Update on 1/19/19:  My memoir, Angels in the OR: What Dying Taught Me About Healing, Survival, and Transformation, can be pre-ordered now. It is a #1 new release in several categories.  I would love it if you helped me make near-death experiences more mainstream.

Just Remember Compassion

Go ahead and work hard to manifest every single one of your dreams.  Build the company you wanted to build.  Start the non-profit.  Win the awards you dreamed of winning, but don’t forget compassion.

Go ahead and marry the guy or girl many others wanted.  Travel to Cozumel, Tahiti, and Rome.  Get a new home every decade and move up in your company, but don’t forget compassion.

Go ahead and train for your first race.  Win and keep training.  Take your efforts to their maximum and beyond. Smile for the cameras as everyone watches as you blast into fame in those blessed 500 meters of your life, but don’t forget compassion.

Go ahead and write the novel that gets a big publishing contract.  Get the movie deal and the house in Encinitas, but don’t forget compassion.

Because…the business can fail, the non-profit can flounder, and awards can be a thing of the past.  Divorce, sickness, and disaster is the rain that falls into many lives, and athletes whose faces were known around the world in their twenties sometimes have trouble getting out of bed in their forties or fifties, their bodies wracked with pain.  The writer who was the envy of all his or her peers sometimes dies alone with a television or a cat, so extend compassion to everyone like it is breath.

When you judge another’s weaknesses, you judge yourself because we will all succumb to frailty.  The flower blooms, but even when we are green, we are also dying.  Even when we are dying though, we are sometimes simply learning what it means to live with compassion for all beings.

So, why not learn the lesson now?  Why not live as if you are already home?  Have compassion for everyone on God’s green earth and everyone who has come before you and everyone who will come after you.

During my near-death experience, one of the aspects of the divine love of God was compassion.  There were many aspects to this megadose of love, but compassion was one of the feelings.  To simply feel God’s acceptance and love as I was without judgment seemed way out of the ordinary for me.  In my life before my NDE, I encountered people who were often judgmental, and I didn’t always extend compassion myself.

The longer I live, the more I realize that one of the most important things we can do is to extend compassion both to ourselves and others in all moments of life, even in small moments when we are frustrated in traffic or unable to sleep.  Try showing yourself a bit more compassion.  The very act of showing compassion for yourself seems to free up space and allows things to shift.