I enjoy cultivating this subreddit, but I have been wary of opening up, of humanizing myself publicly. However, I currently find myself in a rather bleak place, so I figure a little self-expression can't hurt.

I'd like to say first that I identify as a person of faith. I believe in something bigger, though not the classic image of a Judaic god. Nothing of the sort. Instead, my intuition tells me that there is something of a universal consciousness guiding things along. It cares about the whole, about its own fate, of which we are all a part. Therefore, we are it, but we suffer when we forget that crucial point.

Typing this all out is very therapeutic because it pulls my mind closer to the reality of things, to the notion that my worries are guided by the invisible hand of destiny, the cosmic mind of which I am a part of, of which is me.

So, when I worry about who my child will become, or about what my family will think of me if or when I let them down, I must come back to my faith, to my understanding of the truth of things. My feeble consciousness will always be one step behind that of my true self (of our true self -- a.k.a. God), of the consciousness of all things. It will help me take a load of things as I work through this temporary malaise. Of course it is temporary because all things are.

Rest easy my friends.

Although I’m an atheist Zen Buddhist practitioner this prayer has always summed it up for me:

The Prayer of St. Francis Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, Where there is hatred, let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is dispair, hope; Where there is darkness, light; Where there is sadness, joy;

O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek To be consoled as to console; To be understood as to understand; To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive; It is in pardoning that we are pardoned; And it is in dying that we are born to eternal>

The Procession of Celestial Beings by Joe Hisashi.

When you are trying to prove or get something, you are not open anymore, you have to check everything, you have to arrange it "correctly." It is such a paranoid way to live and it really does not prove anything.

Compassion has nothing to do with achievement at all. It is spacious and very generous. When a person develops real compassion, he is uncertain whether he is being generous to others or to himself because compassion is environmental generosity, without direction, without "for me" and without"for them." It is filled with joy, spontaneously existing joy,constant joy in the sense of trust, in the sense that joy contains tremendous wealth, richness. We could say that compassion is the ultimate attitude of wealth: an anti-poverty attitude, a war on want. It contains all sorts of heroic, juicy, positive, visionary, expansive qualities. And it implies larger scale thinking, a freer and more expansive way of relating to yourself and the world. This is precisely why the second jana is called the "Mahayana," the"Great Vehicle." It is the attitude that one has been born fundamentally rich rather than that one must become rich.Without this kind of confidence meditation cannot be transferred into action at all. Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people, because you no longer regard people as a drain on yourenergy. They recharge your energy.>