If you feel a deep outrage at the suffering you see around you, investigate the root of your outrage. Go all the way into it with your consciousness, without expressing it or acting it out, denying or repressing it. You may experience another emotion under the outrage. Relatively speaking, outrage is superficial.

If you let your heart break deeper than it has ever been broken you might find that it holds a treasure for you:

Under the outrage is often a profound despair at the endless cruelty (or mindless destruction of the environment, for another example), seemingly everywhere you look.

If you get to this point of despair, right now, as you read this, allow your consciousness to fall into the core of this despair. Despair is the one emotion that is most avoided. To meet despair means to let go of any story about despair. Simply meet it in innocence so that you can discover what is at the core. Then you can discover that your despair holds a treasure from the depths of yourself.

Are you willing to invite despair, which you have hated, which you have sent away, into your heart? Are you willing to see that hating despair and sending it away won’t get rid of it? Are you willing to say, “Okay, despair, come in, let me meet you as you are?” When you do, you feel in alignment with the outrage. But you can also be in alignment with what you discover at the cover of despair? That core is the truth of your being. If you are in alignment with that, you are in alignment with all. Nothing is excluded.

There is so much unexperienced grief in the closed heart, but the heart broken open sets grief free. When you meet your own pain, grief, or despair all the way, you discover that each holds the gem of truth.