Compassion for Others

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” – Dalai Lama

In this episode, we will learn that when we have compassion for another person, we are aware of their suffering, and we want to do something to alleviate it by helping them.

Compassion is an empathic understanding of a person’s feelings, accompanied by a desire to act on that person’s behalf. Compassion is when you relate to someone’s situation and want to help them. You see someone in trouble, and you feel like pitching in.

It’s possible to be kind for practical reasons without genuine empathy for the other’s suffering. 

But most often, there’s an overlap.

Compassionate people respect others for who they are and what they offer. Compassionate people always try to be compassionate with those around them regardless of the circumstances.

Compassion starts with the understanding that everyone you meet is fighting their own battle, of which you know nothing, which makes it easy to treat others with love, compassion, empathy, and understanding. 

Compassion becomes easy when you realize that we are all facing challenges.

Compassion requires two underlying emotional intelligence skills, self-awareness and empathy. 

Empathy and compassion go together. 

✅Empathy is our natural resonance with the emotions of others, where we sense the difficulty someone might be feeling.

✅Compassion is one of the many responses to empathy.

✅Compassion implies stability of attention and care in a wise and balanced way—caring about yourself and others.

✅Compassion implies wisdom and intelligence to know that it’s not up to you to fix the world for others. You can’t function if you’re always taking in others’ pain. 

To be compassionate to others, start with self-compassion. To indeed have compassion for others, we must have compassion for ourselves.

If we want to change the world by being empathetic, we need to start with ourselves, and then, and only then, we can be compassionate to others, one person at a time.