Practicing peace

I was recently rereading the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., and I understood once again that the whole movement was based on love—love that doesn’t exclude anybody. This is also the Buddhist idea of love. In this view, you want everybody to be healed.

Now, some political activists might say, “OK, but nothing will ever change just by holding that all-inclusive, loving view.” But the truth is, when you take that view and you begin to live by it, something begins to shift very dramatically and you begin to see things in a different way. You begin to have the clarity to see injustice happening, but you can also see that injustice, by its very definition, is harming everybody involved. It’s harming the people who are being oppressed or abused, and it’s harming those who are oppressing and abusing. — Pema Chodron, excerpted from Practicing Peace in Times of War