Cultivating Compassion

Compassion is a process of connecting by identifying with another person. It involves allowing ourselves to be moved by suffering, and experiencing the motivation to help alleviate and prevent it. Qualities of compassion are patience and wisdom; kindness and perseverance; warmth and resolve. It requires perspective-taking, and striving for understanding when someone is struggling, even when their reaction to that challenge spreads negativity. (Healthy boundaries together with compassion allow us to understand and empathize with what motivates challenging behavior even as we refuse to be treated badly.) Compassion encourages us to make generous assumptions when we don’t have all the information. Let’s work to look outside our own context this month, and cultivate our most compassionate selves.

“When we have the courage to live with an open heart, we are able to feel our pain and the pain of others, but we are also able to experience more joy. The bigger and warmer our heart, the stronger our sense of aliveness and resilience.” — Douglas Abrams, The Book of Joy

This challenge offers a chance to practice focusing outside ourselves and strengthening our understanding of and connection to the people around us through reflecting on the challenges they face.

Habit:
Make a generous assumption about the reasons for someone’s behavior
Bear witness to someone’s struggle
Do something kind

To Do:
Week 1: Watch a talk about compassion, like https://youtu.be/ipR0kWt1Fkc, https://youtu.be/vWbWPuvM7R8, or maybe something from this playlist–https://www.ted.com/playlists/447/how_to_make_compassion_thrive
Week 2: Try a Loving-Kindness Meditation – https://youtu.be/sz7cpV7ERsM
Week 3: Write down a memory of a time you have practiced compassion, and how it made you feel. (In a journal or similar, this is just for you.)
Week 4: Share in the Living Vividly Guild about your experience with this challenge.

Reflection:
This challenge really supported me in exploring more fully a way of being in the world that I would like to bring into more of my everyday life. Compassion and self-compassion are huge parts of the wisdom I feel like I’m learning as I continue on this journey of living. I hope I can stay grounded in that intention as the months and years go by: bearing witness, opening my heart, and helping wherever I can.