Cattāri Brahmavihārā

I undertake the training rule to be of service to others, sacrificing my own comfort for their benefit.

Family life provides no end to opportunities for being of service, sacrificing one’s own comfort for the good of others and for helping others to assuage the myriad minor sufferings of quotidian existence. And yet I have spenr most of my life resentful of those closest to me, always feeling as if I had an unfair share of the burden while others were “getting away with it.”  I shudder to think about the kammic inheritance I have left for mself but today at least things can change.

By realizing that my family now were strangers in a past lives and strangers may have been parents or children in another birth I can slowly chip away at the conditioning of a lifetime which, in modern American society at least, seeks to place blame on one’s family for the ills and injustices of life rather than regarding them with eyes of gratitude, love and devotion. Maybe it’s a sign of degenerate times or just a result of my own kamma but if we cannot serve and love our own families we are surely far from the path.

May we serve all beings and not least those who are closest to us in this life.