Hanno's question & Tara Brach's response (20:05 - 27:15)

Please Call Me by My True Name - read by Thich Nhat Hanh

     If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
           - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

     Judge tenderly, if you must. There is usually a side you have not heard, a story you know nothing about, and a battle waged you are not having to fight.
           - Traci Lea LaRussa

     Imagine walking along a sidewalk with your arms full of groceries, and someone roughly bumps into you so that you fall and your groceries are strewn over the ground. As you rise up from the puddle of broken eggs and tomato juice, you are ready to shout out, "You idiot! What's wrong with you? Are you blind?" But just before you can catch your breath to speak, you see that the person who bumped you is actually blind. He, too, is sprawled in the spilled groceries, and your anger vanishes in an instant, to be replaced by sympathetic concern: "Are you hurt? Can I help you up?"
     Our situation is like that. When we clearly realize that the source of disharmony and misery in the world is ignorance, we can open the door of wisdom and compassion. Then we are in a position to heal ourselves and others.
           - from Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground Up by B. Alan Wallace

     An elderly monk found his way to Dharamsala in India after twenty years of imprisonment. Meeting with the Dalai Lama, he told his story, recounting the years of torture, brutality, and isolation. Then the Dalai Lama asked the monk, "Was there any time you felt that your life was truly in danger?" The old monk answered, "The only times I felt deeply endangered were the moments I felt in danger of losing my compassion for my jailers." This is a story of a profound commitment to compassion, a story of faith and forbearance that bears witness to a human being's dedication to keeping his heart and dignity intact in the face of the greatest adversity. The stooped, wrinkled old monk was a simple man without credentials, education, or sophistication. He was also a man with a remarkable heart, who had chosen to forsake the pathways of bitterness and rage, knowing that in following those ways he risked losing what was most precious to him - the home he had made in compassion.
           - from Compassion: Listening to the Cries of the World by Christina Feldman

     When someone disagrees strongly with something to which we are strongly attached, it's easy to dismiss them as people, even see them as somehow less than human. In 1994, there was a shooting at a Planned Parenthood Clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts that killed two people and wounded five. Not long after, a group of six people gathered together to meet in dialogue, three pro-life advocates and three pro-choice advocates. They met, in secret, over a period of five years. Their goal was not to convince each other of their respective points of view, but to come to understand each other, and to discover together how they could help prevent future killings. About this dialogue, Krista Tippett, of the Civil Conversations Project, says: By the end, they said that "None of us at the end of it had changed our position on abortion." In some ways "we were all more articulate at the end of these five years about where we are on the position." But they also said that they could never demonize the other side, now that they had come to love and treasure these people.
           - from Tricycle Buddhist Review, Spring 2013