Come and sit with the Buddha, under the bodhi tree, and breathe. Breathe compassion. Did you know we actually take thousands of breaths a day, over 20,000. . . .

With the deeper understanding of compassion comes the realization we have thousands of opportunities to receive and send compassion everyday with our breath, thus helping create a new way, a way of peace upon Gaia. It can be that simple.

Compassion is one the 13 blessings and virtues given to us by the Council of Love and is defined in this way:

“The ability to Love and serve without judgment. To be able to fully understand and heart feel another’s situation without entering or assuming that cloak. The understanding that another has a chosen path and that we can only offer assistance and Love. We cannot complete another’s journey for them for that would be theft. Tenderness. It’s colours are green, red and magenta.”

Compassion spins in 3 of our chakras — our root, heart and third eye. And the colours? Think of Gaia herself, the beautiful red of a sunset, the deep, deep green of an old pine forest and the magenta of grapes, a glass of good red wine. Breathing out these colours to the world can be a way to peace, that balance of infinite strength and the knowing of the higher ways of being that enable us to co-create with our fellow Gaians, our star families and the Divine.

As we travel this journey of Ascension, every breath we breathe of compassion for ourselves, for others and for everything on the entire planet helps us to anchor in our new way of being.

The Buddha, through Linda Dillon, on Heavenly Blessings a few years ago, spoke most eloquently to us of compassion, welcoming us to sit in the silence with him in our hearts under the bodhi tree:

“I come as the wayfarer and I welcome you to come and sit with me before we pack and leave everything behind to wander the countryside, to minister, to bring hope and to demonstrate compassion.”

He invited us to let go our woes, our struggles, our old ways, to dream big and not to forget compassion for ourselves, “And then tell me your dreams, your greatest hope, the knowing of your journey because there are very few of you, and when I say that, I mean less than a handful, that truly do not know what your journey, purpose, and mission is upon this path. Sometimes you are too shy, or you judge yourself foolish, or you think the dream is too big and then you deny yourself, and when you do that you do not practice compassion.”

The average person takes between 16-20 breaths a minute. That’s 23,040 to 28,800 breaths a day — in where we can be compassionate, kind and gentle with ourselves — and out where we can be kind, gentle and compassionate to our Gaian brothers and sisters, and to everything upon this planet. The Buddha tells us compassion can be an action, within and without, with every breath we take:

“Compassion is also an action, you know, and it is not one-sided, it is in the perfect balance and compassion is what is sorely needed upon your planet of change at this time. . . in this very moment where you draw breath and exhale.”

Compassion can start at home with our elders or for a partner who may not see the journey the way we do. We see compassion can grow very rapidly with a reflective quality as the Buddha says here:

“So, when you have compassion, say in a partnership, where one is on one path and one is on another, and you have great compassion for the one that you feel does not see the Light, and they do not see what you are doing, so you practice compassion. You give it to that person as a gift, wrapped, well I prefer magenta, but what happens as soon as you do this exercise of compassion, it comes back to you ten-fold, one-hundred fold, a-thousand fold because it sucks judgment right out of the equation and it sucks the need for approval – compassion has no need for approval. This is a difficulty that so many lightworkers struggle with because often their journey is lonely – you think I do not know this? That is the wayfarer — because I walk and I wander the planet alone. I may walk with you for a while but I am alone and I am you at the same time.”

There are times we feel injured when scorned or dismissed but as the Buddha tells by turning the situation around and sending compassion, it works miracles and this is what is so needed in creating the New:

“If you switch in that moment of feeling ‘less than’, in that moment of ‘I am tired of not being seen, and understood and accepted and loved’, if you switch and you say ‘I am going to send compassion because obviously this person, this group, this organization does not understand’. So you are not judging them as the injurer, as the predator on your happiness, you let them go. You send them compassion and then you let them go, and then that compassion comes back at you. It works miraculously.”

Here is one of the Buddha’s practical tools to stop all judgement and one in which we can use our breath to receive and send compassion:

“There is a lot of mind chatter that goes on in each of your beings every single day, and it runs like ‘Oh, that’s stupid’, ‘I shouldn’t have done that’, ‘How could I do that?’, ‘That wasn’t right’, ‘Oh, I made a mistake’ and then there is some harshness. Now the difficulty with compassion, it is not permissiveness but it is never, never judgment and when you are judging yourself, as all of us have said, it is never of Love but it also diminishes you.

“So when you practice, when you stop yourself, and say, ‘No, no, compassion’ because it allows the deeper understanding, of the why, and the attachment to the higher vision, the true vision of who you are or who another is and in that way, you move along, and it is literally a practice and you are given thousands, yes, thousands of opportunities every day to practice compassion with yourself and with others. So it is to make this a practice, to stop yourself, as if you have a hiccup and to say. ‘Well, is that of judgment or is that of compassion?’ until it is simply, wonderfully, completely, second nature.”

Compassion calls up our Divinity, rather than the need to defend, as the Buddha says, “Very often judgment is quite personal and even when you say it in a general way, if you peel that banana then what you find is that you are truly judging or criticizing an individual, that is what it comes down to and therefore you are not recognizing the Divinity within them. You are calling out to that Divinity to rise up, that is what compassion does, it calls out for that Divine spark to rise up, rather than to assume an ego defensive stance and you want the defensiveness, the need to defend to be gone, it serves no purpose.”

It is to make compassion a habit but also to know that we don’t always have the fullness of the picture or the complete understanding. The Buddha tells us, “There are those upon your planet who have played very dark roles, knowingly and unwittingly but what it has done has brought to the forefront the anathema that this kind of behavior cannot be tolerated, that you do not choose, as the human collective, to go in that direction and so yes, you practice compassion.”

The Buddha says compassion does not imply agreement, “So it does not mean in stepping back that you say, ‘Oh, I agree, I will not interfere with the practice of genocide because I am practicing agreement.’ No, no, no. You are practicing compassion and you are holding the higher vision while taking sensible action and going forward, not contributing to the chaos and the mayhem but holding the higher vision.” He says compassion is infinite, just as our potential for complete enlightenment is. When we send compassion to those we discern are caught on a treadmill of the old, we are holding the highest vision for All:

“Compassion tends to be quite quiet, you know, because the flip side of this ‘you are doing the best you can’ is the same as ‘I know you can do better’ and that is judgment as well – you are not doing good enough, you are not measuring up to some standard that I have. The question is, ‘What is your heart’s desire? Do you feel that you are doing, in every way, what you desire and want to do? Do you feel in every moment of every day that you are the fullness of who you are?’ That is the question and it is up to the person to respond because what you are saying in that question is, ‘I support you, in what you desire in your path. I’m not expressing agreement or disagreement; I am supporting you in Love.’

“There are very few beings upon your planet who, when approached in that way, with such unconditional support and permission to become, that do not flourish because in that question is also the opening for a very human conversation, ‘You know, I’ve always wanted to try and do this, but I have self-defeating mechanisms’ and then there is advice and sharing and that is different than compassion, it is true heart conversation.”

The Buddha gives us his heart of compassion. He shares his being with each of us, that we may draw upon it and the knowing there is infinite Divine strength for all and everything, as we walk, talk and breathe compassion along our Ascension path to Nova Earth.