Bless those who curse you

Dear ones, as those of us who are awake--who are not saturated with and driven by fear, hate, and shame--know, we are living in challenging times.

We know that there is a surprisingly substantial portion of our fellow Americans who crave with all their hearts to live under oppression, poverty, powerlessness, ignorance, and preventable disease than to live in peace, prosperity, dignity, enlightenment, and health.

We know that there is a surprisingly substantial portion of our fellow Americans who hate us, fear us, and would heartily and gleefully rejoice to see us dead--preferably after seeing us suffer a great deal first.

Our job, as I have been saying, is to get ourselves through to the other side of these challenges with not only as little damage but with as much joy as we can.

So, as I have just been reminded by a very dear teacher of mine, the very best thing we can do is to bless every one and every thing around us.

As I've said recently, sometimes, compassion means letting things just be as they are.

Sometimes, compassion means not harming others because, as we all know, we are all interconnected with every one and every thing around us. So harming another = harming self.

The key to compassion, my teacher observed, is taking action that mutually benefits us and each other and that neither harms us to benefit others nor benefits us by harming others.

Even giving in to sadness around a tragedy falls into the category of harming ourselves, my teacher remarked: when we are sad, our bodies change for the worse. So how are we actually helping others by being sad around what happens to them? We're not! We're not helping them, and we are harming ourselves!

So when we face tragedies, bad news, unforeseen circumstances, or anything else we'd have preferred to avoid, our job is to bless it and the people involved. 

That's a huge way to use the current circumstances to our benefit--to detach from the habit of giving in to negative feelings and use everything as an exercise to offer blessing so that we replace the negative habit with a positive one that benefits every one and every thing, including ourselves.

Out of compassion for self and others, we are obligated to feed ourselves--body and mind--with positivity so that we may keep ourselves as healthy as possible. This approach keeps us strong so that, in our compassion, we maintain--or grow--the capacity to offer positive action.

Even our language must remain gentle, whether with self or with others, because every negative word energetically attaches to and feeds all of the universal negativity associated around that word (as someone who regularly drops F bombs, all I can say is, "Yikes! I've got some work to do!").

So let's all make a pact right here and right now NOT to feed the negativity.

Be thankful for every new thing, even if not our preference, as an opportunity to offer loving-kindness and blessing.

Let's all make a pact right here and right now to bless every iota of all that is--including if not especially those who curse us.