Who said life would be like walking the yellow brick road, or that the human condition would be easy? And why is it so important to be here? What’s the big deal? It appears that the reason we’re not happy is because we long for things to be other than they are. We’re not satisfied being here. Not satisfied being with what is. We want things to be different, because we believe that if they were we would be happier. Therefore, we’re not truly present with our reality.

Certainly many of us face challenging situations, but resistance only makes this harder. It can turn pain into suffering. Taking each moment at a time enables us to be with whatever is happening. When we were in England, Ed was chatting with a nun named Avis. He said to her, “Some day we will all die and meet up in heaven.” And she replied, “Yeah, and we’ll look at each other and say, ‘What was that all about!’”

Normally, we spend our time either living in what-could-have-been or what-might-have-been or if-only, or in the expectation of what-could-be or what-might-be. But constantly living in either the past or the future is like being in a dream, as it limits our capacity to be in the present, with what is happening now. No matter how much we try, plan, plot, arrange, have things to do, we still have no idea what will happen next.

We used to live next to a river and walked beside it each day. But as much as it looked like the same river, even the same water, it was constantly different. Just as we may look the same, the cells in our body are forever being formed, growing and dying; we are continually changing as we renew ourselves in every minute.

We can stay open to these moments of change by simply being aware of them. Right now, just stop and take a deep breath. As you breath out, just notice how your body feels, the chair you are sitting on, and the room you are in. That’s all. It only takes an instant to be present.

Contrary to common belief, it can be immensely liberating to have nothing going on, to discover that the whole universe is contained in this moment. To realize that nothing more is required of us than to just be aware and present. What a relief! Finally, we can experience this reality just as it is, without expectation, prejudice, longing, or without the desire for something to be different. This invites a deep sense of completion, that there really is nowhere else we need to be or go. It’s impossible to think of somewhere else as being better for the grass is vividly green exactly where we are.

Someone once asked Ed if he had ever experienced another dimension. He replied, “Have you experienced this one?” There is no greater joy in this whole world than our own true self.

Practice: Being and Breathing Meditation

When we meditate by simply watching the flow of the breath it naturally brings us into the present. The breath is just breathing, and yet it is never the same, each breath is completely different to the last one.

 Sit comfortably with your back straight, hands in your lap, eyes closed. Spend a few minutes settling your body.

            Now bring your focus to your breathing, just watch the natural movement as you breathe in and out. Silently repeat, “Breathing in, Breathing out.”

            Stay with watching your breath. If your mind starts to drift just see your thoughts as birds in the sky and watch them fly away. Then come back to the breath.

            Anytime you get distracted, bored, or stressed, just come back to the breath, to this moment now. Silently repeat, “I am here, I am now, I am present. I am here, I am now, I am present.”

You can do this for a few minutes or as long as you like. When you are ready, take a deep breath and let it go, open your eyes, and move gently.

Anger can be an effective expression of passion for justice and fairness, for basic rightness, for what is appropriate and humane. But anger can also be like a single match that can burn an entire forest, causing tremendous damage and hurt, wars, greed and self-deception. The fallout can be huge and, invariably, we have no control over the repercussions.

Few of us want to admit that we get bitchy, shout, or lose our temper—we much prefer to see ourselves as being wonderfully tolerant and serene. Yet we all get angry at some time or another and in its passion anger pushes away, condemns, and makes everything wrong except itself. Our heart goes out of reach and we lose touch with our feelings. There is no compromise, no chance for dialogue—I am right and you are wrong.

Trying to eradicate anger is like trying to box with our own shadow: it doesn’t work. Getting rid of it implies either expressing it, and possibly causing emotional carnage; denying and avoiding it, which is a way of lying to ourselves and can cause depression or bitterness; or repressing it, which just holds it inside until it erupts at a later time when it can cause even more harm.

“Ducks don’t do anger,” says Deepesh Faucheux in our book, Be The Change. “Ducks fight over a piece of bread and then they just swim away. But people keep processing everything that happens to them. That processing of the story—what so and so did to me, she wronged me, why doesn’t he respect me—keeps the energy identified as anger and resentment, instead of seeing it as simply energy.”

There are often layers of conflicting feelings hidden beneath anger, such as hurt, insecurity, sadness or fear. The power of rage is such that it can overshadow these other emotions, causing us to lose touch with ourselves and struggle to articulate what we are really feeling. Having lost our connectedness with each other, anger can really be a cry for attention or for contact; it may be expressing grief, loneliness, or a longing to love and be loved. We are saying, “I love you,” or “I need you,” while hurling abuse at each other.

“We get to see that underneath anger,” says Rabbi Zalman Schachter in Be The Change, “there is fear, pain, and sorrow, and we cannot deal with anger unless we also deal with what sustains the anger. We forget how we are hardwired. The reptilian system within us makes sure we are secure and safe. If we do not feel secure, then the dinosaur will rear its head and roar. So under anger is always the question of how safe does the reptilian feel.”

We need to go beneath the anger to see what hurt, longing or fear is trying to make itself heard. There may be feelings of rejection, grief or loneliness, so if we repress anger or pretend it isn’t there then all these other feelings get repressed and ignored as well. Only by recognizing what the real emotion is behind the expression can there be more honest communication.

By naming and recognizing the many faces of anger, we can stay present with it as it arises, keeping the heart open, breathing, watching emotions come up and pass through. We can watch as anger fills the mind and makes such a song and dance, and we can just keep breathing and watching as it goes on it’s merry way.

 Meditation not only invites us to witness anger, but also to get to know and make friends with ourselves. It gives us a midpoint between expressing anger and repressing it, a place where we can be aware of our feelings and not be swept away by them. Meditation is not going to make all our challenges go away but it does enable us to rest in an inclusive acceptance of who we are.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

~ Rumi ~

To anyone first coming to meditation they can be met with a plethora of advice and techniques that is enough to baffle and confuse. Where to go? What to do? Which is best? How to start? How to chose between mindfulness, TM, mantra recitation, kundalini, vipassana, insight, witness, breath awareness, shamata, visualization, MBSR, metta, and more?

Part of the difficulty is that the word meditation means both the experience and the technique. This is important because the experience is spontaneous, natural, arising from within, while the technique is simply the learnt method that helps you have the experience. And it makes little difference which technique you use. When you drive to Rome you need a car but once you get there you don’t. The techniques are designed to help you calm the mind, to bring your attention inward, focused in just this present moment, so that the experience of meditation arises naturally.

We clarify this difference in our book, Be The Change, How Meditation Can Transform You and The World, as it is so easy to get caught up in the technique – mine is better than yours – and forget that it is only a way to something, it is not the something itself. We talked with over 100 meditation teachers and practitioners who all stressed that the experience is far more important than the technique used because what you are really doing is opening yourself to an inner stillness that grows each time you come to sit quietly with yourself. In other words, just shut up, sit still, and see what happens!

The experience of meditation is one of being completely and utterly present. That may sound so simple but it is rare – notice how your normal state of mind is distracted by issues from the past or dealing with issues in the future – anywhere but just right here! When we are fully present all those demanding thoughts begin to drop away, are seen as being far less important, even the anger, resentment, hurt and other negative emotions lose their power. Being fully present we experience the totality of our being and the richness found in stillness and silence.

So, when looking for a meditation technique, it may be worth trying them all. Each one will offer a slightly different take on the same thing, and we each need to find that one that suits us best. As one of Deb’s teachers said, there are as many forms of meditation as there are people who practice it.

Just watching the flow of the breath as it enters and leaves very naturally internalizes our attention and is more than enough for many people (mindfulness, breath awareness, shamata –see below). Others have the same affinity to repeating a mantra or sound as the repetition induces greater peace (TM, mantra meditation). We can also purposefully foster positive states of being, such as cultivating greater peace, kindness, and forgiveness, through the repetition of simple phrases or visualization.

However, meditation can appear very boring, especially to beginners. Just sitting and watching our mind can seem so absurd, especially when we are invariably confronted with an endlessly chattering mind: the dramas, fears and neurosis seem to have a picnic, pushing anything meaningful out of the way. It’s not that this chatter is new, just that we are now more aware of it, like an endless parade of senseless scenarios. When we were teaching meditation in England Ed was explaining how the mind can create havoc, and how some of the most inane thoughts can arise like: “I want to kill my mother!” The woman he was talking with blurted out, “How did you know?”

Practice

All you have to do is sit comfortably and watch your breathing. Just breathe naturally, in and out, no forced, short or long breathing. Simply watch each movement of breath. If this is hard, then you can also silently repeat, “breathing in, breathing out” with each breath.

Thoughts will come and go. You will probably find yourself getting distracted. The mind is very good at finding reasons not to be still, like a monkey bitten by a scorpion leaping from branch to branch it leaps from or drama to drama. When it does, just come back to watching your breath. The monkey will eventually get quiet and be still.

Make friends with meditation by not pushing yourself. Start with sitting for just 10 minutes a day until you naturally find yourself wanting and doing longer. That way you won’t resent it. Sit upright – a bent or slouchy back will bring your energy down.

And as the saying goes, practice makes perfect. Which means that meditation is accumulative – you may not experience anything the first time you do it, but keep at it and you will. And though it may appear as if nothing is happening, in the midst of it all you may have a breakthrough, a moment of insight, and that one moment can change your life.

Ed was raised in the Jewish faith (as he says, on his parents side!), Deb was raised a Quaker. We both began spiritually seeking at the same time in the late 1960′s. Ed was in his twenties living in New York City, hanging out Studio 54 and other discos; meanwhile Deb was an art student living in London. And when Ed was in India being ordained as a Swami — a monk in the Yoga tradition — Deb was being ordained as a Buddhist. We both became teachers in our respective traditions, but by the time we met in the 1980s we had each left being part of a traditional order and were on our own, having decided to explore what it is to live a spiritual life in the midst of a materialistic world. We were like foreigners, finding our way in a world that was not so inclined or sympathetic towards spiritual life.

Essentially, religion is designed to be our spiritual source of comfort and advice, a structure to provide moral guidelines, a caring community, and help for those in need. And in many ways it is. But religion is also the cause of violence, wars, discrimination, bigotry, pain and suffering, all of which are a long way from kindness, compassion, comfort and spiritual reassurance.

Religious morality is also used to justify political reasoning and supremacy. In the U.S., the 1^st amendment draws a clear separation between church and state, between religion and politics. Yet every presidential candidate is judged by his or her religious beliefs, as seen in the attempt to prove that President Obama is a Muslim, more so because his name is Barack Hussein Obama, which generates fear.

Prospective Republican candidates use their Christian beliefs as a form of qualification and go to great lengths to show that a good Christian is a Republican, thereby implying that Democrats are not. We remember watching Bill Moyer (during George W. Bush’s era) interviewing a Kansas couple being evicted from their home due to spiraling mortgage costs. As the movers were carrying out their furniture around them, Moyer looked puzzled and asked why they had voted Republican. They replied: “Because we are Christians!”

We often hear somewhat extreme candidates constantly pushing their religious beliefs into the political arena with outrageous statements like: the hurricane and earthquake happened as God is punishing us, whether it’s because of gay marriage, abortion, or any number of reasons that support their ideology.

This is taking religion into realms that are not religious. When religion is used to validate killing because there is a difference of opinion, then it has gone beyond having a moral compass to imposing belief and power over another. We see this with the killing of abortion clinic staff, all in the name of saving a fetus, despite the pregnancy being caused by rape or incest, or threatening the mother’s life. Yet how many who are trying to stop abortion are also willing to adopt an unwanted baby?

At the same time, spirituality is a loaded word, often misunderstood, as its practices include meditation, contemplation, and direct communication with universal consciousness. The Pope has condemned meditation and yoga as immoral, deluding, and even sinful. Yet spirituality is simply the discovery of our authentic self without any trimmings or labels, which gives us a rich source of values and a deeper meaning to life, whatever our religion.

In the seeking of such meaning, religion and spirituality come together. Spirituality highlights qualities such as caring, kindness, compassion, tolerance, service, and community, and, in its truest sense, so does religion. But where religion is defined by its tradition and teachings, spirituality is defied by what is real in our own experience, arising from an inner search within ourselves, the finding of our own truth.

Where religion tends to breed separation: my religion verses your religion; my god is the only real god; my ethics are better than yours, etc., spirituality sees all people as equal: we are not an “ism” or a label, we are spiritual beings whose purpose is to awaken to our true nature.

Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist, Jesus wasn’t a Christian; the great ones did not create a religion, they just said to look within. They realized the truth that is always here, always present, but so easily forgotten. We are not able to see because of a mind that is veiled by ignorance, hate and greed: the ‘me-centeredness’ that rules and deludes.

When we were with the Dalai Lama at his residence in India we asked him what we could do to help humankind to awaken to caring and kindness. He said how people of different religions should come together in peace and respect and talk openly, honoring each other’s differences and similarities. This is a great example of religion and spirituality coming together.

While we were living in England we had our own TV series and interviewed the British minister Jonathan Aitken, who had just been released from prison. He was an arrogant, egotistical man who, like many politicians in America, think they can get away with most everything. But Aitken became a changed man in prison — it softened him. He shared how he was in a men’s group where he had learned how to cry.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him. — The Buddha

We spend the whole of our lives with ourselves; we can never hide. We can lock ourselves in a room and throw away the key, or live in a cave on a far off island, but wherever we go there we are. Aitken had to realize this, albeit the hard way.

What we put out, we reap. For Aitken it was trying to get away with someone else paying his expenses. For Gov. Perry it may be because he did not pardon a father of three who, despite a lack of evidence, was accused of arson in the death of his children. The man was executed under Perry’s watch, causing numerous doubts and questions.

Perhaps U.S. politicians can gain some humility from Jonathan Aitken, politicians like Rick Perry who make outlandish statements and promises in their attempt to brainwash and convince the people they represent their needs. Say anything enough times and people start to believe it.

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth. — The Buddha

Amidst the digression of the Republican presidential candidates there is one issue that seems paramount to all: Do away with “socialism.” In America, this word is unfortunately misunderstood and represents fear; it has become synonymous with most things that appear wrong, such as the health care system, social security and even education. Coming from 11 years living in England, we are acutely aware of the benefits of such so-called socialism, particularly the National Health Service. Regardless of who you are, health care is available for all and prescriptions are cheap. Yes, there may be a wait to see a doctor; yes, there often isn’t much time allowed for a visit; but, if this is socialism, then long may it live!

The right wingers, such a Rick Perry and others who pervert what socialism means, use it as a fear weapon, a power tool to deflect from its benefits. Gov. Perry has called our social security system a “Ponzi scheme” and is bent on doing away with both it and Medicare. Perry recently reversed his claims about Social Security, but other Republicans have said that it is a “scheme to take money from the American people,” to frighten the young that they will be paying for the aged and will wind up empty handed themselves.

Such conviction begs the question: Does the Texas Governor have any idea what it means to live without an income, savings or any other means of personal survival? Can he honestly justify putting millions of people into a position of not being able to pay their way? Is his allegiance to the rich corporations and nothing else? Does it have to be so obvious they don’t care?

Do not think lightly of evil that not the least consequence will come of it. A whole water pot will fill up from dripping drops of water. A fool fills himself with evil, just a little at a time. — The Buddha

Which leaves us asking, why does Rick Perry want to be president? What are his motives? Power is dangerous in the wrong hands and easily guided by ignorance. First he wants Texas to secede and leave the US, then he wants to be president of the whole country, which means representing all people, not just those who agree with him. Can he really be trusted?

But all is not lost for Perry nor the other Republican contenders. They have time to clear their thinking, open their hearts, and see the reality of someone’s life who does not have the wealth that they all seem to have. And we have time to recognize ignorance for what it is and not let it to penetrate into our minds.

“The question becomes not how we fight a war against those who seek to harm us because of differences in ideology, but how to fight a war against the fear that motivates us to welcome hate, anger and evil into our hearts,” writes Alysson Fergison, in “The Dangers of Evil.” “While it may be easy to react in anger and rush to destroy those who would harm us, we must understand that to do so breeds more hate, anger, misery and destruction … We will never remove evil from the world but we can remove it from ourselves and hopefully inspire others to do the same.”

Just as treasures are uncovered from the earth, so virtue appears from good deeds, and wisdom appears from a pure and peaceful mind. To walk safely through the maze of human life, one needs the light of wisdom and the guidance of virtue. — The Buddha

Through many years of being involved with meditation we have seen how easily people miss the point, mainly because they take the practice and themselves too seriously. Many ‘try’ to meditate but their minds are so busy they get frustrated and quickly believe they are no good at it. Others turn into die-hard advocates of a particular method or technique and become like a salesperson trying to sell their produce.

Just like Yoga, people want to own meditation and to believe that their technique is the best one. They give it a name: TM or Vipassana or Mindfulness and sometimes make outrageous claims of what can be achieved, but that is not the point. Meditation is not a technique – being quiet happens by itself, not because of following the breath in and out, reciting a specific mantra or creating a visualization.

Teachers, through their compassion, created the many methods and techniques in order to help their students to concentrate and focus their minds, to be one-pointed. No one technique is better than another; they equally give our monkey minds something to do other than drive us bananas. Many of the practices known as meditation are actually concentration; they bring the mental energy together so the mind is less fragmented. But this is not meditation.

Meditation invites us to stop, just stop, breathe and be. Just as with a musician playing or an artist painting, when we stop trying to make it happen something occurs, like the radiant sun that suddenly emerges in a cloudy sky. But because we try so hard, we identify more with the technique instead of allowing the meditation to reveal itself.

The practice of meditation easily gets put in a box: “I will practice now, at this time, at this place and in this posture, and I will do this particular method.” But a method is simply an aide; it is not the experience itself. A hammer can help build a house but it is not the house. There is no doubt that through practice we can release stress and feel wonderfully peaceful, but genuine meditation is about waking up, where the mind is clear and free of obscuration.

This is not a mental process but an experiential one as meditation is an opening, a release of ego identity when all attempts to meditate, all striving, all doing stops, when there is no past or future, just radiant emptiness. It is being present – fully aware and present in every moment — and we can do that whatever we are doing and wherever we are. It is the freedom to be fully oneself without limitations or ideologies – there is just this.

Deb’s father, Richard, was on a Zen retreat where he was taught to temper his sensuality, not to give in to his senses or think of sensual things but to stay focused and single minded. While walking in the garden he then came across a pond laden with happily fornicating frogs. We think meditation has to be something special but true meditation is opening and expanding our perception, as if seeing with new eyes.

The technique becomes redundant when meditation becomes our natural state. It doesn’t matter what the technique is — when we drive to Rome the car is necessary but when we get there it is immaterial – what matters is the attitude and awareness that we bring to practice. The teacher is also more important than the technique. They must be skillful, peaceful and clear, regardless of the method or tradition they are teaching.

The moon trusts that the world will continue to go round on its axis, birds trust there will be berries and seeds to eat, trees trust the seasons will follow in the right order. Until we trust that things will unfold naturally then we are slaves to our doubts, fears and neurosis, to the constant chatter in our heads that says we are useless and don’t know anything. But we don’t make the sun to rise or set. The planet is in orbit and neither we nor Jesus or Buddha or any of the wise ones run the show. Our job is simply to surrender to the moment.

As actress Jane Fonda writes in our book, Be The Change: “There are practical reasons for dividing everything up. It makes things easier to manage and to solve, especially technical matters: the us and them, the either-or, the man versus nature, mine and yours. Life is simpler to deal with. But we have applied this fragmenting mindset to all of life so that it’s become our reality, which has led to further fragmentation and chaos and planetary destruction. The challenge is to figure out how to deal with our day-to-day life, while at the same time changing our mindset so that we see reality as the unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence, an undivided, flowing movement without borders.”

In the Buddhist teachings there is a description of a huge net reaching in all directions with a multifaceted mirror-like jewel at each of the many knots, every jewel reflecting all the other jewels. It is called the Jeweled Net of Indra and represents our interconnectedness: see one and you see all within it. Not one can be separated from or is independent of any other; take one away and the net becomes unusable. In other words, we are interrelated, interdependent, inseparable, and interconnected all at the same time, part of an integrated whole, not separate from the trees, elephants, owls, our neighbors, the people in South Africa or a river in India.

Zen teacher Bernie Glassman writes in Be The Change: “Imagine that each of my two hands has the notion that it is an individual object and not connected to anything else. Left hand calls itself Sally, and right hand calls itself Harry. Then Sally gets cut. Harry has read many things about the oneness of life, but he believes that Sally is separate and thinks, I can’t do anything about Sally being cut, I’m not a doctor, and I don’t have a first-aid kit. And anyway, I don’t want to get my new clothes stained. Harry walks away and Sally bleeds to death. But that means Harry also bleeds to death, as Harry and Sally happen to be very attached to each other. This is what happens when the experience of oneness is not there.

“Now imagine Sally and Harry both meditate and, while recognizing the separateness of Sally and Harry, they also recognize their oneness with Bernie. When Sally gets cut, Harry does the best thing possible to help her because he knows that to help her is also helping both him and Bernie. This is not a thinking process; it is the direct experience of the oneness of life. The appreciation of this is huge.”

On a relative level, of course, we have our own thoughts and feelings, but they cannot be separated from what we were taught by our parents or from experiences of pain and joy in our relationships—just as it is impossible to separate our body from the food we eat or the farmer who grew the food or the earth and the rain. There is actually no part of our being that is a separate or independent entity from everyone we have met and everything we have done or from every part of the world around us.

Author Tim Freke writes: “We think that we are separate from each other, and we are not. We think we are separate from the whole of life, and we are not. Tim is an integral part of the whole, and everyone and everything are also an integral part of the whole and, therefore, one with Tim. Separateness is the conceptual story we tell to make sense of life, the story of who we are, and when we get sucked into it we are not conscious of our deeper being. This is when we cause suffering to each other and our world. Waking up is the recognition that there is no other, that every person or situation is not separate from our essential nature.”

Where separation divides and causes conflict, awareness of our interconnectedness means we see all others as ourselves. The jewels in Indra’s net are independent jewels and each reflects a different aspect of the whole, while also reflecting each other. Each is so interrelated to all that they cannot exist without each other or without the entire net.

This can take us to the point where we most certainly don’t want to wish them well. But does harboring dislike, revenge, even hate, do us any favors? Does it really make us feel better in the long run or does it just get us more stressed?

It’s important that we acknowledge what we are feeling—all the anger, unfairness, and aversion—and really honor how hurt we are. Repressing our feelings means they’ll just come up again at some point, most likely when another situation triggers a similar response.

But negative emotions can sap our energy, especially when we hold on to them. And they spread like wildfire, soon affecting our behavior and attitudes towards other people, like a single match that can burn down an entire forest.

And they create an emotional bond with the abuser that keeps our feelings alive, so that we keep replaying the drama and conflict over in our heads, justifying our own behavior and disregarding theirs. In the process we become a not-very-nice person.

Anger, aggression and bitterness are like thieves in the night who steal our ability to love and care. Is it possible to turn that negativity around and chill out so we can wish our abuser well, without necessarily needing to know them as a friend again? This may sound challenging and absurd but it can make life’s difficulties far more tolerable. How can we do this?

1. Recognize no one harms another unless they are in pain themselves. Ever noticed how, when you’re in a good mood, it’s hard for you to harm or hurt anything? You may even take the time to get an insect out of the sink. But if you’re in a bad mood or are feeling very stressed, then how easy it is to wash it down the drain.

2. No one can hurt you unless you let them. Hard to believe, as no one actually wants to be hurt but it’s true. When someone hurts us, we are inadvertently letting them have an emotional hold over us. Instead, as spiritual teacher Byron Katie often says: If someone yells at you, let them yell, it makes them happy!

3. Respect yourself enough that you want to feel good. Deb did this with her father, an abusive and angry man. Deb made the decision that she wouldn’t respond to him with negativity, so she turned it around within herself and continued to wish him well. He died recently and Deb was able to feel total closure.

4. Consider how you may have contributed to the situation. It’s all too easy to point fingers and blame the perpetrator but no difficulty is entirely one-sided. So contemplate your piece in the dialogue or what you may have done to add fuel to the fire. Even when he feels he is 100% right, Ed always looks at a difficulty to see what was his part in it.

5. Extend kindness. That doesn’t mean you’re like a doormat that lets others trample all over you while you just lie there and take it. But it does mean letting go of negativity sooner than you might have done before, so that you can replace it with compassion. Like an oyster that may not like that irritating grain of sand in its shell but manages to transform the irritation into a beautiful and precious pearl.

6. Meditate. Meditation takes the heat out of things and helps you cool off, so you don’t over react. A daily practice we use is where we focus on a person we may be having difficulty with or is having a difficulty with us. We hold them in our hearts and say: “May you be well!  May you be happy!  May all things go well for you!”

Sarah Palin used the occasion to defend her own mistakes, such as targeting Congresswoman Gifford, in the process making herself appear to be both the injured party and the savior. She criticized those who ‘manufactured a blood libel’ against her without realizing what it meant, rather than accepting that she might be the one who had erred.

In contrast, at the memorial for the victims, President Obama urged us all to look at our own behavior: “At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized … it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds… We may ask ourselves if we’ve shown enough kindness and generosity and compassion to the people in our lives… what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame — but rather, how well we have loved and what small part we have played in making the lives of other people better.”

The world is made up of endless difficulties and challenges. But blaming others or losing our cool does not resolve the conflict. Such self-centeredness is not kind or compassionate; rather it breeds greed, hatred and further delusion. When we are self-centered we think of ourselves first; when we are kind we think of both ourselves and others.

Wikipedia describes a revolution as a “fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time.” Normally applied to politics, we believe this can also be applied to our own inner structures: how we think, talk and behave with each other.

A revolution also means a turning around, so a kindness revolution means turning ourselves away from hate, self-centeredness and derision, toward caring, kindness and compassion. And a revolution is a re-evolution, an opportunity to transcend differences so we can offer genuine respect to one another. Kindness is completely revolutionary: it will change each one of us, it will change others, and it will definitely change the world.

How different our world could be if we were all required to be compassionate and kind! So what is it that stops us? Kindness is free, it never goes bad, it has no sell-by date, we can never get enough of it, and we can never give enough of it. As the Dalai Lama says, kindness is his religion.

However, kindness is often overlooked or undervalued. Which is a pity as it takes only a very small amount of it to turn someone’s day from bad to wonderful. Discover kindness. Practice being kind to others for the whole day and see how good you feel. Then try doing it for a week, or even a lifetime!

“As a cancer patient, I can honestly say that cancer is definitely a drag. However, it has also brought many blessings. Instantly I had to start listening to my world, I discovered a sense of space and newness, and LOVE—so much love. Trungpa Rinpoche said that you just have to lean into whatever is happening. He called the experience of living with illness one taste; that whether you get well or not, all conditions have the same one taste.”

Liz also had what she called her three R’s: Release, Restore, Radiate.

Release

Release whatever is holding you back, whether fear, doubt, anger, frustration, irritation, all the dramas and memories that cause pain and suffering, anything that is getting in the way of having a clear mind and an open heart. Normally, we tend to deny, ignore or repress such unwanted feelings and bury them inside where they fester and damage us further. Liz saw the need to recognize and own these feelings so they could be named, known and released. This is fully acknowledging the depth of the pain, loss and fear, and letting it go, letting it heal, letting it be. “We can only release something when we know it—we cannot let go of something that is hidden away, lurking in the darkness. It has to first come into the light.”

Restore

Restore your inner self by filling up with confidence, trust, acceptance, and awareness. Illness can easily take us away from our true or Buddha nature or what is sacred; we lose touch with the spiritual and heart-felt, blaming the world for our pain or getting angry at loved ones. Liz instinctively knew that it was essential to stay connected, to strengthen her trust in the unknown, and in the stillness within, to listen to silence.

Radiate

Radiate by sending love out into the world so others may benefit. This is so important as illness makes us focus on our issues, leaving little space to accommodate anyone else’s difficulties. When we give to others it takes us beyond ourselves into a bigger, more altruistic space. Liz was the most giving person we have known. Even in the later stages of her illness she would arrive at our house with a bag of goodies—oddments she had seen that she knew we would love. And she did this for many others too. She radiated generosity. Kindness is free to give and it leaves the giver the richest of all.

Liz tried everything to stay alive, but when the time came to accept that she was dying she did it gracefully and peacefully.

We treasure her three R’s and hope that, in sharing them, they can help you too, so that the New Year is a glorious, joyful and radiant one for you!