and understanding. Love has the power to will open us to the world and so we seek it out. But the fear of losing love keeps us locked into patterns of manipulation and coercion in order to establish a power we have never had. The power is love itself. As soon as it becomes “ours” it becomes limited. When we lock in the love, we also lock in the fear and close ourselves off to understanding.