Have you ever been in a disagreement with someone and you just knew you were right? You knew that if the other person would only see things from your point of view, with your own history of thoughts, feelings, and experiences, they’d understand?
Who hasn’t, right? Part of being a compassionate person is attempting to feel and see the truth of someone else’s experience.
Let’s define compassion as having a sense of togetherness or closeness with another person, so much so that you recognize that you are not really all that separate.  You feel so connected that feelings are shared and there’s no separation between you.  When you feel this way toward another person, you naturally want to care for them as you care for yourself, eliminating their distress and helping them in any way.
First we feel empathy, but that emotional connection does not turn into compassion until it is put into action, expressing just how you want to care for the other.  How can we become more compassionate? Just like with any tool we want to implement… practice.
It’s hard to stop a judgmental mind from doing it’s normal thing. Â It’s difficult to consciously drop that sense of separation we feel between ourselves and other person. Â We can come to care so much for our own needs that we don’t even concern ourselves with anyone else’s. Â This preoccupation with self prevents us from growing into the person we want to be and overriding your self/instinct takes practice.
And so I’ve challenged myself to rise above this tendency. Â This week, especially when I drop into judgement or become secluded in myself, I will reach out to understand what something might be like for someone else and act (with love) in some way to help them.
Maybe you’d like to join me? Each day I am actively reaching out to three people with the idea of being generous with my care and effort.  There have been many times lately when I’ve thought about someone I know who just lost his soul mate, but yesterday, I realized that those thoughts don’t do anything.  I wrote a letter to him expressing my wish for wholeness and peace for him and letting him know he’s been in my thoughts.  That action was compassion in action.
Calling a parent or grandparent to say you love them, reaffirming a child by restating their feelings back to them, sending a note or a gift to say you’re thinking of someone, doing the dishes or laundry for someone, donating to a charity, actively listening to someone, etc. Â I have found that I don’t have to try to come up with ideas… in the course of a day, opportunities to be compassionate naturally arise. Â It’s up to me to act on them.
Let me know how you show compassion to people in your life.
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