Meditation Encourages Compassion

dose of calmness. Every weekday morning, I'll share a meditation story, offer a simple practical tip about how you or a loved one can stay a bit calmer in your life, and then we'll end each episode together with a moment of gratitude. My hope is that I can share what I know to anyone who needs it. Ready, sit comfortably, take a few deep breaths, and let's begin today's journey. I want to tell you about a man named Joseph

who I met in New York City. Joseph was in a facility that was really a one year vocational training program for men who had been rescued from the streets, and they were trained in a skill so when they left they would have a job to return to their families and their neighborhoods with. But the center also knew

that a job alone was not enough. They were going to need tools to help them manage the stress and the pressures and the temptations when they went back to their neighborhoods, went back to their families that would help prevent them from returning to their life of often substance

use disorder. We had been invited to come and teach transcendentle meditation to the men in this program, and there was one man there in particular that I remember, Joseph, who when I heard his story, it had a very transformational effect in my life and I think about him often. So Joseph had a master's degree in philosophy from Yale, and he did what any self respecting philosophy student would do.

He got a job on Wallt's for you in a brokerage firm, and he had a very successful career, and he had a wife and two children and a great job working in the Twin Towers. So this is where the story changes. On September two thousand and one, Joseph left the Twin Towers his office to run an errand fifteen minutes before a plane hit, all of Joseph's colleagues were killed. The trauma from that, the guilt from that,

the anger from that absolutely devastated Joseph. And while he was never a drinker in college, he started to abuse alcohol to mask his pain, and he started drinking so much that he got violent. And even though the parent company for which he worked offered him a lot of support, therapy and everything, Joseph didn't take advantage of it. He

continued down his downward spiral. His wife and children laught, he lost his job, he lost his house, and within eight months Joseph was homeless and he lived that way for ten years and then he entered this shelter slash vocational program. For Joseph when he was at Yale, one reason why he became a philosophy major is he was really interested in the deeper values of life and he had a firm conviction that deep within every human being

there was a field of common good. And he got his job and never found a way to have that experience. Fast forward and I'm talking to Joseph and he's loving his meditation and I asked him why, and he said, he feels more relaxed, more focused, But he said there's something more that connection that he was looking for his whole life. He found in the meditation, in the transcending

and the transcendental meditation. And he said, isn't it interesting that something I spent my whole life seeking that it took me ending up in a homeless shelter where I would learn a meditation technique that would give me the experience of what I had been seeking for twenty five years. And I thought to myself, powerful experience for Joseph, but a powerful awakening experience for me. Before meeting Joseph, I would have just walked by and not given a thought.

But I realized now that every homeless person has a backstory. Every homeless person was once a six month old kid crawling across the kitchen floor, and that traumas often brought on at an early age, shaped and distorted joseph life and others lives, so they end up homeless. All homeless in New York City at one time, we're veterans with PTSD. I thank Joseph for making me a more compassionate person. And I realized that compassion isn't something you can artificially manufacture.

If I'm stressed, if I'm angry, if I'm agitated, if I'm irritated I can't be compassionate, but I'd like to live that way. So the first step in compassion, I realized, is being compassionate towards oneself. And first and foremost for that is meditation. A meditation that gives you access to that field of common good, that field of silence, that field of peace that lies within everyone. It's not a religious thought, it's not a philosophical thought. It exists within everyone.

And from that basis we can live a compassionate life. All right, let's end this time together doing something that I think should be a feature of our everyday life, and that's appreciation and gratitude. So let's take thirty seconds of quiet, thirty seconds to take a break, just take a moment. It turns out when we do that it's good for our health as well. I'll be right back, all right. Thank you for joining. This is Bob Roth.

Keep calm, Thanks for listening today. I hope you heard something that inspires that uplifts you and that you can incorporate into your own life. Until next time, remember, meditate, be kind, and be true to yourself. Hey, all of you out there, I'd love to hear from you. You can send me your stories, your questions, or anything else on your mind. Just connect with me on Twitter, Facebook,

or Instagram at hashtag meditation Bob. You can also send me an email at meditation Bob Roth at gmail dot com. I look forward to hearing from you.