Shared Human Condition

When we sit to meditate, we might feel as though we're the only person experiencing a particular feeling or thought, whether it's something chronic that has been around forever, or something quite acute, something that just happened today. Whatever's going on, it's really common to feel isolated, forgetting that the mind is a shared human condition. So although we're all different, we're all unique, at the same time, mind is mind. When we experience, say, sadness, sure, it might be sadness that's been initiated by something specific in our own environment, in our own geography, but that sadness that we experience is a sadness of mind, and sadness is common to every mind. It's not my sadness or your sadness, it's our sadness. It's worth remembering that there might be a hundred million people in the world experiencing that same sadness at that very moment. And in just the same way, when we're happy, it's not my happiness or your happiness. It's our happiness. When we remember this, we don't feel so alone. We don't feel like we're different. Whether it's happiness or sadness, the idea is to be at ease with it and being at ease means not always reacting to it or trying to change it. Just recognizing that it's a part of our mind, of our life, and of our shared sense this human condition....