Compassion is an essential aspect of spiritual practice. This virtue encourages connections with others, helping them find healing and happiness.
As it expands our horizons and shows us that others suffering is no different from our own, it teaches us empathy and kindness.
1. Listen to Others
One of the keys to developing compassion is learning how to listen—not simply listening but genuinely engaging with them and absorbing their experiences, even if it may be challenging to hear.
Listening empathetically can be challenging and discomfiting; it requires being open to hearing that our deeply-held ideas and beliefs could be mistaken, while the inverse means resisting suggestions, or giving counter-advice, rather than taking something on board for consideration.
Mindfulness, meditation, and yoga can all help cultivate an open heart. Sanandaji highlights that volunteering, philanthropy, and social justice advocacy are invaluable in building empathy. Providing someone with an ear to listen or helping out a neighbor could significantly impact someone in need.
Compassion and love are often described as having similar characteristics; both can be described as feeling "tenderly toward others and acting on their behalf. While pity focuses more on seeing another as inferior or weaker than oneself, compassion entails acknowledging and empathizing with someone experiencing distress.
2. Practice Non-violence
We must recognize our shared identity with others' suffering to be compassionate. This may involve affinity with those in countries, cultures, religions, ideologies, or social identities similar to our own; it could even extend beyond living beings themselves. Compassion can only truly flourish when there is an experience of closeness and connectedness to those we care for, making openness, sensitiveness, and attentiveness essential for those on a spiritual path.
Part of practicing compassion includes refraining from violence. This includes actions that cause physical harm to others and words or actions that could be considered offensive to another individual or group. This practice is known as Ahimsa and can be found across many philosophies and religions.
Non-violence can be non-violence activities, from informing others about its harmful effects to supporting organizations that advocate nonviolent activism or even engaging in peaceful protests. However, practicing non-violence involves loving yourself and those around you with kindness and respect - including performing random acts of kindness regularly!
3. Practice Self-Compassion
Self-compassion refers to treating yourself with the kindness and care you would show a friend. When faced with life struggles or mistakes, failures, or inadequacies, self-compassion allows us to respond more positively than harshly to our experiences instead of harsh self-criticism.
According to Sanandaji, compassion allows our hearts to open wide, and we can feel others' pain and suffering more acutely, providing us an opportunity for spiritual practice that will enable us to understand others on an intimate level and connect more closely.
But we can also be compassionate towards ourselves, which can be challenging. Sanandaji specifies that cultivating self-compassion is integral to spiritual practice as it reminds us that all humans deserve kindness and understanding. Compassion can be practiced through daily acts and more formal gestures - for instance, writing yourself letters can reduce worries while diminishing negative tendencies such as rumination.
Making time for yourself to indulge in calming practices is also not to be underestimated, as it can help you channel your greatest self into other aspects of your life. Consider taking time for a long bath to relax and unwind with some music, or with a good book in silence, and you’ll soon see it manifest itself in your other activities.
4. Share Your Experiences
Being compassionate requires having a healthy psyche. This means addressing unresolved trauma. Sanandaji emphasizes that seeking professional assistance such as therapy or spiritual counseling will assist the healing process and allow you to feel more kindness towards others and yourself.
Compassion stems from empathy, meaning you must acknowledge the suffering of others and embrace their feelings. It differs from sympathy, which involves feeling sorry for someone and trying to help them escape their situation. Meditation and mindfulness can help cultivate more excellent empathetic responses toward those around us.
How can you foster compassion? By performing simple acts of kindness. For instance, holding the door for someone or offering compliments are just two examples of ways small acts can significantly impact people needing assistance. Furthermore, practicing listening with your whole body can show someone that you genuinely care for their well-being. This shows your audience that your attention isn't just on their words alone, but their entire being.
5. Compassionate Acts
Sanandaji lays stress on the fact that compassion involves an understanding of others' suffering and an intention to alleviate that suffering through actions ranging from offering kind words or taking part in research-validated training programs to engaging with all aspects of one's life--from friends and family members to strangers on the street and all living creatures on Earth.
Biologically speaking, compassion may have evolved as an emotion or trait to improve the well-being of those "self-relevant," such as offspring and genetic relatives. However, recent evolutionary treatments of compassion suggest it also assists individuals in upholding cooperation norms and engaging in cooperative behaviors with non-kin.
As we develop our understanding of compassion, we find numerous studies into animal behavior that suggest closely related animals like chimpanzees also exhibit compassion to animals from other species, suggesting it is a behavior that can have wide-reaching ramifications for older theories of evolution and survival. Consider this fact when confronted with the likes of a spider in your room: to kill it, or to set it free?
Comments