"But I tell you who hear me:
Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you."

Luke 6:27-28

Alright...as soon as you started to read this you're thinking that I've come down to the south and turned into a Bible-thumper -- totally not the case, eventhough I drive past seven churches on my super short drive to the post office.

The thing that amazes me as I read more and more is how many core principles every religion have in common, yet none of them seem to practice them, especially those in power who claim to be religious. This passage from Luke shares principles with Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, etc...COMPASSION

It brings me to maybe the most important point in anything I have heard in any of my groups or in any of my counseling sessions...and compassion again is the root. One of the things I struggled most with back home was the influence of some around me who seem to be always negative, defeatist, and "woah is me."

They had an incredibly active pain body was the first way I learned to put it. A pain body can be dormant or active, but it does exist in every single person...unless you can find someone on the planet whose never dealt with adversity once in their lives.

The problem with me, was OBVIOUSLY that my pain body was constantly active and I had absolutely no clue how to make it dormant, even for a second. Others back home, and most importantly, people who I am in extremely close contact with, have active pain bodies, pain bodies that are constantly kicking, and the hardest part is, like when I didn't have any control, was, that those with this vivacious pain body have no idea of any other way of being.

This from Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now:

"Once the pain body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn't really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will see that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others."

I wish I could somehow draw a stick figure on this thing -- it's so much easier in explaining where the hell I am going with this.

So me, I am the stick figure on the left side of the page right? A few inches to the right of the stick figure is this being who, as Tolle says, has been taken over by the pain body. Between me and the taken over entity is this bitterness, and vitriol that only makes the chasm between us grow, even if it's subconsciously. But when there is bitterness boiling underneath, guess what happens -- what happened to me in the Spirng/Summer of '08.

Instead, there has to be a way not to battle through the vitriol and muddle in between the two figures, it can't be done. You do, or I do (the stick figure), have to acknowledge it's existence though, and just like a hurdle, hop over that bad heap. What's then drawn between that pain body and the person who just took the leap past them is COMPASSION and the knowing that you will always struggle if you always thing you can get them to change. The stick figure is over the hurdle now, having compassion for what lies in the pain body behind it, but not trying to battle with it anymore, or not letting it awake your dormant pain body. You don't have to stretch your mind too far to see that this is what the passage from Luke talks about.

The most encouraging thing about all of this in the end though is that compassion is a gift. Live with it, and have compassion for everyone, even those "who curse you." Once your over that hurdle where you just unconsciously feed the pain bodies of yourself and of others, the whole road opens up in front of you.