Why

Strive to do good, but if you cannot do good, at the least, do no harm

Coram Deo

Every day is a journey and it is the journey itself that is your home

Why ‘do no harm’? Because to harm other things harms yourself and when you have harmed yourself this way enough times you cannot be truly happy and you cannot truly love and you cannot truly engage with the world that you are a part of and live your life to the full. Unless you learn the principles of ‘do no harm’ you will remain alone, and become more alone as you age.

Inside, in an unconscious attempt to protect yourself from your own pain, you develop ‘blindness of heart’ and you become a cripple, and that very disability leads you to carry on harming other lives. Whether they are those of your partner, or family and children, or unborn babies, or people living in foreign lands, or the very animals who breathe the same air as ourselves, you harm them all - both by what you do and by what you do not do.

When you choose to stop doing harm you take the biggest step a being can make - you choose to become conscious, to wake up. And then your foot is placed firmly on the road to becoming fully human - and it is only from there that you can truly love and can be truly loved.

You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.

John Wooden

So - these pages offer just a few brief descriptions, some information, and links to organisations that do ‘good things’ - just a few out of hundreds of thousands.

Take the time to follow the links - but be prepared, because if you open your heart to this then your suppressed emotions will surface and you will cry.

You will cry a great deal

And as you cry - for people and animals you will never know and probably never meet and, ultimately, for yourself, you will start to heal, and as you start to heal, you will start to help - and your life and countless other lives will be changed, for the better, forever.

forever

The Dalai Lama on compassion to others

How can you be delivered from your blindness of heart?

How do you even start? - well, in small ways.

By doing just one or two good things regularly you become aware of the bad things you do and they start to drop away. ... so .....

Of course you cannot feed the world, but you could just feed one child, a child you may never meet - from £6.15 for a whole year with Mary’s Meals.

You could learn the truth about abortion and if a friend needs help from you the information would be at hand.

You could join Amnesty for just £10 a year, write a few letters and stop innocent people being tortured in another country, again, people you will never meet.

You could choose to eat meat only from free range sources, where the animals have had good lives, or you could become a vegetarian.

You could stop being angry at someone - hating someone is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die - it harms only you.

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.

Mother Teresa

All that we are is the result of what we have thought.

If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him.

If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.

Siddhartha

No kind action ever stops with itself. One kind action leads to another. Good example is followed. A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves.

Amelia Earhart