It is an ordinary Wednesday morning, I'm just arriving at my agency. Park the car, go upstairs, say hello to still somewhat sleepy colleagues on the way to my room. Wake up the screen and sign in to online banking. Like most of the mornings.
SHOCK! Red numbers. BIG red numbers, right in front of me on the screen, and it´s MY business account. Nothing to interpret, nothing to reconfirm, this is a matter of fact - the account is not only in the red, it's close to its limit. And it's only a few days until salaries have to be paid. In plain language: big problems ahead.

I just finished reading „In the Shadow of the Buddha“ by Matteo Pistono. It´s a fascinating book about a nearly decade-long pilgrimage through Tibet, on the footsteps of a great master of the past. And it’s also a detailed description of the author´s inner journey, a journey through the various levels of meditation.

After 8 years of sometimes dangerous travels, Matteo arrives at the last sacred place that his teacher had told him to go to – and finds a completely devastated, “empty” and abandoned place at the end of the world. Right there, with all his expectations being crashed, he has a fundamental insight.

Developing attention, a step towards compassion?

In the West, we often think that it is simply selfish to be sitting on a meditation cushion. There is so much suffering in the world, how can meditation be of any use to help relieve it?

In this TED talk, Daniel Goleman shows how developing our mindfulness and attention is such a key step towards compassion (see also Erric's post from 28 April).
Daniel is the author of the ground-breaking books Emotional intelligence and Social Intelligence as well as speaker at the Mind & Life Conference and at The Wisdom of Awareness
 Understanding the mind and transforming the heart through meditation, love and compassion retreat led by Sogyal Rinpoche and Tsoknyi Rinpoche.

You may have experienced that meditation develops our attention and care towards our own body and mind, well the good news is that it will also develop develop our attention and care towards others. And it can work whether stories of the Good Samaritan did it for you or not.

I was born and raised in Bavaria. Yes, I know, everybody around the world who´s ever heard of that place, now thinks of Sauerkraut, Beer, Oktoberfest. (If you did think of something else, you are probably also Bavarian.) In fact, that´s all true. It´s also true that it´s a really wonderful part of Germany with huge mountains and romantic hills, lots of lakes and rivers, and in some ways I miss it. And it´s also very Roman-Catholic, nowadays, and definitely when I lived there.  That´s why  my spiritual path began as a pioneer in “What a Roman Catholic mass really can be”.

Gaps fascinate me. They have a great and completely underestimated potential. They separate things, they are the space between. One could even say that it would be really difficult to distinguish anything, to say where one thing ends and another starts, without gaps. And the interesting thing about them is that they do not only separate physical objects, but also mental "objects". And that's where they become really relevant for meditation.

Just now, I had a treatment at the dentist. To be exact, it was one long treatment in two steps on two days. It was one of those really unpleasant treatments, opened by a countless number of injections all over the mouth, followed by horrible noises and massive mechanical interaction during which the little snatches of pain arriving at your nerves give you a glimpse of what it would feel like if you wouldn't have a tea cup of anesthetics inside your gums. So in one phrase: the whole program of experiences that make those visits at the dentist a nightmare for 9 out of 10 people.

But this time it was different. Or, it was the same but it felt completely different. Why? Because I had made a decision before.