Nothing new.

Except perhaps that the the circumstances are more extreme than they have been since I lost my counseling career.

There is this.

The fixed idea that we have about ourselves as solid and separate from each other is painfully limiting. (35)

Bodhichitta is our heart—our wounded, softened heart…. The more you look, the more you find just a feeling of tenderness tinged with some kind of sadness. This sadness is not about somebody mistreating us. This is inherent sadness, unconditioned sadness. (39-40)

In cultivating loving-kindness, we train first to be honest, loving and compassionate toward ourselves…. [our] loving-kindness is unconditional… Without loving-kindness for ourselves it is difficult, if not impossible, to genuinely feel it for others. (41)

— The Pocket Pema Chödrön, (2008)

Or this.

To any caregiver, my advice is to pay attention to yourself and to any sense of being irritable, tired, or sad…. [It] is important not to bypass your experience by rejecting or ignoring these feelings or talking yourself out of them….

If you look directly at your experience, free of judgment, your pain will fully emerge into the light of the open attention you offer yourself. Feel that sense of yourself, allowing your experience…. Just be with it….

The being of yourself knows fully how to do this. As you be, you non-conceptually host this pain identity, this pain speech, and pain imagination. Aware of being, your experience will self-liberate, releasing or exhausting. The openness of your being is the source of all positive qualities. (22)

— Tenzin Wangyal Rinpche, in “Ask the Teachers,”
BuddhaDharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly, Spring 2016

And so it is.

Blessèd Be,
Michael