If you develop compassion for people and all creatures you can reach out to them. You can offer help to them. You will be able to feel their situation. You will see them clearly not for the circumstances that they find themselves but in who they can become. You will recognize the beauty inside of them. You will recognize that they are very much like yourself. You can empathize with them. Once you do that you may be able to help them affect a change. Or do it for them. You can have compassion for one person, for a whole country, or a whole area, or for the whole world. You can develop compassion for every creature.

When you act with compassion, you are able to see with clarity, that the person in front of you does not know who they truly are in the spirit. You will see that they do not recognize their own choices, or their own worth, or their own beauty. Perhaps you will see their strength even though they feel weak.

Compassion helps you to overcome obstacles on behalf of someone/something that you might not otherwise attempt to overcome. Compassion motivates you and stirs you to change. Laws and situations have been changed because of one person to thousands of people filled with compassion working in a unified manner.

There have been articles written on how animals with compassion have saved other animals and humans. There was one article about a wolf that had compassion for a man who had been lost in the wilderness in the winter. The wolf stayed with the man several days and kept a watch on him so that the other wolves would not come close to him. On one particular day the man had gone without food for several days and the wolf showed up with a freshly killed rabbit and dropped it in the snow for him so that he would not starve to death.

Another time the man said that he felt like the wolf was leading him. When he followed the wolf for several miles, the wolf had led him to a cluster of big heavy pine trees and a place on the ground underneath that was covered with dozens of twigs and pine branches like a bed. It was a protected place from the snow, wind and predators. The wolf might have given up his bed for this man. The man said that without the wolf's compassion he would never had survived.

There are many articles about dolphins who have rescued people, have risked their own life to fight off sharks for them, and have carried them to safety. I saw a news story on the television about a small boy who had fallen into the gorilla's cage at a zoo right in front of about five gorillas. One gorilla first came to the unconscious boy to examine him. The boy began to wake up and was quite startled and began to wail in pain and fear. The gorilla did something extraordinary and picked up the boy and carried him to the entrance where the handlers and the food comes out. Then the gorilla stepped back from the entrance so that the handlers could enter and retrieve the injured boy without a problem. That is an extraordinary act of compassion!! One creature was moved to help another.

Thank God, that we have also been moved by compassion to help our fellow human beings and animals in times that they have become hapless or that have been injured or trapped. That we can ban together to help a creature in need. Always remember that we might have been in dire need once upon a time or that someday we could be that person who finds ourselves in a terrible situation. Have compassion on others and remember to have compassion on yourself.copyright 2006 Yoga Kat