Hello and welcome back to Practicing Human, the podcast where every day we're getting

a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory and Muscara, and in today's episode we're going to talk about having

compassion for others.

More to come on that in a moment, first, let's settle in together with the sound of the

bells.

Okay, so I'd like to share a poem by Miller Williams.

It says, have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don't want it.

What appears as bad manners and ill-temper or cynicism is always a sign of things no

ears have heard, no eyes have seen.

You do not know what wars are going on down there, where the spirit meets the bone.

Notice how that one lines for you.

The idea of having compassion for everyone we meet, I think, can be a complicated teaching.

It can be complicated, or I think a better word that comes to mind for me is it can

be troublesome, is because it can cause us to gloss over our anger, and at worst suppress

our anger, or think that we're not being good people, or good meditators, or good practicing

humans if we're feeling really resentful toward another person.

If you follow my work, you know that I'm really big on moving toward the experience of

wholeness, which involves making space for these experiences that can arise.

And so there's a fine line, I think, between feeling frustration with another person who

might cause you harm, with bad manners as Miller Williams says, an ill-temper or cynicism,

feeling yourself in relationship to that, the authentic expression that's arising and

...