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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

So hello from this Tuesday, second day for our series on compassionate action.

And before I start, I want to mention that I also noticed that the link to this YouTube channel in some of the places on IMC is inaccurate.

And I'll see what we can do to fix it today.

If you go to the homepage for IMC's YouTube channel, there's a square there for what's being broadcast live, so that's one way to get to it.

And hopefully by tomorrow, the links that are will be repaired.

So here on the issue of compassionate action yesterday's talk was about focusing on compassionate action for the sake of others.

And that is commonly how compassion is understood that we're caring for others.

But equally important is that our compassion for others should also include a care for ourselves to have actions to help and support others for what own sake as well, that as much as Buddhism might talk about not self and not living from selfishness and self-centeredness.

There is an emphasis on really being responsible or caring, monitoring carefully this inner life of our own, and to care for it, that this too is important to have compassion for.

This too is important to bring care and friendliness to.

And in terms of compassionate action in the world, having compassion for others and acting on that compassion,

so that focus might be on doing things for others, but as we do it, we should also do it for our own sake.

And that means two things. One thing it means is don't abandon yourself as you do it. Don't give yourself away.

Sacrifice, don't easily sacrifice your own well-being and welfare for the sake of supporting and helping other people. It's not necessary.

There are sometimes we become uncomfortable, sometimes our comfort level of sacrifice for the well-being of others, sometimes we do sacrifice certain things for others.

But don't sacrifice, don't abandon yourself. Don't give up on staying connected to the practice for yourself, monitoring yourself, knowing when you get attached and when you are getting stressed, when you get contracted, when you get afraid,

when you get overly anxious in what you are doing and override the compassion by despair or dismay or a sense of obligation and fear of consequences if you don't do the action.

So the principle that to have compassion and action in the world in a way that also is for your own sake, so that you benefit from it, so that it's a way of caring for yourself simultaneously as it is caring for others.

This caring for others and caring for oneself does not need to be two separate things. And many times the idea of compassion is considered to be almost synonymous with being altruistic.

And that's often synonymous with the kind of giving up from oneself, abandoning oneself. And sometimes Buddhist teachers will even say that, as I said yesterday, that one of the purposes of being compassionate is for your own happiness and well-being by giving up on your selfishness or self-centeredness.

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