Compassion is essentially the wish that beings not suffer -- from subtle physical and emotional discomfort to agony and anguish -- combined with feelings of sympathetic concern.
You could have compassion for an individual (a friend in the hospital, a co-worker passed over for a promotion), groups of people (victims of crime, those displaced by a hurricane, refugee children), animals (your pet, livestock heading for the slaughterhouse), and yourself.
Compassion is not pity, agreement, or a waiving of your rights. You can have compassion for people who've wronged you while also insisting that they treat you better.
Compassion by itself opens your heart and nourishes people you care about. Those who receive your compassion are more likely to be patient, forgiving, and compassionate with you. Compassion reflects the wisdom that everything is related to everything else, and it naturally draws you into feeling more connected with all things.
Additionally, compassion can incline you to helpful action. For example, one study showed that motor circuits in the brain lit up when people were feeling compassionate, as if they were getting ready to do something about the suffering they were sensing.
How?
Compassion is natural; you don't have to force it; just open to the difficulty, the struggle, the stress, the impact of events, the sorrow and strain in the other person; open your heart, let yourself be moved, and let compassion flow through you.
Feel what compassion's like in your body -- in your chest, throat, and face. Sense the way it softens your thoughts, gentles your reactions. Know it so you can find your way back again.
Moments of compassion come in the flow of life -- maybe a friend tells you about a loss, or you can see the hurt behind someone's angry face, or a hungry child looks out at you from the pages of a newspaper.
Also, you can deliberately call in compassion a minute (or more), perhaps each day; here are a few suggestions:
· Relax and tune into your body.
· Remember the feeling of being with someone who cares about you.
· Bring to mind someone it is easy to feel compassion for.
· Perhaps put your compassion into words, softly heard in the back of your mind, such as: "May you not suffer ... may this hard time pass ... may things be alright for you."
· Expand your circle of compassion to include others; consider a benefactor (someone who has been kind to you), friend, neutral person, difficult person (a challenge, certainly), and yourself (sometimes the hardest person of all).
· Going further, extend compassion to all the beings in your family ... neighborhood ... city ... state ... country ... world. All beings, known or unknown, liked or disliked. Humans, animals, plants, even microbes. Beings great or small, in the air, on the ground, under water. Including all, omitting none.
Going through your day, open to compassion from time to time for people you don't know: someone in a deli, a stranger on a bus, crowds moving down the sidewalk.
Let compassion settle into the background of your mind and body. As what you come from, woven into your gaze, words, and actions.
Omitting none.
Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a neuropsychologist and author of the bestselling Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom (in 21 languages) - and Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time. Founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom and Affiliate of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, he's taught at Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, and in meditation centers in Europe, North America, and Australia. His work has been featured on the BBC, NPR, Consumer Reports Health, and U.S. News and World Report. His blog - Just One Thing - has over 25,000 subscribers and suggests a simple practice each week that will bring you more joy, more fulfilling relationships, and more peace of mind and heart. If you wish, you can subscribe to Just One Thing here.
There was a story making headlines this week of a small child who was struck by a car in the middle of a crowd and no-one around them responded. How could such a thing happen? Are the Chinese such callous, uncaring people? Not really. In fact, it hasn't been too long since I've heard news reports here in the US such as a homeless man who was stabbed when saving a woman from being attacked while on-lookers walked by ignoring him for almost an hour and a half before reacting.
There are those for whom it is easy to feel compassion for. Studies show that not only do we largely take our cues from others (especially in crowds), but that we respond most to those whom we perceive as "like us." A cute, small child might elicit much empathy, but a dusty, homeless person not nearly so much. Yet as far as the quality of being human goes, there is no difference. Compassion, real compassion, does not divide us. Instead, it unites us.
I highly recommend both her books and visiting the website to see the work that people are doing to come together as groups to work towards this end. But as the author well states, it all begins within the individual.
www.asenseofdecency.com
I have a friend who is very diligent in her effort to be compassionate.. What I've noticed, with some qualms, is how her efforts to extend compassion look a lot like what a Western psychologist would call being an enabler to dysfunctional behavior. Her husband, whom she describes as being deeply flawed emotionally, has often behaved in ways that limit his well being as well as hers but she consistently makes excuses for him, in the belief that she is being compassionate. As much as some of his behavior really bothers her, she would not dare to mention it to him, in order to help him to heal or behave better, lest she be guilty of trying to "fix" him which she believes is a violation of compassionate conduct.
Likewise she has a son who is terribly irresponsible financially and she has, again in the name of compassion, continuously bailed him out, to the point of self-sacrifice. She may be just lacking wisdon in her effort to "be compassionate" or maybe she's really indulging in co-dependent behavior in order to be loved herself. Neither man has grown or made any effort to remedy his behavior in spite of all her compassion. Indeed it seems that her compassion consistently gives them permission to languish in their dysfunctional behavior. At what point does compassion become indulgence, co-dependency or "enabling?"
all the effort in the world does not make one compassionate.
compassion is an awakening process. effort might be a significant variable but there are others.
once awakened to compassion for others and self; then indulgence, co dependency and enabling would be impossible.
the world is about sympathy and empathy and compassion is as rare as a duck that does not like water or finding a white crow.
asking a compassionate person to enable another person would be like asking a saint to harm another person. they would be able to see the harm to that person in the enabling process and also see the underlying reality of that person's selfish and misguided mode of being in the world.
your friend is doing much harm to her son and husband with the best of intentions, but then what do they say about the road to where is paved with good intentions.
This is an incorrect statement about compassion. You are defining sympathy not compassion with some elements of empathy. Compassion is understanding the underlying reality or realities of suffering and the actions of others.
Compassion sees that all actions even harmful actions are simply misguided and selfish desires for the want of love.
“The ways are but two: love and the want of love†Mencius 300 BC
“Compassion reflects the wisdom that everything is related to everything else, and it naturally draws you into feeling more connected with all things.â€
This is a correct statement and has profound wisdom in it. Few religious people I know would know how to make such a statement. Most religions teach we are separate from the infinite. How can anything be separate from infinite?????
“Going further, extend compassion to all the beings in your family ... neighborhood ... city ... state ... country ... world. All beings, known or unknown, liked or disliked. Humans, animals, plants, even microbes. Beings great or small, in the air, on the ground, under water. Including all, omitting noneâ€.
This is very well stated. The Buddha could not have expressed compassion any better. That last sentence about compassion is the best that wisdom has to offer. Religion could learn much from this well written paragraph but yet most see not.