When your mind is liberated your heart floods with compassion: compassion for yourself, for having undergone countless sufferings because you were not yet able to relieve yourself of false views, hatred, ignorance, and anger; and compassion for others because they do not yet see and so are still imprisoned by false views, hatred, and ignorance and continue to create suffering for themselves and for others. Now look at yourself and at others with the eyes of compassion, like a saint who hears the cry of every creature in the universe and whose voice is the voice of every person who has seen reality in perfect wholeness. As a Buddhist Sutra hears the voice of the Bodhisattva of compassion:
The wondrous voice, the voice of the one
who attends to the cries of the world
The noble voice, the voice of the rising
tide surpassing all the sounds of the world
Let our mind be attuned to that voice.
Put aside all doubt and meditate on the pure and
holy nature of the regarder of the cries of the world
Because that is our reliance in situations
of pain, distress, calamity, death.
Perfect in all merits, beholding all sentient being with
compassionate eyes, making the ocean of blessings limitless,
Before this one, we should incline.
Practice looking at all beings with the eyes of compassion: this is the meditation called "the meditation on compassion."
... A peace worker is like anyone else. She or he must live her own life. Work is only a part of life. But work is life only when done in mindfulness. Otherwise one becomes like the person "who lives as though dead." We need to light our own torch in order to carry on. But the life of each one of us is connected with the life of those around us. If we know how to live in mindfulness, if we know how to preserve and care for our own mind and heart, then thanks to that, our brothers and sisters will also know how to live in mindfulness.
- Thich Nhat Hahn,
excerpted from The Miracle of Mindfulness
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