July 2021 - Compassion Group Notes
Recommended Reading: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGkXmXrfKCcTxpDfrfMkTKdwLjs excellent blog site - this particular one is about “What is Love.”
Follow the blog BrainPickings by Maria Popolov
Needs - As an Adult, they are your Responsibility
Still being dependent on others for your basic survival needs, as well as your emotional, psychological, and intellectual needs, as an adult, is indicative of the general stage of human evolution in which there is not yet the capacity to turn inwards, take back your demands on others to meet your needs, and learn to meet your own needs. Consider how pathological it would be to still be feeding your thirty-year-old child, providing housing and paying their bills. It is just as pathological to be going to your partner in life and demanding they meet your needs for reassurance, value and love. In both cases developmental milestones have not been achieved.
How others receive is not your business - your business is learning to pour out from a loving heart - for you
Needs - What is True Generosity
“You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.” ~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
True generosity is an outpouring from the heart, that perceives need and gladly, willingly, and spontaneously meets the need of another without thought and without expectation. It is a giving that does not know it gives and does not see or care about the outcome. There is no expectation for reciprocation. It is not self-serving. it does not keep score. It is not a giving, in order to get a feeling of goodness, smugness, superiority and self-righteousness or some reciprocation of gratitude expressed in word or equal giving back.
“True generosity is wanting for you, not wanting from you.”
Twice Blessed
So that I stopped
there
and looked
into the waters
seeing not only
my reflected face
but the great sky
that framed
my lonely figure
and after a moment
I lifted my hands
and then my eyes
and I allowed myself
to be astonished
by the great
everywhere
calling to me
like an old
and unspoken
invitation,
made new
by the sun
and the spring,
and the cloud
and the light,
like something
both
calling to me
and radiating
from where I stood,
as if I could
understand
everything
I had been given
and everything ever
taken from me,
as if I could be
everything I have ever
learned
and everything
I could ever know,
as if I knew
both the way I had come
and, secretly,
the way
underneath
I was still
promised to go,
brought together,
like this, with the
unyielding ground
and the symmetry
of the moving sky,
caught in still waters.
Someone I have been,
and someone
I am just,
about to become,
something I am
and will be forever,
the sheer generosity
of being loved
through loving:
the miracle reflection
of a twice blessed life.
~David Whyte
Needs - Spirit has no need - it is fulfilled in itself
Your DNA has a physical reality - your genes contain the DNA of what you inherit and what is encoded from previous generations of humans all the way back to the very beginning.
In all humans this DNA is informed by fear for survival, and fear of not belonging as a human to the tribe into which you are born. If you do not adapt to other humans and what they need you will be shunned, in one way or another, and without connection to others, as a child, you will die. In other words, the fear of shame is integral in learning how to belong to the tribe, and this is the secondary fear of death - this time to your true nature of goodness, light, truth, and love if you are somehow unacceptable to others.
“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”
~Meister Eckhart
Rainer Maria Rilke from "Gravity's Law"
How surely gravity's law, strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing-
each stone, blossom, child -
is held in place.
Unsplash Images
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to for some empty freedom.
If we surrendered to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
So like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
