Ted O’Toole –  It Is Like a Quilt: How Can I Care for All Beings and Still Care for Myself?

Talk Title: It Is Like a Quilt: How Can I Care for All Beings and Still Care for Myself?

Talk Summary: Shinshu Roberts says in Meeting the Myriad Things that all aspects of Buddhism are one thing. “It is like a quilt,” she says, in that “we work one piece at a time, but there is a larger project – the quilt itself.” She also says that “even after a practitioner has experienced the time of working on the whole, it is okay to respond to each piece as it arises, because that is often how life meets us.” If all beings make up the quilt as a whole, and each of us is an individual piece, when must we work to free all beings, and when must we work on caring for our own individual selves? How do we find the proper balance in difficult times?