Sangha of Auspicious Companions

She Came Around the Counter

On the day of her mother’s funeral, with rain splitting open a dry summer sky, Helen walked into an office store in Taree, Australia, to print a eulogy. It was nearing the end of 2015 and the saleswoman who greeted her was the same one who had been gently asking about her ailing mother for months — through every biweekly flight, every boarding pass printed, every quiet update shared across a counter. This time, when she heard what the paper was for, she didn’t offer a polished condolence from behind the register. She walked around it entirely and pulled the grieving daughter into what the author describes as “a long, proper chest-to-chest embrace that wrapped me up and held me close.” Then she pressed an umbrella into her hands and sent her out into the rain. Beyond the tenderness of the gesture this woman behind the counter understood the power of being a witness to grief. That was the last day Helen visited that office store, but she carries the woman behind the counter in her heart eleven years later, proof that someone can hold the whole arc of your sorrow without even knowing your name.

Be The Change

Think of someone in your life who is quietly carrying something that can be heavy — a long illness, an unknown transition, an invisible grief. Reach out today not with advice, but simply to say: I’ve been thinking of you, and I see what you’re carrying. Let the whole of it be witnessed.

What You Don’t Have to Carry

As a very young mother, Patricia Lim took on great responsibility in the care of her children and household. She took on even more to become a psychologist, and an executive for the UN in Brazil. After learning about HeartMath in a Leadership program, Patricia “felt the energy of the field, and my heart” and began a journey to listen, even leaving her prestigious career at one point. She took many sacred paths of experiential learning in Peru, Camino de Santiago, French Camino, Nepal, and India, meeting a lot of angels including the Dalai Lama. She began to let go of what she thought she had to carry and control – “status, money, people, everything, actually.” “What I tell myself every day — and I’m still learning — is that everything we need is already inside of us. All of the love, and the life we want to live, is already inside of us.”

Be The Change

Devote some time to listen to your heart to determine one thing you need not carry or try to control. Trust yourself and trust your heart to take a first step on the path to letting go.

Unsubscribe from this email

Fifteen Balloons Blocked His Rear Window

He had a car stuffed with fifteen birthday balloons and was soulfully singing along to a sacred chant when he reversed full-speed into a stranger’s brand-new SUV. What Matthias Hombauer did next — walking slowly toward the furious, shaking man and offering a hug — wasn’t a decision so much as something that moved through him unbidden. “I never say ‘brother’ to strangers,” he admits, and yet the word came out, and something in the other man settled. What unfolds from that Vienna sidewalk is a meditation on the gap between the wisdom we profess and the moment that tests whether we mean it. Hombauer — a former molecular biologist turned concert photographer turned life coach — describes a practice of writing down the document you already carry: the relentless inner commentary, ninety percent negative, that quietly shapes every encounter. Then, through forgiveness, flipping it into declarations of who you actually are. “It’s easy to say ‘I see the light in everyone’ while sitting at home,” he writes. “It’s not easy in a car accident.” The angry man, it turned out, had a ten-year-old child — the same age as Hombauer’s child — whose birthday party the balloons were for. A book gift was mailed to his address from the insurance papers, a drawing of the crash included so he’d know who sent it. A day later, the phone rang. Sometimes accidents, it seems, are less about faults and errors than about what gets opened.

Be The Change

Sit down today and write — without editing — the thoughts you repeat to yourself most often. Then write one sentence that names who you actually want to be, in the most specific language you can find. Keep that sentence somewhere visible for the next week and notice when reality gives you a chance to test it.

This Week’s DailyGood Digest

In this week’s daily inspirations, we discovered the power of choices made from love.

We explored the profound impact of choosing love over fear through the story of a principal who risked his career to support a homeless student. Aryae Coopersmith encouraged us to stay open to the friends who see our potential, while Fernanda Abra reminded us that love for animals must be active, as seen in the creation of canopy bridges safeguarding countless creatures. Andreas Nussbaumer’s transition from sales to nurturing a farm sanctuary taught us the virtues of patience and attentiveness. Meanwhile, the solar ambulance project, championed by 23 students, embodied Margaret Mead’s conviction that committed citizens can indeed change the world. Finally, Rev. Charles Gibbs invited us to embrace the mysteries of life, slipping the nets of certainty to join the mystics and poets in the vast ocean of questions.

Join The Community

If you enjoy good news stories and want to help change the media landscape, join our volunteer team to curate, edit, spread the good! Login and get started.

Three Generations, One Food Truck

In 1974, Travis Holmes Sr. launched Birmingham, Alabama’s first food truck. His son grew up beside him on it, racing to chop onions faster than his father. Then, at 26, that son was killed — leaving behind an infant and a grandfather who had to find a reason to go back to work. What Travis Sr. found, eventually, was that the truck was the one place grief and love occupied the same space without fighting. “I wanted to carry on for him,” the grandfather says, “because he loved it.” When Travis III — the infant — turned nine, he excitedly climbed aboard the food truck on weekends, telling his friends, “I’m going with my granddad.” Three generations, one vehicle, and a loss that never fully heals but somehow keeps feeding people anyway. At 73, fresh off of cancer treatment, Travis Sr. watches his grandson and sees his son living on — with the same curly hair, and the same instinct to feed a stranger, even when it costs him. Some legacies aren’t built from monuments but from daily, simple routines of chopping onions and carrying a willingness to show up.

Be The Change

Call or visit a relative from a different generation this week and ask them to teach you one specific thing they know — a recipe, a skill, a story about someone. Let something from their life live through you.

Principal Refuses to Abandon Homeless Student, Despite It Costing His Job

When Rob Burnside learned that a homeless student named Landerius Hayes was sleeping in his car but could no longer legally attend his school due to a change of address, he went home that day and told his wife about the situation. The first words out of her mouth were, “Well, he can stay with us, if he needs to.” Together, they opened their home, eventually became Hayes’ legal guardians, and watched him walk across a graduation stage this past May. The decision cost Burnside his 31-year career in education — a price he accepted without hesitation: “What value can we put on the life of a young person?” What this story quietly reveals is that the most consequential choices people make are rarely complicated — they just require a willingness to let someone else matter more than personal cost. Hayes is now studying to become an aviation mechanic, and in the stands at his graduation sat the man he calls Pops, who gave up his job so a teenager could keep his future.

Be The Change

Think of someone in your life — perhaps a student, a neighbor, an elder, or a young person who may be quietly struggling — and ask yourself honestly: have you been “processing the paperwork” when you could be asking a deeper question? Today, reach out to that person and simply offer your presence and humanity.

Read the Signals and Stay Open

At fourteen, Shmuel Klein — a scholarly boy who knew nothing of war — was handed a prison full of soldiers and told to run it. He couldn’t, so he told them the truth: you run it. I’ll sit up front with my books and look official. And they did. When Passover came, he unlocked every cell, said he’d be gone a week, and asked them simply to keep up appearances. He returned to find every prisoner exactly where he’d left them. This is the story Aryae Coopersmith’s grandfather told him before his bar mitzvah — and it turned out to be less a family history than a lifelong instruction: “Trust the people in the room with you. Open the doors, and see what holds.” Coopersmith spent the next seven decades testing that instruction: sparking friendship between a communist and a Republican through a high school newspaper, co-founding the House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco (starting with a Presbyterian seminarian’s $400 savings), building an HR community in Silicon Valley by getting people who never spoke to each other into the same room. The thread running through it all isn’t ideology or ambition — it’s the circle itself. His own children completed the lesson one frantic dinner when his daughter looked up and said, “Dad, you need laughing lessons” — and then she and her brother clowned until he broke.

Be The Change

Identify one person in your life whose worldview genuinely differs from yours, and reach out today — not to debate, but to ask a single open question about how they came to see things the way they do. Listen with open curiosity, and without preparing your response.