Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘One of my students wrote to me that they were having a lot of visceral response to this recent example of cruelty in the news, and asked, “What value does the Dharma have in the face of that?” 

I felt such tenderness toward this person.

A great value of the teaching is that we can feel these visceral responses and find a refuge in ourselves through attention and untangling it…

As we learn to practice being in refuge in our own bodies, we can widen out to include the bodies of our communities and the body of the earth itself.

This connectedness is perhaps only doable if we are non-separating from our own bodies as a starting place. When we are in denial of the pain in our own bodies, we are so much less likely to be able to make room for the pain of other people and beings in the world.

The specificity of our experience in our bodies—to feel our bodies, our breath, and our heartbeat, and to slow down and experience what we’re actually experiencing—is so important.’ (from Slow Down. Help Out. Wake Up.)