“Love is our true essence. Love has no limitations of caste, religion, race or nationality. We are all beads strung together on the same thread of love.”
This is a quote from Amma, an incarnation and representation of the divine mother (madre de Dios).
She continues…
“I saw children of some families lying around, tired and starving, while those of other families ate. I saw old people crying with no one to care for them and wash their clothes or love them. When I came face to face with this life, I wanted to die. I wanted to die in fire, in pain. Why was it like this? Was it their fate? If someone falls into a pit, it’s god’s duty to help them. That makes it my duty too, that’s how I began.”
“The compassion and love that you show to the beggar is the real devotion to God. This is what Amma wants Her children to do.”
How Can We Parent with Compassion?
Compassion for our own children begins with compassion for ourselves. Our children are born in a relative state of innocence. They are pure. Yet this divine purity is not reflected in the world, or by us as parents. As a result of this, our children will feel pain. They feel pain because they are merged with us. And they are therefore merged with our own darkness, as well as our own light. To parent with compassion we must feel and hold a space of compassion for ourselves. But how does one do this?
Step 1. Acknowledge the part of yourself that feels a lack of compassion towards yourself or others.
Step 2. Notice if you have any judgement about this part of yourself?
Step 3. Invite in the feeling of forgiveness or compassion into the place that doesn’t feel compassionate. This can be done by using a religious figure, a feeling from the past where you felt compassionate, or were you remember someone being compassionate towards you.
Step 4. Visualize compassion and see it flowing through you.
Step 5. Understand that what your children do, they have little control over. They make mistakes, just like you. Compassion is a divine quality.
