The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

So, continuing on this theme of aspiration,

one of the really beautiful parts of compassion is this desire

for the alleviation of suffering, for suffering to come to an end.

And we're so fortunate we live in a world where people do have this aspiration, have this wish.

And because it's such a beautiful and important desire or wish,

it's important to consider the different facets of it or how to do it well.

And if we do it kind of automatic pilot about what we think it's supposed to be like,

we might do it simplistically or ways that actually might not even be helpful.

I'm involved with training people to do chaplaincy, Buddhist chaplaincy.

And there with chaplaincy is kind of in the public sphere,

one of the few maybe professions where it's much more explicit, almost like a job description,

is to bring compassionate care to patients and hospitals, to be inmates in prison,

to all kinds of different situations, to hospice, school, colleges,

many places where they have chaplains.

And one of the kind of core ideas of chaplaincy world

is that the compassionate care should be done in the service of others,

as opposed to fixing them or helping them.

There was a famous article by Rachel Noemi Raymond,

who wrote about the distinction between fixing and helping and serving.

And I'm not representing her so accurately, but speaking for myself that fixing implies that someone is broken.

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