Cultivating Compassion, p 2

These days we hear a lot from physicians and people who are health-minded that it's very important to stay hydrated. It's very important to drink water. Drinking water is very beneficial for the body. It's almost like a medicine to keep yourself hydrated. We always hear that you have to drink enough water and it's very beneficial for our health. Similarly, we need to hydrate the mind with compassion. This is water for the mind, and this is something that we should again and again bring into our minds, this compassion, as if we are hydrating our minds.

Just as water is helpful for our physical health, compassion is helpful for our mental health. In doing this, we will find that we become a very gentle, honest person, somebody who is very straightforward. Our mind becomes tamed. Our mind becomes gentle, honest, tamed and straightforward. The way we respond to people becomes very gentle, with underlying compassion. We have emotions, we have feelings all the time. If we bring to them the practice of compassion again and again, we will have an underlying compassion so that when we express emotions or when we feel emotions, when emotions arise, when feelings arise in response to others, they will be infused with compassion. This is a very helpful experience for us, because we respond compassionately to others. This is not just a religious practice or a spiritual practice or a Buddhist school. This is a natural experience. It's very helpful to have a practice of compassion.

Compassion is indispensable in our lives, we must have it. Without it, we run the risk of becoming a very self centered person, somebody who has many negative or afflictive emotions that are untamable or become prevalent. We risk more experiences of unhappiness, and our minds cannot be happy. This is why in the great vehicle, the Mahayana vehicle, compassion is discussed as an indispensable factor in our lives.

Practicing compassion for oneself: the wish to be free of the three poisons

So how do we give rise to compassion in relation to others? It's by seeing the suffering of other beings, witnessing their suffering, and then giving rise to the wish to free them from suffering, to have the thought that they be free from suffering.

And how about in relation to ourselves, compassion for oneself? This depends on understanding the three poisons or negative emotions, and what it is to be under the influence of negative emotions. When we are under the power of negative emotions, we have no free will of our own. It's as if we have no freedom, we are doing the work of the negative emotions. We are the servant of desire, for example, we're the servant of anger, the servant of jealousy. Our mind has no free will. Our mind has no autonomy, no independence of our own. We are always doing the work of negative emotions. And because of that, we are unhappy. We are not well, our health is not good because we have no freedom. We are only doing the work of the negative emotions. The experience is one of not being well, not being happy, and even becoming ill or sick within the mind.

The mind experiences a state of un-health and we become the servant of our concepts, our negative emotions. And because of the power of cause and effect, the effect is that we experience suffering. So we have the thought, "May I be free of suffering, may I experience what it's like to be free from suffering, may I not be the servant of this desire, may I not be the servant of negative emotions." Having that thought is the experience of compassion towards oneself. This is the wish to be free from the experience of suffering that arises from negative emotions.