This video from the Cleveland Clinic, “Empathy: The Human Connection to Patient Care”, was shown at InsightLA a few years ago. It shows a miraculous seeing into the hearts of others with eyes of compassion. If only we would see beyond the different roles and personalities we all inhabit to the one family we actually are!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=
Meditation allows us to be still and let the heart flower into new understanding and tenderness—this is the miracle of mindfulness! To paraquote the poet Walt Whitman:
Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Los Angeles,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of
the water…
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—
the ships with people in them,
What stranger miracles are there?
With mindful walking and quiet sitting, we develop the ability to intuit, to see under the surface of things. We tune into universal rhythms of both the human and non-human worlds. Births and celebrations and losses and milestones touch our hearts while the earth turns on its axis and brings the seasons.
Wednesday was the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. Tonight the moon is waning, as a radiant crescent slivers into darkness. Here in the Northern hemisphere, we’ve been living each day a little longer. The majestic sun lingers slow and bright in the afternoon sky. This is the turning, light sheared off days by seconds, then minutes, till the longest night of winter solstice. This is the life of our world.
There is no other life—just this: the gradual turning of immense currents of light and dark, the miracle of incarnation, of empathy and compassion, embodied in each of you, in each one of us.
Love, Trudy