Tis the Season of Compassion

 

12.25.2020 ’TIS THE SEASON OF COMPASSION We at Lion’s Roar want to wish you the happiest of Happy Holidays. After all, the season is all about things that we can all agree on (and could use more of): peace on Earth, goodwill to all, joyful giving, family, friendship, kindness.    May this Weekend Reader bring you extra cheer and wisdom, and may that cheer and wisdom bring brightness into your home and our world. We thank you for reading, and for your support. Happy Holidays, friends. —Rod Meade Sperry, editorial director, Lion’s Roar Digital

’Tis the Season of Compassion Janice Lynne Lundy explains how a simple, helpful question helps her to keep her heart open – to others, and to herself — during the holidays and year-round. The holidays we celebrate — Hanukkah, Christmas, or Kwanzaa — invite us to examine our own hearts; to open them wide, offer wishes of well-being to others, and engage in acts of generosity. But what if we’re feeling too busy or overwhelmed, resentful or Scrooge-like, at what the holiday season demands of us? What then? We can begin by cultivating compassion.

Have a Very Buddhist Christmas Bhante Sudhaso, Rachel Neumann, Lama Rod Owens, Kate Johnson, Ira Sukrungruang, Lodro Rinzler, Mary Rose O’Reilley, and Bonnie Nadzam offer sweet and personal takes on yuletide dharma. Kate Johnson: I still see Christmas as a time to celebrate the shared wish for a better world. It seems like we all want peace and for everyone to be safe and fed. Yet we have all contributed to a system in which these things seem impossible, and that truth is breaking our hearts. At Christmastime, believers and others seem a little more willing to try to love each other, to welcome the stranger, to share what we have, and to slow down enough to appreciate our blessings. This is a kind of magic, an ordinary miracle that is absolutely worth celebrating.

How to Work with the Winter Blues “Perhaps,” says Sylvia Boorstein, “these days of less sunlight are opportunities for more contemplative time, more looking deeply to see what can only be seen in the dark.” These are especially hard days for people whose minds are burdened with the fatigue of depression, the grief of loss, even the relatively mild Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) that seems directly related to the amount of daylight. Someone once said to me, “The view out the window looks like the inside of my mind. Hopeless.” Right after Thanksgiving, therapists I know begin saying, “I can’t wait until the holidays are over. Everyone feels worse. It’s such a problem to try to be happy if you’re not.”

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