Jeremy Rifkin - The Empathic Civilisation

Bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society.

"Compassion is like the sky; it covers all beings." 

-- Torei Enji

"People don't talk about the soul very much anymore. It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is cold comfort on a winter night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've gotten back the chest X ray and it doesn't look so good, or when the doctor writes 'prognosis, poor.'"

- Anna Quindlen

What do you wish you knew about love at 20?

What Do you Wish You Knew at Twenty?

Be gentle. Radically gentle. Be gentle with yourself. Be gentle with other people. And not in a sappy kind of way. I mean genuinely, from the heart gentle. I don't think any other advice would have gotten through to me. If someone had said this to me, instead of what I actually heard ("Don't be so sensitive," "You think too much," or "What did you expect?") I think I might have treated myself and other people with a lot more kindness.

If there's one thing I've learned from my meditation practice it's how incredibly aggressive I've been. On the most subtlest of levels. The majority of my thoughts and feelings have been rooted in self-aggression (which I still struggle with). And our culture really doesn't help much in this regard either.

Typically, we're told that being gentle is considered weak. Or, at the very least, this is what is implied.

But to be gentle is to acknowledge our humanness and our vulnerability. It is to recognize our connection. It is to treat ourselves and all beings with the utmost respect and requires great courage. To be gentle is to be intimate.

I cannot imagine anything stronger or more loving than that.

-- Robin Anderson, via the Interdependence Project 

The Calligraphy of Thich Nhat Hanh

Louis C.K.'s Girls Can't Have Cell Phones

"You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That's what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That's being a person." - Louis C.K.

Different Ways of Dealing with Obstacles

A cute comic on how we can deal with obstacles in our lives by Marcelle Hanselaar.

The Legend of Buddha (Buddhist Film) HQ

"Individuality is the problem, not the solution." 

- Lama Marut

What is Compassion?

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”

--Pema ChödrönThe Places that Scare You 

From Victimhood to Mastery with Lama Marut

Lama Marut is a Western-born monk who teaches primarily Westerners. I think his approach is "tough love" and it's sometimes painful to hear. Unlike many of his contemporaries who push us to be kinder to ourselves, he takes an alternative approach which is to remind us that our suffering is karmic return. If it's karmic retribution, then we take ownership of it and we fix it in this lifetime. If we suffer, we are victims only of our own past actions. He reiterates this message over and over again: No one can make you unhappy. No one can make you happy. Only you are responsible for your own happiness.

(Here is Part 2)

Roman Krznaric - The Power of Outrospection

Introspection is out, and outrospection is in. Philosopher and author Roman Krznaric explains how we can help drive social change by stepping outside ourselves.

Ajahn Brahm - Loving Your Sufferings

I really enjoy the talks offered by Ajahn Brahm. In this talk, he explains the purpose of suffering in our lives and why we must embrace pain. The message is clear: embrace your pain so you can empathize and help others through their pain. There's no other way we will grow.

Buddhist View on Loneliness and Picking People Up at Bars

Lodro Rinzler offers a Buddhist perspective on dealing with loneliness while single.

First steps into Buddhist meditation from Buddhism Now

Buddhism Now offers an illustrated guide for getting started in Buddhist meditation.

Basic Buddhist Teachings

This video introduces basic pieces of Buddhism, including:

• The Three Jewels
• The Four Noble Truths
• The Noble Eightfold Path
• The 5,8, and 10 Precepts

A Scientific Perspective on the Subject of Self and No-Self (Anatta)

Who am I? One of the things that is difficult for people to understand when they first start studying Buddhism is the tenet that the self is a fictive construction of the mind. Buddhists believe that there is no such thing as identity, at least not objectively. This notion is called Anatta, or "no-self." One of the dangers of the concept of "self" is that self-identification distances us from our true nature of interdependence.  It's a completely alien concept to most Westerners who are taught that individuality is a virtue. That I exist only as a mental construction of who I think I am is a profound statement.

This Dharma talk offered by Bro. Billy Tan helpfully discusses the subject from a scientific perspective. It's a solid introduction to understanding Anatta.

Max Strom - There is No App for Happiness

Max Strom, author of A Life Worth Breathing delivers this interesting talk about technology's role in diminishing our happiness and offers two suggestions for how to correct this.

"Every hour you spend on Facebook or playing a video game, you spend away from someone who loves you." 

- Max Strom

Mark Ruffalo Teaches Empathy on Sesame Street

Metta Everyday

"You can sit on a subway in New York City and begin, without looking weird at all, to direct the force of loving-kindness to those around you. See a person as he was as a child in his original beauty. In a minute, your relationship to him becomes transformed and he’s connected with your heart. Another training, mindfulness of intention, is learning to take a few breaths before speaking to someone you’re in conflict with. Ask yourself, 'What is my highest, or best, intention?' Your intention isn’t to be right or one-up the person, or defend yourself. Look into your heart, and it will show you that you’re looking for ways to connect and create bridges."

 -- Jack Kornfield

Self-Compassion versus Self-Esteem

It's famously noted that the Dalai Llama needed someone to explain to him the concept of self-esteem. He didn't understand it--didn't understand why so many people in Western countries would hate themselves. In non-capitalistic societies, individuals do not need to "prove their worth" in order to justify their waking breath. They never need to justify their own existence. In less "advanced" cultures where Buddhism still thrives, people aren't bombarded with images and messages from the media telling them that they are somehow deficient and must purchase things in order to better themselves.

Admit it: we don't get the message in our culture that you're fine just the way you are. If you're at all observant, you see a thousand messages a day telling you that you're wrong. That's mostly what consumer capitalism is all about--a system geared entirely around making you see yourself as an incomplete, unworthy person who can be completed only by earning enough money to buy the shit that will make you whole.

And so there's a mental health danger to consumer capitalism being the organizing framework of our society. You and I, as adults, often shrug--we look at the world and say, "Ok, sure, but surely being an adult means you have to bolster yourself up against that." Never mind how or with what resources (we skip that part).  We look down on people with self-esteem issues, as if it's some weakness of character or immaturity. And then we treat it likes there's some software out there that unhealthy adults can download to fix themselves. "Go to therapy," as if psychoanalysis will patch the bug. We rarely interpret the situation for what it really is: "Wow, I guess the pervasive message of unworthiness cut a little too deep in that one."

We rarely treat this kind of pain and suffering with empathy. We pathologize it so we can condescend to it. We'd rather support a system that diminishes you at every turn rather than say, "Yeah, actually, I can see why you would feel that way."

And so there's a mental health danger in rearing children in a culture where all adults are assessed, valorized and slotted into an unequal hierarchy of privileges. Effectively, much of what "education" is in Western society is preparing children for a future where they can expect to be graded, rated, weighed, measured, and sorted for their ultimate position in what is our vastly unequal society.

For our system to work, we can't have adults going about claiming inherent, inalienable rights to love, care, health and happiness. So we tell our kids in every way possible: you have to earn all the good stuff life has to offer. And then, in the same breadth without any second thought, we say, "But you have to love yourself for who you are, too."

Some kids grow up fine with the contradiction. But I'd wager most of us didn't. We struggle with evaluating ourselves on whatever value system we have adopted to measure the worth of a human being. We measure ourselves up against this metric and decide, "Well, today I am thin enough to be worthy of self-love." Or, "Today, my job isn't high-status enough to be worthy of self-respect."

Most of us, when scratched deep enough, will admit to having problems with this. Self-esteem is a frustrating concept because so much of what we esteem in others is pretty much what we're taught to esteem in others--their jobs, their education, their looks (for women), their height (for men). If you're especially forward-thinking, you might value someone's philanthropic contributions, their kindness shown to friends or their commitment to social justice. But esteem is synonymous with worth. And the problem with that is our notions of worth are warped. No matter where we get them, our value systems alienate us from the basic notion that we don't need to justify our lives.

None of us ever asked to be born.

And the fact is, there are more reasons to hate yourself in our society than there are stars in the sky. If you're an especially analytical person, you've probably already identified several hundred if not thousands of reasons by now (and why, statistically, you're the most likely to be depressed and/or a stand-up comedian). And the entire self-esteem movement falters precisely because you can't convince someone who falls short  by his or her own metric to like themselves. Logically, they can't fathom how or why they should. All they need to do is see the traits they believe themselves to carry be depreciated and rejected to give themselves all the reasons they need to go on hating themselves. When a little girl hears a cruel remark made about a fat woman in a restaurant, she's always going to know and worry that her value, her worth as a human being is in some part determined by the weight she carries on her body. It's not something any hallow talk about loving herself is going to fix.

And so, our mental health rides a roller coaster. Self-esteem just goes on supporting this idea that you should just value yourself, goddammit, despite whatever you see elsewhere. It's a ridiculous notion.

Self-compassion, though, isn't about worth. It's about really understanding that you don't need to justify your existence--not even to yourself. That even if you were flawed beyond measure, you're still just a piece of the universe inhabiting a human form and thus totally legitimate just as you are. The universe isn't wrong or right, it just is. And as such, you are neither wrong or right, you just are. Self-compassion is taking refuge in this idea. You see your self-hate for what it is: just ideas you have about how people should be valued and how you don't live up to them. They're just thoughts. Some people share them with you, some people don't. But in the end, they're just thoughts.

Instead of teaching kids to re-calibrate their value system to some "better" value system, we need to recognize why we feel we need value systems in the first place. In our culture, it's usually because we feel a compulsive need to assess where in the unequal spectrum of human worth people should be slotted. We want to know where we sit. And from this idea, most of us, we hate ourselves for not being more (and we can always be more).

But these are all thoughts. They have a ton of power over how we feel, but in the end they are just thoughts. The most depressed of us will think them a thousand times an hour. The most enlightened of us--the monks who have to be taught what self-esteem even is--they don't have these thoughts. They don't need to justify themselves to the world--just being born is justification enough. The universe needed me to be me, so here I am. They aren't happier because they have different value systems or "like themselves;" they're happier because they don't have this compulsion to measure up to anything. They have the same compassion for themselves a mother would for her child, brought into this world confused and crying, hungry for love and anxious to learn. Beyond that, it's thoughts and to our detriment, a lot of our thoughts come from systems of thought that have nothing to do with human nature.