Circle of Compassion

By Gail Straub

What happens when an Easterner who needs trees, hates heat, and doesn't gamble spends a year living in Las Vegas? Follow the author's reflections as she comes to appreciate the surrounding desert so deeply that she returns seven years later to hear more of the Mojave's message. Share in the process as this desert reveals itself as both a macrocosm and a microcosm of the major issues facing us today. For as a sacred text set in the perspective of deep time and clarified by silence, the Mojave landscape has the power to move us humans from an ego-self to an eco-Self awareness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Little Bound Books
• Release date: May 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781953340344

Book preview

This small book of meditations is for anyone who longs to put their compassion into action—to make compassion real in everyday ways. It’s for those who want to balance caring for self and caring for the world, because they recognize that the health of the human psyche and the health of the world are inextricably related, and we cannot truly heal one without healing the other. And it’s for those who understand that to deepen in compassion we need to open our hearts and face the suffering inside ourselves and in the world around us, because when we face suffering with an open heart we find momentary pain but we also find the doorway to lasting fulfillment and freedom.

These meditations are based on my book The Rhythm of Compassion: Caring for Self, Connecting with Society, which uses the metaphor of the in-breath and the out-breath to help people balance care of self and others. There’s a natural time for the in-breath of caring for self and family, and a natural time for the out-breath of caring for the needs of the world. The challenge is to become skillful in following your rhythm of compassion—knowing when it’s time to go inward and when to go out into the community.

These short meditations are designed to help you learn to follow your unique rhythm of compassion. In part the meditations are inspired by the most frequent questions and concerns expressed in letters and e-mails and at lectures from people who had read The Rhythm of Compassion:

• What are the most effective tools for balancing caring  for self and others?

• How do I find the courage to face suffering—my

  own, my family’s, and my community’s?

• How do I find the time to serve, or the time to care

  for myself?

• How do I know when I’ve done enough for the

  person I care for?

• What helps when the suffering of the world

   overwhelms me?

• How do I cultivate genuine compassion rather than

  moral do-goodism?

Though these questions came from a remarkably diverse cross-section of people—ministers, social workers, teachers, parents, therapists, business executives and managers, college students, activists, and healers—what they all had in common was a yearning to deepen in compassion, and a recognition that their own health was inseparable from the health of the world.

Circle of Compassion is designed for you to incorporate