This one New Year’s resolution can change your life, heal your relationships, create health and well-being, and heal our planet.
One of the most important aspects of Inner Bonding is opening to a compassionate intention to learn. I think a lot about love and compassion. Compassion is often more than people think it is.
Compassion does include the standard definition: the ability to feel empathy with another or others who are suffering, to be moved by the suffering, and to want to help alleviate it.
But Compassion is So Much More
It’s my experience that like love, we don’t generate it within ourselves; we open to it. Compassion, like love, peace, joy, grace, and true wisdom are gifts of spirit that we experience when we are open to learning about loving ourselves and others. These gifts are what the universe is. Compassion is a bright, light, loving energy that deeply connects you with yourself, others, animals, and the planet.
It’s a feeling that enters your heart when you surrender to your guidance. To feel compassion requires that you are able to feel empathy for others. Empathy and compassion create a very deep resonance with someone so that you feel what the other is feeling, in your own being. When you feel empathy and compassion for another, you feel a kind of partnership and connectedness with that person—a sense of oneness with them.
In order to truly feel this level of empathy and compassion for another or others, we have to be able to feel it for ourselves. We have to start with compassion for ourselves in order to extend it to others, to all of life, and to the planet. This means that, instead of being resistant to love, loving ourselves and others become our guiding light.
Compassion Is The Antidote To What Ails Us
Learning how to have compassion for ourselves, and translate that into loving actions for ourselves, is the key to health, inner peace, joy, and loving relationships. Learning to see and value ourselves is essential for seeing and valuing all of life. We cannot do this when we are stuck in our ego-wounded selves, resistant to love.
Physical and emotional self-abandonment, which results from resisting love, is a major cause of illness, anxiety, depression, addictions, and relationship problems. Compassion for ourselves is basic to healing self-abandonment and creating health, peace, and loving relationships.
We cannot do harm to ourselves, others, animals, and the planet when we open to love, empathy, and compassion, rather than allow our ego-wounded self to judge ourselves and others and avoid responsibility for our feelings with addictions and blaming others.
What ails us, our relationships and our planet are the unloving actions that come from our intent to control and avoid responsibility for ourselves, which is what the ego-wounded self is all about. Self-abandonment results in self-loathing, which people project onto others in the form of racism, sexism, homophobia, and in the form of greed that is wreaking havoc with our environment.
Compassion is the opposite, because we have to be open and surrender to our higher guidance to feel compassion, and our guidance would never guide us to harm ourselves, others, or the planet.
This Year’s New Year’s Resolution
I encourage you today, right now, to make the one New Year’s resolution that is most vital to make:
“I resolve to practice opening to learning about loving myself and others with my higher guidance, and inviting love and compassion into my heart for myself, others, and the planet.”
This is the most important choice you can make for yourself, your health, your relationships, your inner peace and joy, and for our planet. This one choice will lead to loving yourself, loving others, loving animals, and loving our planet. It will lead you out of anger, blame, and projected self-loathing, and into taking personal responsibility for your own feelings.
Most importantly, it will lead you into experiencing the state of oneness that we so deeply need to heal our ravaged planet. It’s time for us to experience what science has proven—that we are all connected to each other and to all of life.
Loving actions prevail when you feel your oneness—within yourself, with others, with all of life, and with the planet; starting with love, empathy, and compassion for yourself, and then extending that to others and our planet, is the doorway to healing what ails us.
To learn more about compassion see: Discovering Self-Love
