Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of RAIN

And when I get stuck in painful emotions, it brings me to a repeating realization, an insight that has profoundly changed my life: I have to love myself into healing.

We may still feel fear, but we are above the line, reconnected to a larger space of presence and self-compassion.

To love someone is to learn the song in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten. • Arne Garborg It is a sobering thought that the finest act of love you can perform is not an act of service but an act of contemplation, of seeing. When you serve people, you help, support, comfort, alleviate pain. When you see them in their inner bea

AWAY FROM YOUR STAR

have a favorite saying posted in my office: “To be kind, you must swerve regularly from your path.”

Nelson Mandela wrote, “It never hurts to think too highly of a person; often they become ennobled and act better because of it.”

I could not lie anymore, so I started to call my dog “God.” First he looked confused, then he started smiling, then he even danced. I kept at it: now he doesn’t even bite. I am wondering if this might work on people? • sant tukaram, seventeenth-century poet-saint, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

With practice, we discover that when our resistance is gone, the demons are gone.

Becoming a mirror of goodness is a deliberate training in radical compassion. When we’re in trance—preoccupied, anxious, reactive, on autopilot—we’re often blind to the goodness of others. Instead, we fixate on what we don’t like, what seems wrong.