We, like the Mother of the World, become the compassionate presence that can hold, with tenderness, the rising and passing waves of suffering.

We are waiting for the next moment to contain what this moment does not.

The mistake we make is that when we're feeling another person is not treating us in the way that makes us feel secure and loved, we fixate our attention on that person and what's wrong with them. We also fixate on what's wrong with us. Instead, we can bring forward two wings of awareness: the wing of mindfulness (noticing what's going on inside us) and the wing of kindness (compassion to what's going on inside us).

When we see the secret beauty of anyone, including ourselves, we see past our judgment and fear into the core of who we truly are - not an entrapped self but the radiance of goodness.

I mentioned earlier the two wings of awareness. The first step is recognizing the fear of getting close to others - this honest witnessing of where it is in the body, where it is in your beliefs.The other wing regards what's seen with kindness and compassion.

If our hearts are ready for anything, we can open to our inevitable losses, and to the depths of our sorrow. We can grieve our lost loves, our lost youth, our lost health, our lost capacities. This is part of our humanness, part of the expression of our love for life.

I would say both Western psychology and Eastern paths would recognize that we get caught up in feeling like a separate self and an unworthy self.