Episode 18: Hearing the Cries of the World

One Heart One Mind

Thomas McConkie

Meditation, Spirituality, Mindfulness, Contemplation, Psychology, Buddhism, Development, Thomasmcconkie, Religion & Spirituality

5 • 632 Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2022

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When we open up to the suffering on the planet, we soon realize that we, the “small self”, are not nearly big enough to contain it all. To really hold suffering in our heart and help to relieve it, we must get bigger—a move from the relative to the Absolute. In Buddhism, there is a Bodhisattva, or awakened being, who models just this: Kuan Yin (Chinese translation). Her name means “she who hears the cries of the world.” As a new war wages in Ukraine, it is an especially important moment to learn to get Big, to hold it together; to hear the cries of the world.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus.
0:15.0	I'm your host Thomas Mekonki. Thanks so much for listening today. I record today's episode with a bit of a heavy heart.
0:27.4	I'm sure many, if not all of you are aware of the world events unfolding right now.
0:34.4	The war in Ukraine, the profound impact that's going to have on every being on the planet already
0:43.5	is having. I felt that an appropriate episode today would just be a meditation and learning
0:51.6	how to hold this in our hearts from a more practice-oriented point
0:55.9	of view. Before I get into the meditation proper, a couple of things I want to say. First, I'm
1:04.5	not here to politicize this. I know the world is complex and people are complex and many
1:09.8	perspectives exist within this space. I'm not here to
1:13.1	promote the virtue or the superiority of any particular view other than there is pain and
1:21.7	there is suffering in the world. Essentially that. And the challenge, what do I want to say about this challenge, especially in a digital
1:35.5	age where information travels very quickly, we can read a story, we can read a headline
1:43.1	about a bombing, about civilian deaths, about this and that.
1:48.7	And we feel helpless.
1:52.2	It's so far removed from us, what do I do?
1:55.1	Not only that, but it's hard to look away from the news.
1:59.0	So we keep reading more and more news and it piles up like so much
2:04.2	undigested food in our gut and we can start to feel sick and glutted with information.
2:12.9	Something as intense as war, as violence and death, it can shock the system and we don't know
2:22.5	how to process it.
2:23.7	And one of the great practices that I'm familiar with through the Buddhist tradition, though,
2:29.8	it's not the only tradition that highlights this teaching. To really be open to reality, reality that we
	...

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