Who Deserves Compassion?

Who deserves compassion? Is it just the people who appear to be in need? What is need, anyway? Some people have obvious needs –  they may be hungry, homeless, sick or injured,  or lonely. Others’ needs are not as visible. In fact, we all have needs of some kind  –  yes, even the most privileged of us. None of us can ever know what is going on in another person’s life, even if they tell us; we cannot feel their feelings or their hunger or their physical pain. No one is immune from having problems of some kind. And unfortunately, no one can do everything it takes to alleviate those problems.

It’s a common misconception that everyone who is living in unfortunate circumstances could do better if they tried. All it takes to realize this is to find yourself in dire circumstances that are not of your own making, and not have the help you need. All our brothers and sisters deserve our help.

Think about how often we hear someone blamed or ridiculed for their unfortunate circumstances.  Even rape victims are often blamed for having been raped.

Some comments we hear (or make) might be:

“I don’t owe anything to those who have not helped themselves.”

“She wouldn’t have been raped if she didn’t dress provocatively.”

“If he wanted a job he could go out and get one. He’s healthy.”

“If you’re sick it’s because you are not spiritually advanced,” or “You have bad Karma.”

“When you’re sick it’s your imagination.”

“You’re just looking for attention.”

“She got cancer from eating junk food.”

“You’re lazy and making up excuses.”

Think about how scary it would be to find yourself in dire circumstances. Not only is the circumstance beyond your control, but on top of that you are blamed for it! The idea that such an occurrence or situation could randomly happen to you is unthinkable. So if it can’t be random, it must their own fault, right? Wrong. We are so frightened by the idea that it could happen to us that we make ourselves believe it has to be the unfortunate persons’ fault, which we think makes us immune. But we are not immune.

Good people can find themselves in bad circumstances. And who are we to judge who is good and who is not? We can’t know someone’s heart. What we can do is help them.

Follow Your Passion

Have you always had a feeling that you were born to do something specific – something that tugs at your heartstrings – but that you have not heeded? Were you afraid it wouldn’t provide a good living for you? Were you afraid you wouldn’t be taken seriously?

Let me tell you my story.

Since I was tiny I’ve had five passions: to be a spiritual seeker, to play music, to protect animals, to work in a medical setting, and to create art. Music was the strongest. There was never a question in my mind that one of these would be my path. But which one?

I tried the more acceptable paths; my first jobs were waitressing, working for an insurance company, and being a secretary for a minister and a camp for underprivileged kids. Then I became a jeweler and then a sign painter. All these I did because I thought playing music would not provide a sufficient income. And I was miserable. There were times I didn’t see the point in living.

Finally, I realized that life was passing me by. I quit all else and went in to music full time. I never looked back. At first, providing beauty to soothe my listeners seemed like a worthy activity. But soon, life’s journey took me down the road of therapeutic music. I didn’t stop to ask myself if that was wise or logical. It was simply clear that it was what I was supposed to do. I couldn’t NOT do it. I had no idea how it would play out or how I would sustain myself.

Over time, I founded and co-founded two of the original training programs for therapeutic musicians who play live music for individual patients in hospitals, care homes, and hospices, as well as in hospital hallways and waiting rooms, and in ERs, ORs, ICU s and NICUs. We’ve trained hundreds of musicians to play appropriate therapeutic music, and the results have been so impressively positive that medical facilities everywhere are now clamoring for them. Patients report that live music changed their entire experience of being hospitalized, nurses report that it makes their jobs less stressful, and doctors report that patients need fewer pain meds and have shorter hospital stays. Families of dying patients often report that the music helps them get in touch with the importance of family, acceptance, and forgiveness.

The impact of a simple decision to follow my passion has been enormous. I’m telling you about this not to claim kudos, but to show you that anyone can make an impact if you just follow your passion. Your passion is what was given to you to do. Don’t ignore it. It’s important.

Leave a comment and tell us what your passion is and how it has affected you and others.

The Fear of Helping

The angels among us who regularly engage in compassionate action tell us it is energizing, fulfilling, enhances their sense of purpose, and provides perspective on their own lives. Yet when considering the choice for compassionate action, it’s natural to wonder if you have enough time, energy, or fortitude to help another person. We may have our own concerns, may be working too hard, and may be worried about ourselves and our families, which makes the thought of helping others seem daunting. We may assume that only certain kinds of people engage in compassionate work easily. Or we may assume that just giving money is effective, when actually practical help is what’s needed.

Many of us have not had experience in direct, person-to-person, assistive activity, so we cannot predict how it will feel, and the unknown can be frightening to us. In reality, compassionate action can be easier, more practical, and more fulfilling that we might assume. In the days when families lived in multi-generational households, there was ample opportunity to gain experience in caring for those within our own families. It came naturally; it was part of life. These days, most of us don’t learn this skill directly, so it can seem daunting and unfamiliar.

Because of this, there can be reluctance, but there can also be unrealistic idealism. Some who idealistically begin compassionate work may soon drop out if it does not fit our expectations. We may feel inadequate, may not know how to conserve our energy or budget our time, or may have high expectations of what we can accomplish or how we should be acknowledged. Those who stay with compassionate work are those who go into it with a realist’s point of view and few expectations.

We may assume that our offers to help others must be big and significant. However, for those in need, it is more often the simple things that are most needed. There are those who cannot get up for a glass of water, cook a meal, clean the house, feed or walk their beloved pet, and doing these small but significant things for such a person can make the difference between suffering and comfort.

Thoughts that Come in the Night

Sometimes the thoughts that occur in the middle of the night are wonderfully clear and insightful. I often wake with a phrase that seems like a gift, and I’ve decided to post them here. Here are a few:

n”If you want to have perfect Vision, you have to give up the vision you ow have.”

“Get over it. Dragging the baggage of the past around with you is not useful. The present is the only reality. So get over it! Then you can live fully.”

Hard Truths

Posted on June 3, 2019 by rileylaurie

One late night, I stood on a dock in the dark with a small group of others to welcome home a man who had just rowed seventy miles in a dory. He was participating in a race called the Seventy-48. The 48 part meant that participants were expected to complete the race within forty-eight hours. He had done it in twenty-nine.

He arrived disoriented, exhausted, spent to his last drop of energy and then beyond it. It took him longer than normal to maneuver to the finish, get the boat beached, and stumble out of it, greeting his friends almost coherently but not quite. He spoke randomly and disjointedly to this person and that, of the journey just made, the challenges he’d faced, his mental and physical state, and whatever else came to his mind. If you didn’t know him you’d assume he you’d assume that his personality was a little loopy and he lacked the right number of brain cells. If you did know him, you’d know that he is an intelligent and articulate person who was hanging on by a thread of consciousness.

The energy and determination he had needed to do what he had just accomplished was enormous. He had pushed himself further than most people are ever willing to do, because he wanted the satisfaction of knowing he had done something challenging and wonderful. And he had succeeded. We were so proud of him. We did what we could to help him get the boat put away and get him home for a long sleep.

What strikes me about the experience of observing this event is that his state of mind and body when he came ashore was just like a number of other people I know who push themselves to the limit of their physical endurance and mental cognition, except they do it every day of their lives. They are people with chronic illnesses, who begin each day with a fraction of the energy a healthy person has, and then steel themselves to get through the hours until they can go back to bed and heave a sigh of exhausted relief. Every day. All their lives.

We have great respect for athletes who push themselves to their limits of endurance. We have little respect for those in poor health for whom getting through a normal day is an athletic feat, and who, in addition to enduring the torture of feeling physically horrible al the time, also have to endure the attitudes of their families, friends, co-workers, bosses, doctors, and most everyone they encounter every day who think they are laggards, layabouts, malingerers, attention-seekers, and even liars  –  and who know that when not being told this to their faces, it’s said behind their backs. Getting anyone to believe them is something they eventually give up on.

Not just their bodies are pushed to the max. Some brilliant minds are working overtime to maintain a semblance of normal cognition despite the effects of the illness and the exhaustion of trying to pretend they are well. I recently saw a phrase that said, “Chronically ill people are not faking illness. They are faking wellness.”

Some fake it better than others, even to the degree that no one guesses what’s going on, their families think they’re feeling better than they are, and their doctors tell them they are fine. Many have to do it because they could not otherwise make a living, or because they know the love of their families and friends is conditional. Faking health is a high art.

Most chronically ill people are told they probably did something to deserve their illness. But they don’t know what that something is. They are told they could be well if they wanted to be. They see the eye-rolling, the sneers of disbelief, and the people who cross the street to avoid them. Most of them come to believe they are mentally ill.

My friend who rowed seventy miles in twenty-nine hours didn’t have to fake feeling better than he felt at the finish of the race. It was okay to feel that way. He had just done something that gave him the right. And we all knew that his brain wasn’t working quite right because his body wasn’t. There was nothing abnormal about his situation right then, even though he had chosen to do the race.

My point is, there’s nothing abnormal about the less than stellar, semi-cogent personalities of people who are sick, either. Yet they are treated as outcasts, making their life experience one of not just constant pain or fatigue or mental fog, but one of being judged and scorned as well. No wonder it’s hard to find a way through each day. They are athletes both physically and emotionally.  But they have not chosen their race.Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment | Edit

Committing to What Matters

Posted on October 22, 2016 by rileylaurie

What is compassion? We usually think of it as a feeling that motives action, or  more commonly, as sympathy or even pity. But are these really the best definitions? What if compassion is both simpler and larger than that?

In fact, true compassion is a state of being. Compassion is something we feel and extend in the presence of and in the absence of a perceived need or problem. Within that simplicity is contained so much depth that it changes our lives –  and consequently it changes the lives of others, like ripples in a lake.

There is one common thread that runs through every life: the need for love  –  which comes of course in may forms. The need for love disguises itself in all kinds of behaviors that may or may not look like a cry for love. But almost all behaviors are! The quest for love is the single goal common to all humans, whether or not that is obvious in their actions or even their own consciousness. (There are four kinds of love: romantic, familial, brotherly, and universal. This writing is about the latter three kinds.)

How is that request answered? Most often, it is not, becasue we don’t recognize many behaviors as cries for love. But when we do, love may be given in the form of simple presence, a smile, a hug. Maybe a listening ear. Maybe a moment of our time. It may be companionship, or true friendship. You don’t have to be someone with a lot of time or energy or money to be a person of compassion.

Compassion is a lifestyle. When you are kind to others, you are kind to yourself and they are sometimes kinder to you. When you serve others even in the simplest of ways, you serve yourself. Life becomes more meaningful. It’s not difficult or esoteric  –  compassion as a lifestyle is actually easier than any alternative. It is the simple insistence on treating all others with love regardless of how you perceive they treat you, in the knowledge that all their behaviors are cries for love. That takes away all need to figure out how to treat different people, or to wonder what their true intentions are. When you know that what everyone really wants is love, you know more about each person than they may know about themselves.

How can one become a person of compassion? The first step on the road to compassion starts with taking stock of what we personally have, what we need, what we don’t actually need, what’s important in life, and how the lives of others are affected by what we do with our own lives. After sorting out these factors, many people find that the things we’ve worked for and thought important are actually burdens that we’ve heaped upon ourselves to distract us from the realities around us and to keep us off the path to real joy. When we see this, we find it easy and freeing to slough off the distracting stuff of the material-driven world, and commit our lives to the essential work of love.

One common misconception about compassion is that one must be religious in order to engage in it. But dogmatic details do not have to be accepted in order to recognize and act upon the basic principles of compassion. Most of the world’s main religions promote compassion, yet many misguided zealots also use religion as an excuse for hostility, so we cannot cite religion as the only basis for compassion. Compassion is a means and an end unto itself, to be lived merely because it is the right thing to do, no matter who you are, where you live, what your social standing is, or what religion you do or do not belong to.

In fact, although most of the people whose stories will be told on my Biographies of Compassion page (see link at the top of this page) were devoutly committed to one or another religion, several of them lived in great doubt about their place in that religion, their worthiness, or the veracity of their beliefs. They did their compassionate work regardless of these uncertainties. True compassion is not born of the wish to gain favor with the divine; it is born of the recognition that living compassionately is the only sensible way to live.

On this website (on the other pages and also in future posts) we will explore the many forms of compassion, compassionate living, spiritual paths, states of reality, and related subjects. Please subscribe or check back often!

Why We Lack Compassion

Posted on September 21, 2020 by rileylaurie

I’m about to say some challenging things. But these are challenging times, and if we are to meet these times and come through them as better people, we need to take a hard and honest look at some things that determine our attitudes, feelings, and behaviors.

All around us there is real suffering, perhaps we would rather not witness the negativity, and instead are trying to keep our spirits up by closing our eyes or by creating Facebook platitudes and thinking that posting them is action enough. But compassion isn’t just a feeling. It’s not just pity or empathy. Compassion is also action.

It is not pleasant to witness all the wrongs and the evil in the world today, and it can be tiresome. But one reason that we don’t want to engage more is not because we have compassion fatigue, but because we, too, are suffering to some degree, and we think that exonerates us from action on behalf of others. We look at our own challenges and think of them as something that renders us incapable of or excused from reaching out with a helping hand. We leave action to those who aren’t weighed down by problems of their own. Of course, if everyone subscribed to that idea, no one would take action  –  because everyone has some kind of challenge in life. Those who take action do it in spite of their own problems.

What’s more, we are proud of our problems. We tend to wear our own hardships as badges of courage or as invitations for sympathy. We are very much invested in the drama of our own hardships, even when we have to look really hard to find them.

Many of us are incredibly privileged. Our version of a “hardship” may be that we can’t find a comfortable mask, or our vacation got cancelled, or we have to stay put in our comfortably air conditioned homes, or even that the world is different and disorienting.  These are what I call “first-world problems”. We are outrageously privileged. And oh how we complain.

Of course, some of us privileged people have been sick, have had loved ones die of COVID, have faced other hardships that we never had to handle before. Because of our privileged status (due to having better financial security, good health, or being white and upper-class, or having skills that will get us a new and better job in the future), we are better equipped to handle such things than people who started out less fortunate.  When suffering  –  perhaps with the ravages of post-COVID syndromes that will last the rest of your life, the loss of a businesses, the loss of a family member, the loss of a home to fire, breathing toxic smoke  –  if you started out privileged, you will emerge in better shape than those who did not.

I’m not saying your problems aren’t real. But we all have reserves of strength beyond our self-pity, and we need to start tapping into them. Look at Jimmy Carter: with cancer and other health problems and at the age of 95, he is still building houses for Habitat for Humanity. He doesn’t see his own challenges as a reason to think himself not responsible for the welfare of others.

When witnessing hardship, many of us take our privilege to an extreme: we can’t even drum up the feeling of compassion. We may think the person deserves their troubles, that they have somehow been irresponsible or that it’s just Karma or maybe a punishment from God for some wrongdoing. Do we really think we will never get sick or die? That we will never have a car accident? That our house cannot burn down, and that our job is a hundred percent secure? Do we really think we are invulnerable and that it’s because we are superior in some way? Some of the most spiritually-minded of us really do think that way.

If you are privileged, it’s not because you are superior. It’s because you are very, very lucky. Sure, you are a good person, and you have worked hard for what you have. But there are many, many good people who work harder than any of us but who never get beyond poverty and destitution  –  because of factors beyond their immediate control. Unfortunate is not the same as inferior.  

Those of us who have endured hardships are well equipped to understand what it’s like and what is needed to overcome them. And if we have a conscience, we’ll realize that “thoughts and prayers” are not an adequate substitute for truly making a difference. If you want God to help someone, be God’s hands and feet. You may be the miracle that changes a life.Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment | Edit

We Already Know What to Do

Posted on June 18, 2020 by rileylaurie

There is only one Divine message, one principle, one instruction: Love all beings absolutely. That’s all. That’s everything. That one injunction encompasses all Knowledge, all action, and is the sum total of spirituality. It is what every realized master has told us. All else is merely explanation.

It is so simple and so all-encompassing. Love all beings absolutely. We all know this in our hearts, we know the truth of it, we know what its results would be if we did it. We need look no further. We already have the transformative tool and we already know how to use it.

And yet, we continue to study and seek and study and seek. We sing songs that ask God or Spirit to “come to us”. From where? God, Spirit, or whatever we wish to call the Divine, is here and always has been. We have simply refused to admit it. We have pretended we didn’t know.

Continuing to seek is a guarantee that we will not find. Seeking is an end in itself. It makes us feel holy, it gives us the impression that we are special, it lets us tell ourselves we are good people, maybe better than those who don’t seek. We emerge from church or kirtan or meditation or ashram or mosque and go out into the world and act the way we have been comfortable acting: sometimes lovingly when we’re in the mood, and sometimes not, when we think we have an excuse.

Trying to convince us to simply love all beings absolutely  –  which involves action as well as sentiment  –  requires persistence of the Voice of Guidance, the Holy Spirit, the Word of Christ, or whatever we wish to call it, repeating it over and over through the ages of human history. And yet…  and yet…

And yet until we wake up and admit, “Oh. Being loving to all beings is my only job and my only responsibility,” we will remain on the treadmill which is merely an excuse to avoid Love.

Just love all beings absolutely. We do not have to feel enlightened to do this. We don’t have to wait for the bright light to overtake us before we act as though it has. Because when we consistently act as though it has, it will. If it has not, that’s because we have not been consistently acting in love. We’ve had it backwards when we’ve thought that loving absolutely is a skill we will only gain after we become enlightened. Rather, it is loving absolutely that will produce the result of recognizing our enlightenment. You might not do it perfectly, but each time you fall off the horse, you can get back on and keep going.

What does loving absolutely entail? It means asking Guidance for its wisdom in all situations. The simple question, “How shall I respond,” is sufficient. And when you are too upset to see your way forward, ask “Please help me to see this differently.” You may be amazed at how swiftly clarity comes.

You are not a victim of the world. You make your world. Own it. Take responsibility for it in all its beauty and all its ugliness. There is only one way to take that responsibility: to love all beings absolutely. Getting back on the horse again and again is itself an act of unconditional love for all beings.

The benefits of organized religion are, of course, the warmth of community and the strength of numbers when action of some kind is taken. If a religion or some form of spiritual practice does not promote loving action, it’s not born of Love. “Thoughts and prayers” has famously become a catch-phrase for “I don’t care enough to take action.”

When Jesus found his followers hungry, he didn’t say, “You have my sympathy”  –  he fed them. When Mother Teresa found people dying on the streets of Calcutta, she left her conveniently cloistered convent and founded a new one that served those people. When Jane Goodall and Laurie Marker found chimpanzees and cheetahs endangered, they decided to spend their lives caring for them and finding ways to promote healthy coexistence with humans. These people didn’t just talk about the issues or lead discussions that made people feel good because they “cared” enough to discuss it. They also acted. It probably wasn’t convenient for them, but they knew that loving absolutely was their only purpose. If we don’t love absolutely, who will?

If you don’t feel that you can take action  –  maybe your health is not good enough, or it may be dangerous, or your family would disown you, or maybe you just can’t think of what to do  –  remember that you don’t have to figure it out. Just ask for Guidance. The clarity will come in ways that you might never have thought about. Remember, too, that even small actions create big ripples.

When Guidance comes, listen carefully: is it your ego’s voice shouting, or is it the still, small voice of true Guidance softly suggesting? Listen to the still, small voice. You will feel it not a function of how loudly it shouts, but of how truly it speaks.

When we love absolutely, we send ripples out into the world that grow and grow, even when we don’t know we’ve done so. The action of lovingkindness to all beings will remove the veil from your eyes that has kept you from seeing that your enlightenment is already here. We all know the Answer already. We must admit that we do. If you don’t feel it, act like you do, and the feeling will be uncovered.

Just love all beings absolutely.

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A Better Way

Posted on April 8, 2020 by rileylaurie

For spiritually-minded people, our main objective is to learn who we truly are and what our potential is. Through the ages, the great masters have told us that all we need to do is love one another, absolutely and without judgement. We are told that following the path of Love will result in enlightenment. Even though we say we want with all or hearts to find enlightenment, most of us have not as yet gone there.; we have not chosen to love absolutely. Therein lies the challenge: such an easy answer, and yet we find ourselves consistently unable to do it. Why? Because we have free will and we keep choosing another way. Willingness to follow the better way eludes us.

If there is a guiding spirit, why would it not simply make us live the better way? Because without free will, Love (the better way) is not real; when it’s a requirement it is not felt wholeheartedly. We must choose it. One of the reasons we don’t seem to want to choose absolute and unconditional Love is because we don’t have a solid idea of what the result looks like. People want to know the result before they arrive. In short, we are afraid of the unknown.

Although the great masters have described a “journey” or a “path”, those words are metaphors. There is no actual path, only our reluctance to arrive at the goal makes it look like there is a path  – a very long one. The longer and more complex we pretend it is, the better excuse we have to not reach the goal. But where we are going is already here
and we just don’t know how to see it. Or more accurately, we don’t really want to see it; if we did, we would. What’s the evidence for this? Well, even though the inner
work you’ve done so far has probably been considerable, and even very helpful, have you found one hundred percent of what you have been seeking? Many of us seek for a lifetime, never realizing that the goal was here all along.

Right now, while in quarantine, we are being forced to look at life in a whole new way. We can’t do most of our normal activities, which we thought we had to do to make our way in life. We’re all seeing that whatever we used to do apparently wasn’t so necessary – because here we are doing something else. So what was all that former activity about? The things people do that we think are necessary are actually a disguised seeking of fulfillment.
We seek fulfillment in as many ways as we can. We believe some activities are essential, but really the only reason they are is to provide some kind of fulfillment. You could look closely at pretty much everything you’ve done, or any way you’ve reacted to events in the past, and it will boil down to an effort to produce fulfillment on some level.

But none of those things has worked completely. Are you happy? I mean a hundred percent, completely, and always happy? Are you always at peace? Considering all the work you’ve done in your life, and all the things you have or have not accomplished, are you totally satisfied? What are we really seeking, anyway?

What we truly want is love, peace, satisfaction, and bliss. The sum of these is the definition of enlightenment. Throughout human history, we have been being given the key, by real people whom we know were enlightened. Contemporary people like Gangaji, Amber Terrell, Byron Katie. Recent masters like Ramana Maharshi, Gandhi, Sam
Levenson, Mother Teresa, Black Elk; past masters like Saint Frances of Assisi, Hildegaard Von Bingen, Baha’ulla; and ancient masters like Yehoshevah ben Josef (known in our culture as Jesus), Gautama Buddha, Confucius, and some who lived so long ago they have become considered mythological, such as White Buffalo Woman. They have not failed to show us enlightenment. We have simply failed to accept it. Absolute Love seems like such work. We don’t want to have to try so hard. If only they’d just bestow it on us by osmosis.

And yet, we can make that decision any time. How do we know when we are truly, finally willing to love? We are willing when we are happily empty of any picture or expectation of what enlightenment is, and we are truly tired of chasing something it is not. When we trust that enlightenment knows where we are and will meet us here. It knows our whereabouts. It knows us inside and out. Enlightenment is not “out there”. It is right here, staring us in the face, and all we have to do is accept it, accept this gift, and stop seeking, stop going down the endless path. Why seek what has always been offered? It is not hidden! There is no place to look. Stop. Be quiet. Be at peace. Love unconditionally.

Enlightenment is not a place or a thing or a goal; it’s a choice.Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment | Edit

Being Humanity’s Champion

Posted on April 3, 2020 by rileylaurie

Until very recently, most people assumed that any sudden threat to the human race would come from nuclear war or large-scale terrorist activity, and that the longer-term threat may be climate change. But few thought a fast-moving global pandemic would suddenly present an imminent danger to the population and the social structures of the entire planet. We are poorly prepared to respond to the presence of this monster in our midst.

Since not enough people are sufficiently educated to understand how illness spreads, since there is a culture of disbelief at any and all news, since science is considered suspect, and since denial is rampant, the problem is intensified. Additionally, blame is often being placed where it doesn’t necessarily belong.

But there’s some perspective we need to consider: it’s the natural tendency of people to look for someone to blame for any unpleasant occurrence. Baffling as it is that anyone could blame the media, the liberals, the Chinese, or the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the situation we are all in right now, it’s the sort of thing we all do, whether we realize it or not.

Aside from the obviously miscreant refusers who will not self-isolate or who purposely cough on items at the grocery store and are therefore clearly and purposely making themselves blame-worthy,  and the slowness of action on the part of entire governments to legislate protective measures, the orginating fault is obscure. It’s been surmised that bush-meat markets in Asia are the culprit, but as yet no one really knows where this virus came from. But we act as though we do; almost no one wants to accept that some things just happen  –  either as a result of human activities that are not purposely malicious, or for reasons we cannot trace.

Blame is most vehement when situations are most dire, because that is when people are feeling the most frightened and are desperate for the relief of identifying a source, and therefore of having the illusion of at least partially neutralizing the threat. People are usually unaware of why they’re groping around for someone or something to blame, and they truly believe their erroneous conclusions because they are desperate to find relief from their fear. Yes, the most aggressive blamers are the ones who are the most desperately afraid.

That’s why, in a seemingly but not really unrelated example, society in general has such callous attitudes toward those whose life situations are seen as undesirable  –  the poor, the chronically ill, the mentally ill, war victims, domestic abuse victims, the homeless, even the elderly. Probably a majority of us humans, whether we admit it or not, think that such people deserve their lot for one reason or another; we think they are irresponsible, lazy, or that they somehow were born inferior. There’s even a common belief that they chose their life situations in some spiritual realm before they were born. Believing it’s their own fault assuages our horror at the existence of such suffering and our fear that it may actually just be due to the random nature of life on earth. Blaming someone for their own situation puts us at ease in the illusion that we ourselves are not vulnerable because we are somehow superior (smarter, wiser, more educated, more responsible, or simply born better). Those who thought themselves immune due to some sense of superiority, but who suddenly find themselves surprised by misfortune, unwittingly join the ranks for those looked down upon by the remaining fortunates who therefore don’t learn a thing from them.

But even if it were true that in all cases one’s own actions, Karma, or birth status is the reason for  suffering, the fact is that the suffering still exists. Turning a blind eye to it is not the answer. All the world’s great spiritual traditions tell us that our purpose here is to be of service to others, or at least to be kind to others. Alleviating suffering is essential to our own mental health because such an action gives us a sense of mastering it; in other words, it allays the very fear that would otherwise lead us to blame. (In other words, running toward our fear instead of away from it is truly the most effective way to alleviate it.)

It is, therefore, of utmost importance to treat all beings, regardless of their status, situation, and even their beliefs, as beloved  –  for their sake and yours. Your Beloved is not just someone in a romantic relationship, someone in your family, a friend, or an acquaintance. It is not just someone who agrees with you, who is smart, who acts appropriately, or who is sane. It is not just someone in your own culture or country. Your Beloved is all people, no matter who they are.

It’s our job, collectively and individually, to be the champions of our Beloveds. We are their knight in shining armor, their protector, their support system who believes in them, in their right to exist, in their right to be whoever they are. It is not our job to judge, but instead to exemplify what is right and wrong by our own actions. If we don’t lend a hand to everyone we can, regardless of who they are, how can we be any better than what we have judged them to be?

How can we champion humanity right now in these times? By epitomizing Love. By doing what we are asked to do to slow the spread of the pandemic. Make masks and give them to hospitals, supermarkets, public transportation workers, homeless people. Foster a pet from the shelter. Offer to get groceries and run essential errands for your neighbors  –  and not just a select few of them. Email people you know and people you barely know, and ask if they are OK. Send e-cards to cheer people. Donate groceries to a family that is hungry because they have lost their income and have no savings. And have some compassion for those who are too fearful to have compassion for others.

May we emerge from this time of uncertainty with a deeper understanding of what Love is.