L E T T E R from Jac – Where Are We Blocking Compassion

I raised this in our Tea Ceremony and Meditation Gathering last Saturday because someone asked it of me awhile ago and it really stuck with me. “How many times have you walked past someone homeless and thought, damn I’ve got no coins and kept walking”?. For me, I always buy a meal when I see someone as I can card it. BUT I had to, with a shock admit I had never, ever handed a note to a homeless person. Why the hell not?? What was the difference honestly in my day between $4 in coin and a $5 note.

I sat with it and realised it was an awful deeply buried idea, that I didn’t want to see them spend the money on something numbing, like drugs and alcohol. God it pains me to write that, it’s so shortsighted and mean. Because the truth is we are all numb. We shop online. We party. We emotionally eat. Or we control our food intake. We overexercise. We oversleep. We look at social media. There are so many socially acceptable things we all do to numb ourselves. Being a human being with a mind and ego and all the other humans can be pretty painful at times. We’ll do whatever we can to escape it.

So then with compassion, we can see that everyone does the same thing, with different mediums. What might it look like if we opened our eyes to this, and our hearts. How might we navigate our days? How might we respond when we walk past someone in need?

Sent with love,

Jac x