For all your loving and compassionate friends on this site I share a poem by Wendell Berry called the Peace of Wild Thingd,

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

I just completed a wonderful course on cultivating compassion offered through the compassion Institute which was founded by the man who used to be the English language translator for his Holiness the Dalai Lama. I’ve experienced some wonderful healing of myself in the process of generating compassion for others who are suffering. Of course being human we cannot avoid suffering, the question is how to transform it as an instrument for progress on a spiritual path. I highly recommend this experience and I’m happy to talk with any of you individually about my experience in the nature of the course.

Every two months or so we have a zoom call connecting all my immediate family members. That includes a son, daughter-in-law and young grandson in Brooklyn New York, and then in Seattle a son, daughter-in-law and my ex-wife who is living with him and is the mother of both boys. We were on for about an hour and a half just sharing what we had done over Thanksgiving, and several of us and have birthdays to talk about. We’ve been doing these kind of calls ever since before the pandemic and it has been simply a wonderful experience. Hope you all are doing well. Peace, love, and many blessings.💕💕🙏🏼

Sandra, Mary, Pilgrim,l Anna, Elaine and others, as I trad the postings in this space I am so moved by the love and compassion I see from all of you and am grateful that I found this Gratiitudd Lounge and can be with you all here, Along with the joys in life there is suffering, but in The grace of God, there is no more suffering than we can endure. That’s true for me.

I think of this poem by Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Thanks for sharing. My wife and I are both great admirers as well as students of his Holiness the Dalai Lama. We first saw him at a presentation he did in Portland Oregon over 20 years ago. All the courses on the compassion Institute website have been developed in coordination with Stanford university in their psychology department. So there’s a lot of research-based evidence for the effectiveness of compassion. There is an initial course that I think is a good precursor to the main course of cultivating compassion training, which is called building compassion from the inside out. In itThubten Jinpa provides an exhaustive background on the importance of compassion and its relationship to happiness.