I have heard that you have had a difficult situation with your husband. It is good that you were able to separate from him. It’s very important always to remember one’s own past life negative karma: in the past you treated him the same way. It’s good to remember this, so you don’t get angry with him. Because you treated him badly in a past life, he treated you badly, and that will cause him to be reborn in the lower realms. That’s how to develop compassion.
Think also, “I did similar things to him in the past.” This is also the way to think about others who harm you.
This shows the nature of samsara. Think, “The situation is this: I must be liberated from samsara. Therefore, I must practice Dharma. There is no other way.”
All the problems you experience are teaching you and persuading you to practice Dharma. They remind you to abandon negative karma and always to generate good karma.
“I must experience problems with compassion”—this means for the benefit of all sentient beings. There are numberless others whose problems are greater than yours, and you are just one person. Even calculating with these numbers, think, “How wonderful for me to experience all suffering and its cause, and let them have all happiness up to the highest happiness of enlightenment. I am just one person. Whether I am reborn even in the hell realms or whether I achieve liberation, it is nothing.” Perform this meditation whenever you can, morning and evening.
Everything you receive comes from the kindness of every sentient being. They are the most precious beings for you, so take on all their suffering, with compassion, in the form of pollution or smoke. Give it to your ego. It becomes totally non-existent, and so does the emotional “I.” It becomes non-existent, as it is non-existent. Perform this meditation from time to time.
Meditate on loving kindness, also, wishing all sentient beings to have temporal and ultimate happiness. Give all your past, present, and future happiness to every sentient being. Visualize that it becomes whatever they want or need. That causes them to actualize the path, and that path causes them to eliminate all their defilements.
Visualize yourself as Chenrezig, Tara, or Buddha whenever you experience problems, sickness, or relationship problems. Think, “I am experiencing this for sentient beings.” Even when you are dying, perform the same meditation. It is the best way of dying. Practicing it during your life is the best way of living: you live and die for others who are experiencing the cycle of death.
However much compassion you generate toward one sentient being, however much service you offer, that much more extensive merit and that much more purification of past karma you accomplish, and thereby that much closer you become to enlightenment and to the end of samsara and its oceans of suffering.
If you don’t generate compassion, you don’t receive any of these vast benefits. Other beings are the most kind ones in your life. Those you should cherish are only others. Those you should work for are only other sentient beings. What they need is happiness, up to enlightenment. What they don’t need is suffering. It is your responsibility to accomplish this for all sentient beings. Therefore, you need to achieve enlightenment, to actualize the path, to meditate, to transform whatever you do in daily life into the path, doing everything for others, only for their benefit.
