The greatest healing comes not from without but from within. The greatest healing comes in reconciling with the self. The greatest healing comes in being honest with the self. The greatest healing comes in fully knowing the self. The greatest healing comes in being able to forgive the self. The greatest healing comes from the compassionate heart that turns to the self and says: I love you. Now that’s healing!
-From the Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne
Without judgment of self and other take your journey through life, knowing that as your life unfolds it brings you many gifts in many disguises. As you accept your gifts without judgment allow them to bring you their messages and their potential so that you may grow each day into the being you truly are. Allow your experiences in life to guide you to the work to be done, letting them show you your personal lessons so that this life may be as fulfilling as possible. Do not be so afraid of life, but love it and embrace it without judgment. Let it lead you into a life of compassion and understanding of yourself so that you may have greater compassion and understanding of others. Judge not that you may know compassion. Now that is a wonderful life indeed!
-From the Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne
Bring the warmth of the sun into your heart and spread your love like silent golden sunbeams. Bring the light of the moon into your heart and let your love shine like silvery moonbeams. Bring awareness of yourself as part of the whole into your heart, one among many, and let that knowing stir you to compassion for all you share the planet with. Look upon the earth at your feet and the sky above your head and give thanks for this day and this time, for the privilege of walking upon the giving earth among the many, with the golden warmth of the sun and the silvery light of the moon always shining down upon you—riches indeed!
-From the Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne
In the 1970s I lived in Sweden. I went there to live with my boyfriend. He later became my first husband. Entry into the country on a visa was easy. Since I was living with him, I had no problem. Had I been a refugee the process would have been a bit different but not too much more difficult had I been able to prove refugee status. After six months my visa was renewed for another six months. Permanent residency took a lot longer to achieve. We waited somewhat nervously for the authorities to approve my staying on. Eventually, after several years, full residency was granted.
As soon as I entered the country and applied to stay on, however, I was automatically granted entry into the system, into the state medical plan, into the sick leave plan, into higher education should I want it, into Swedish language classes. If I remember correctly I could vote too, at least in local elections. There were schools for retraining. Had I arrived with no discernible means of making a living I could have retrained, for free, in any number of occupations or skill sets. It’s a Socialist country after all.
The Swedes have had a working system in place for dealing with migrants and refugees for a long time. During World War II they began taking in people fleeing the Nazis. I knew of a couple, in their late fifties when I met them, who had escaped from Germany, as seventeen year olds, along with a group of other children of all ages, led by members of the underground, all heading to Sweden where they were welcomed with open arms. They traveled on foot for weeks during the cold winter months. The woman, Dora, lost several toes from frostbite. She and Herman met on that long trek, fell in love and married upon arrival in Sweden. They were inseparable.
They told of being compassionately cared for upon arrival, given everything they needed, though they were frightened and couldn’t speak the language. They were given the opportunity for new life and they never forgot it. They spoke always with gratitude for the compassionate people who had risked their own lives to help them along the way and for the Swedes who took them in. They did learn to speak the language fluently and eventually became Swedish citizens.
Sweden, whose population had been slowly dwindling, had invited in foreign workers during the 1960s and 70s to temporarily work in the car manufacturing plants, providing badly needed labor making Volvos and Saabs. By the time I arrived their intake system was well established and pretty seamless.
I read in an article in The Telegraph the other day, that along with Germany, another country that also took in guest workers during the 60s and 70s, Sweden is one of the key destinations for the Syrian migrants as it is offering permanent residency to all Syrian asylum seekers. That’s compassion. It has already gotten 64,700 requests for asylum. For a small country that’s an awful lot.
The article in The Telegraph addressed the dilemma that the Danish police faced as they tried to stop the migrants, who had come by ferry from Germany, from entering Denmark. The migrants had no intention of staying in Denmark; they just wanted to pass through. Many were attempting to walk along the highways in the direction of Sweden when they were stopped.
After a while the Danish police released the migrants. They did not want to fight or harm anyone. They let them stream into their country. They opened their borders for that moment and let the people go to whatever fate they chose. No borders that day.
There is no easy solution to what is happening to the Syrians and others who are running as fast as they can from the approaching apocalypse, as they see it, but perhaps the compassionate Danes, in stepping aside and letting those desperate people travel safely through their country, offer one solution. And perhaps that’s all it will take, at least for the time being, making decisions based on what is right in the moment. True, they could have also let in ISIS adherents traveling among the migrants, but they took that chance for the betterment of some many hundreds of lives.
It’s always time for compassion,
Jan
Read the article here: Denmark Blocks Motorway
They say that to truly experience something we should walk in the shoes of another. To fully experience another’s pain and another’s joy, to weather the good times and the bad, to be discriminated against, to be judged, to be turned away for some reason, hated for some reason, or despised because of who we are is the road to compassion.
Compassion however begins at home, within the self. If we never turn inward and never gain insight into what makes us tick we will never be able to truly experience compassion. We might say we are compassionate beings, but compassion is without borders, without restriction, and compassion does not discriminate.
Compassion takes the view that we are all the same, souls on evolutionary journeys, that we are all beings of light and energy, with endlessly infinite possibility. To find out if we are truly compassionate beings, we must ask ourselves: Do I truly see everyone that way, as beings of light and energy? And then we must be honest with what arises from deep within.
Today, as I read the news of the great migrations into Europe, I see a microcosm of what is to come, the same energy on the move that is happening on an environmental level. Things are being destroyed in one form or another and living beings, evolutionarily keyed to survival, are moving to better, higher, cooler ground. It’s happening all over the planet; species are dying; extinctions are happening.
I do believe that people, on the whole, are compassionate, caring beings. But at the same time they are afraid of change, of anything that might impose on their stable existence. Let others suffer, but don’t bring any of your personal problems into my backyard. Well, I think we all have to get used to the fact that the problems belong to all of us and this world is all one big backyard now. We’ve all made it that way. And just as true compassion is without borders, we have to have a world without borders too, if we are to truly be the compassionate beings we say we are.
So many people are fearful of others, fearful of their differences, perceived ideas of things they know nothing about, perpetuating stories and lies that have circulated the globe like folktales, harbingers of hate and discrimination. In the end we are all flesh and blood, with emotions and feelings, as mixed up and confused as the next person, and we are all facing death at the end of our time here. There is nothing that makes us different there.
Fear keeps us isolated and contained. But fear is usually something inside us, something that has been festering and brewing since childhood, things we were taught that may not be true at all. When we face our own personal fears in the right way, with compassion for ourselves and those who hurt, discriminate, or cause us pain, we access our fearlessness. And true compassion is fearless too. In facing our fears and our pain with compassion we release ourselves of all that keeps us locked in and locked out of the truly compassionate world we all wish for.
Perhaps the new world we all wish for will have a new name, no longer called Earth, it will be called Compassion. To become ready to walk down the road toward Compassion, we must first walk down our personal road of fear, and meet head on all that confronts us as we migrate through the borders and fears within. It is the only way to reach Compassion.
One at a time, if we take the trip we can make the world truly compassionate, fearless, without borders, nobody excluded, anywhere. That is the new world of Compassion.
On the road to Compassion,
Jan