How did I get onto a path of compassion?

 Most of my "growing up years" from ages 6 to 21 had been spent in Tujunga and Glendale, California which is in Los Angeles County. I found living there sort of interesting and exciting but also "dangerous" like most big city areas are worldwide. So, there was a certain amount of "Trauma" associated with growing up there for me. 

So, when I was in my 20s and desired to "leave" cities like Los Angeles area cities and San Diego Cities and go somewhere remote to heal all the wounds of growing up there. Yes. It had been very exciting sort of like a movie to live and grow up there but also traumatic seeing all the blood and gore and people getting beat up within an inch of their lives including my best friend in a bad fight in high school. Seeing people draw knives on each other and threaten each other in various ways that people did in the 1950s and 1960s especially before the "Flower Child" movement occurred in the late 1960s. Paranoia of all kinds was more "normal" then which often led to violence and deaths at times too among my generation.

So, after my son was born in 1974 my biggest desire was to permanently move away from places like Los Angeles County and San Diego County to more remote and country places that I could heal from what had happened in my life.

I succeeded in various ways first moving to Mt. Shasta in 1976 with my first wife and when my first wife and I broke up and I was a single father in 1977 I had to regroup to San Diego for awhile. After my first wife moved away from Mt. Shasta by 1979 I returned with my son and worked in the Mt. Shasta Area and lived there and bought property there in 1980 with my 2nd wife when we married in 1980 there. I met her there in Mt. Shasta too. From 1980 to 1985 we home schooled my son and her two children from her first marriage on land we bought together and I built us an A-Frame house on our 2 1/2 acres of land that was remote (about 10 miles from the nearest Gas Station). During these times I healed and moved onto a path of compassion and met many Tibetan Lamas from 1980 throughout the 1980s and entered fully into a path of compassion through Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhist initiations in the U.S. and India and Nepal while I was there with my family.

This is how I entered a path of compassion by calming myself down and slowing down by moving to the remote country with a view of mt. Shasta at 4000 feet in elevation from our land and home schooling our children from 1980 to 1985 then there.