Ways To Become More Compassionate

[gad]

Hello To Everyone - this is my first post ever on any type of forum so I hope that it works.
I have been meditating for some years and am looking for any suggestions and/or ideas on how to practice becoming more compassionate.
Thank you.

[JonW]

Hello gad.
Welcome to the forum. Pleased to meet you.
Your question is an excellent one. Please allow me to ponder and I'll return with some suggestions.
All best wishes, Jon

[Gareth]

I've heard of something called a loving kindness meditation, but I've never actually tried it.

My inexpert opinion is that the best way to develop these feelings is to practise them, this is probably what the loving kindness meditation is. I will advertise this topic on Twitter and see if we can get you some better answers.

[JonW]

The loving kindness guided meditation is highly recommended. This is an especially good one from Sharon Salzberg:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3uLqt69VyI
For me, compassion is one of the cornerstones of mindfulness. In mindful meditation we learn to observe our thoughts and feelings with gentle self-compassion.
Compassion for others flows freely from that.
As we learn to be more mindful in our everyday lives so we become more gentle and forgiving towards ourselves and others.
Mindfulness, when practiced regularly, makes us less agitated and self-absorbed. We learn to respond to situations with grace rather than react with impatience or anger.
In fraught situations (an argument with a co-worker or partner, for example), we feel more able to take a few breaths and maybe bring some calm to the situation, rather than making it worse by fighting fire with fire.
If we fall out with someone, maybe we'll take some time to reflect. Maybe we'll conclude that the falling out was not a simple case of me being right and the other person being 100% wrong. Perhaps we'll be more likely to extend the olive branch and make it up with that person. Life, after all, is short. Why harbour unnecessary grudges?
Through meditation, we learn about ourselves. Maybe one of the things we learn is that we are complex beings with very human flaws. That might make us reflect that others are also complex, with the same kind of flaws. As a result, we might become more accepting of people's foibles.
Ultimately, we might start to realise that being compassionate towards others makes for a better world for all, and an easier world to navigate. We might start to realise that there's more love in the world than we ever suspected. And that, if we put more love out into the world, maybe a lot more love will flow into our own lives.
Compassion is a good thing. Let's spread it around.
Cheers, Jon

[larorra]

i loved your post Jon. I am presently working my way through the Mark Williams & Danny Penman book "mindfulness - finding peace in a frantic world" with a different topic for each week. I am doing it at my down pace as due to my schedule find it impossible to do it fridays and saturdays. So i am on week 7 of 8 and this week have option to chores one meditation i like and 1 i found hard from previous 6 weeks. I chose mindful movement for my favourite and for the hard one "exploring difficulty which brings me back to your topic compassion - find it hard to "be" with the feeling that a difficult thought brings, it says in the book to see what the sensation in the body is and be open and curious to sensation But when i bring up a difficult tjhought i get a pain in my chest and become upset i try to go with the breathing and calm myself well today was first day returing to this meditacion so will see jow it goes i keep in mind advice "its ok to feel this way" so see hjow it goes
P.s Sorry for mistakes hard writing off My phone.

[JonW]

Hi Larorra,
The "exploring difficulty" stage can be challenging but worth sticking with.
The revelation for me was seeing how my body was immediately affected when a difficult thought arose. The difficult thought created a difficult emotion and then created tension in certain parts of my body - neck, chest, belly. I'd never noticed this before i started meditating.
As I persisted with the meditation, it got easier. I began to accept the "difficult" thoughts just as thoughts rather than trying to resist the thought arising or fighting it off after it arose. A typical one would be a memory of my ex-girlfriend, for example. Over time, by getting used to the thought as a thought (rather than seeing it as something real, something more than a memory, a fact), the thought would ebb away, rather than creating a painful emotion followed by tension in my body.
A few months on and those same thoughts still arise from time to time. I observe them gently, with compassion, and they ebb away. They no longer cause me pain. I've learned to recognise that the thoughts have no more power than a soap bubble. They're no more real than a Batman cartoon. To paraphrase Jon Kabat-Kinn, the thoughts are mere "secretions of the brain". They come and they go. No reason to get caught up in them.
It takes practice though.

[piedwagtail91]

i use kristin neffs self compassion meditations a lot http://www.self-compassion.org/guided-self-compassion-meditations-mp3.html - well all the time now if i'm honest, found myself with a lot of unwanted stress.

soften soothe allow is good for working with difficult emotions, a self compassionate version of working with difficulty.
i led this meditation recently at a day of mindfulness, to say it was intense and very moving is a bit of an understatement, it took me half a day to recover .
it helps you take what can be an overpowering emotion and break it down into something that it's possible to learn to cope with.
be warned though, these go further than mindfulness and involve soothing and softening around the emotional sensation, be that gently caressing where you feel the emotion , hands on heart and maybe (self) hugs - not sure if kristin neff has that in but i put it in mine after reading her comments on how powerful it was.. the hands on heart was found to bring out very intense feelings.


if you prefer a male voice christopher germers download page is here http://www.mindfulselfcompassion.org/meditations_downloads.php

this is a link to their mindful self compassion page, they recently blended mindfulness and self compassion and started mindful self compassion courses in america.
http://www.centerformsc.org/

[JonW]

Thanks for those links pied...I'll check them out.

[larorra]

I will check them out too guys and thanks for your replies. I guess the thought i have been focusing on in my med is hard because its an ongoing problem and not resolved , I think if it was something from the past which was finished with it would be easier. But hey i don't do easy, like a challenge. I will keep in mind they are only thoughts and I can deal with them. thanks again!

[JonW]

"I guess the thought I have been focusing on in my med is hard because it's an ongoing problem and not resolved , I think if it was something from the past which was finished with it would be easier."
That's probably true. But I've found mindfulness to be enormously helpful when I've been dealing with something current - the death of a parent last Xmas springs to mind. During difficult, challenging times mindfulness can teach us to find the space to cope so that we don't feel completely overwhelmed.
All best, Jon