Frank Ostaseski, Founder & Director Metta Institute, Five Precepts
The Second Precept: Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience
In the process of healing others and ourselves we open to both our joy and fear. In the service of this healing we draw on our strength and helplessness, our wounds and passion to discover a meeting place with the other. Professional warmth doesn’t heal. It is not our expertise but the exploration of our own suffering that enables us to be of real assistance. That’s what allows us to touch another human being’s pain with compassion instead of with fear and pity. We have to invite it all in. We can’t travel with others in territory that we haven’t explored ourselves. It is the exploration of our own inner life that enables us to form an empathetic bridge to the other person.
Frank Ostaseski is a Zen chaplain who has developed five precepts as companions on the journey of accompanying the dying. The precepts are also deeply meaningful in other aspects of life.
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Doing the work to become fully ourselves often feels self-indulgent. Yet this is how we really heal others and ourselves. It’s not easy to find a way to be that uses all of the gifts that God has given us so that we are fully alive, but when we do we bring greater aliveness to those around us. In order to do this, we must reclaim all our emotions, even the ones we would like to disown and pretend have nothing to do with us.
Loving God, please give me the strength and courage to be myself, bringing all of my parts together and living all of the life that you have given me, healing others with my wholeness and my brokenness. Give me the courage and insight to see myself as I am and accept all of it as gift.
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