Perhaps the greatest need we have as human beings is to love and to be loved. Our capacity to love is directly related to being able to open up our heart at its deepest level. We spend most of our lives closed off to other people’s suffering. It is as we are afraid that if we get to close we will somehow get drawn into another person’s suffering.
Opening ourselves up to other people’s suffering is called compassion. This is difficult for most people to do because of the nature of our world. We live to majority of our life in our ego which is based in fear. We don’t want to open up and show true heartfelt compassion to others for fear that we will be hurt.
In order to show true compassion for others you must transform from your ego to a spirit guided life. One of the best ways I have found to connect with your spirit and live from that highest frequency is by learning to bless everyone. When you bless everyone it opens up a path to eventually being able to love everyone unconditionally.
There are particular techniques for blessing others that are very powerful. Most religions have standard formulas for blessing people. My two favorite blessings come for the Christian and Tibetan traditions. In the Christian tradition the blessing is, “May the peace of God which passeth all understanding be with you now and forever.”
There are certain words in this blessing that I find very powerful: “which passeth all understanding.” This means that which transcends the intellect, that which is beyond our judgment. “Peace of God”, is the silence of the ocean of being which is always there beyond our understanding, beyond our thoughts. May everyone have this peace, how can anyone ever argue with that? How can we not wish that for everyone? Whether it is for someone we consider a friend or an enemy?
In the Tibetan tradition the blessing is, “Om mani padme hum.” In this wonderful blessing “Om” invokes the infinite, enlightenment, fulfillment; it is the jewel we are always searching for at any moment in our life. “Padme” means lotus, that which spreads everywhere and is found everywhere including in our own heart.
Most people wish other people the best, so let’s say for example you notice a homeless person on a street corner. You could wish him to find a job, better judgment, good health, to find a home and have a better life. This tries to encompass too much for the person because you can continually find more and more wishes for the person and it never ends. Instead, it’s better to silently bless the person. By blessing the person you are wishing him or her the jewel of existence, which is found everywhere including in ourselves.
The way I bless people and advise my clients is to just walk through crowds such as when you are in a mall, a movie theatre or even the DMV and an silently or quietly under your breath say either the Christian or Tibetan blessings. When we bless another person we witness their true self, their spirit.
There has always been much disagreement over the ages between spiritual masters and teachers as to whether or not blessing another person actually helps him or her but what they all agree on is that it does something very powerful for us when we do it.
Blessing other people pokes holes in the hard outer shell of our ego and shatters it. It moves us out of our intellect where we have the false belief that somehow we are better than someone else because of the amount of money we make or a certain title or position we may have. It liberates us and moves us into the identity of our spirit.
Rather than going through life moment to moment trying to keep everyone else’s suffering at arm’s length blessing a person invites compassion in and opens our heart to the suffering of others and in the process we discover that it doesn’t hurt us. Our heart is big enough to transform it.
The English Poet, William Blake wrote, “Love to faults is always blind, always is to joy inclined. Lawless winged, and unconfined, and breaks all chains from every mind.”
Whatever type of blessing resonates for you to bestow on others it will expand your heart and your ability to love unconditionally. We don’t have to be told to love one another we just do. Love can’t be forced. It has to grow in our lives. This is transformational power of blessing.
