Worship?

[Diana]

Apologies, Diana, for trimming your post. I don't know how to put several quotes from you so I can respond to them separately. 

When you are in the text editor making a post or replying to a post (select the little icon that looks like a dialogue bubble at the bottom of the post you want to reply to, and it will open the text editor with the quote intact). From there I will attach a visual for the steps, because if I do it here in a post it will mess with the post and you won't be able to see what I mean.


  replying-to-quotes-in-a-post.jpg (Size: 362.03 KB / Downloads: 4)
(Sorry for the purple line around the white box where I explain begin and end quotes. Just ignore it—it was a mistake I overlooked when I exported the jpeg.)

Do you feel/sense pain inside of you when you encounter such situations as you describe? If so, how do you process such?
...
When you see other-selves experiencing their journeys at different levels of needs/energy centers, how do you experience it? What emotions, thoughts, sensations arise in you? How do you process? 

I do feel pain, and whatever emotions arise from these situations. I am not so advanced that I always process it well (though sometimes I do). But I think the point is to feel and allow the pain, and all the intensity of my response to suffering but not be ruined by it, to accept the pain and the situation (aside from something I can do such as helping out a homeless person with some money or food for example). But this must be done wisely, as too much pain can send one too deeply into despair.

I also try to send loving thoughts—for example—toward miserable animals in pens, factory farms, or tiny corrals by talking to them in my mind and envisioning them in a meadow, free, with young ones. I don't know if this helps the animals but it helps me to balance the pain, and then I suppose indirectly this helps the animals. 

I also donate to orgs that help the homeless, underprivileged, and animals. If I am low on money I just give $5 or whatever I can. I tried volunteering at an animal shelter but it was way too painful for me and I figured my intense sadness was not helping the situation, so I concluded that donations are a better approach until I can deal better with the pain.

We resist pain and that is natural. I finally got to the point of accepting the pain and things changed a bit in an important way, in that I stopped resisting it and so it just flowed better. I also have written to process the pain. For example, I wrote a short story, For the Love of Trees, as at Christmas I have a hard time seeing all the cut-down trees in grocery store parking lots.