How do we suffer with each other in our particular circumstances?
How do we suffer with people like the friends and family members who are grieving in Connecticut? How do we share in the suffering of people around us every day?
And how do we suffer with people like Adam Lanza, after and before they perpetrate such crimes?
To many, this sounds like giving in to defeat ... as if we're merely saying it's the poor who are blessed. I've been in too many business and personal situations in which everyone's intuition is flat wrong. That's reason enough to believe that the way of compassion might be worth a try.
Even if guns were to vanish, the specter that haunts our young men would still hover in silence, darkly.
A partial solution to these toxic circumstances could be a coordinated cultivation of what might be called an empathic habit. Most people surely felt an impulsive empathy for the parents and survivors involved in the Sandy Hook massacre, as shown by the countless memorial services and candlelight vigils that took place after the murders. But empathy could help best if exercised before rather than after such tragedies.
Empathy could serve many of us: those who have not yet put themselves in the position of a person who is losing their power and those who can aim a gun at someone without imagining themselves on the other end of the barrel. For those of us who belong to a demographic that is doing increasingly better, a trained empathic reflex toward those we know to be losing for our gains could lead to a more deferential attitude on our part and could constitute an invitation for them to stay with us. To delight in their losses and aim at them the question, “How does it feel?” will only trigger a cycle of resentment and plant the seeds for vengeance. It is crucial to accommodate the pain of others.
In Vietnam, archaeologists say, a Stone Age community took care of a man who couldn’t take care of himself.
While it is a painful truism that brutality and violence are at least as old as humanity, so, it seems, is caring for the sick and disabled.
And some archaeologists are suggesting a closer, more systematic look at how prehistoric people — who may have left only their bones — treated illness, injury and incapacitation. Call it the archaeology of health care.
One of the most telling moments was when a young man named Sam announced that school life was not set up to help him and his fellow teenagers to be kind and compassionate. The name of the game, he said, is to get good exam results - end of story..
Following the recent news that the UK has the world's sixth best education system, I thought now would be a good time to share some of my own research.
This research involved zero analysis of exam results, no evaluation of teacher performance, and has yielded not a single league table. My findings are based entirely on the three days that I spent at a conference in London called Empathy and Compassion in Society.
Andy FraserJournalist focusing on sport, meditation, well-being and compassion
His Holiness, the XIV Dalai Lama, launched the first-ever World Compassion Day at an event in Mumbai on Wednesday. The programme was organized by the animal rights group Humane Society International (HSI) and Pritish Nandy Communications.
Urging the packed audience that comprised filmstars, animal activists and industrialists to try their best to shun meat and other non-vegetarian foods, Dalai Lama said: "A vegetarian diet is the most healthy one for you. We must respect all forms of life."
Helping others who are dealing with trauma can be highly satisfying and rewarding. But it can also take a toll on caregivers - particularly if they have similar issues of their own. You may find yourself comforting a bereaved spouse while you're trying to cope with fears about your spouse's safety. You may work hard getting help and assistance for other people while ignoring your own needs. Over time, the stress of helping others can cause symptoms - anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability - that interfere with everyday life. This response is often referred to as "compassion fatigue" or "secondary traumatic stress."
Left untreated, compassion fatigue can lead to burnout and other conditions that may not go away on their own. If you work with victims of trauma, you can take steps to recognize, limit, and treat these effects.
How compassion is the best kept secret to being happy, healthy, wealthy and wise...
Compassion Makes You Happy
A brain-imaging study headed by neuroscientist Jordan Grafman from the National Institute of Health showed that the "pleasures centers" in the brain, i.e. the parts of our brains that are active when we experience pleasure (like dessert, money, sex) are equally active when we observe someone giving money to charity as when we receive money ourselves! Giving to others even increases well-being above and beyond spending money on ourselves. In a revealing experiment published in Science by Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton, participants received a sum of money... At the end of the study, participants that had spent money on others felt significantly happier than those that had spent money on themselves.
The Dalai Lama has called for a century of compassion and peace in which the gap between the rich and poor narrows and environmental stewardship is a priority.
The exiled Tibetan leader told a crowd of about 5,600 at the Rhode Island Convention Center on Wednesday that peace stems from happiness and that happiness stems from looking beyond yourself. "We are part of humanity," he said, adding of fellow global citizens: "Their problem is my problem. Their happiness is my happiness. We have to look to the interests of others."
Pursuing his goal of making Louisville an even more compassionate city, Mayor Greg Fischer has signed a resolution adopting the international “Charter for Compassion” – making Louisville the largest city in America to take this action. Louisville will also embark on a 10-year campaign for compassion which will be implemented by a new local group, the Partnership for a Compassionate Louisville. The Partnership will be co-chaired by Louisville attorney Tom Williams and Sadiqa Reynolds, Mayor Fischer’s chief of community building.
Compassionate Louisville | Students: Give your views on compassion
This is a special invitation to all schools, all age groups, to tweet, text, write, draw, paint, photograph or video what you see, feel, express or think about compassion. The Courier-Journal will make the selections and publish entries in the Nov. 11 Sunday Forum and online.
Nov. 11 marks the one-year anniversary of Compassionate Louisville. Help the city celebrate by sharing what you see as compassion.
All students from all schools — including home schools — can participate.
"So world, breed compassion. Can we put compassion above all things? Can we be brave enough to fight for peace with no fight at all?" Gaga also presented a gift for Sean and John Lennon that she described as "the seed of a lotus flower and the seed of an olive branch."
Two days of hands-on workshops for helping professionals with keynote speakers Dr Kristin Neff, Françoise Mathieu and Andrée Jetté and others.
This year, we will focus both on organizational health and on hands-on wellness strategies you can try right at the conference. Part of the conference will involve breakout sessions with smaller group activities. We will also offer a refresher session for Compassion Fatigue Trainers who are seeking to sharpen their skills and connect with others.
In my line of work, I practice compassion very often for the clients that I help to overcome often debilitating injuries that include both the physical and emotional. Sometimes it seems that our society doesn't practice a lot of compassion--we are quick to judge another without really looking at ourselves. While browsing the Internet, I came across an article that caught my eye about the health benefits of compassion and thought about how there are many benefits to practicing this type of behavior. In fact, research shows that having compassion for others results in lesser anxiety, depression and stress. Regardless, it is still difficult to practice compassion, but there are ways for you to get better at it.
Not does compassion lower anxiety, depression and stress, but there are no adverse side effect, and this style of 'treatment' does not result in a large medical bill either.
Stories of Compassion is part of an umbrella effort called “Compassion Games: Survival of the Kindest,” and it begins Sept. 21. The Compassion Games are sponsored by Compassionate Seattle, United Way of King County, the City of Seattle, and King County. The games are intended as both a fun and serious way to renew regional dialogue about the value of compassionate action in our personal lives and in our communities.
Opening day coincides with United Way of King County’s Day of Caring, one of the great compassion efforts our community participates in every year. Contest entries will be posted online at the Compassion Games site, a gallery for all to read, see and share. Winners will be announced later this fall. But it won’t end there.
That is the path of fear, and the absurd notion that more guns will result in less violence. The path of fear leads to anger, hatred, violence and depression. As a physician I can say it leads to mental and physical illness. It helps neither the parents nor any surviving children in the family.
There is another path, one of human connection and compassion. We all watched the victims and the parents, and we felt emotionally attached to them. We saw retired psychologist Gene Rosen talk about how he saw a group of frightened children in his front yard, and how he took them inside and gave them the stuffed animals that his grandchildren play with. How do we continue that connectio
Founder of the Inner Kids program, Susan Kaiser Greenland adapted adult meditation practices for kids, seeing a marked improvement in their capacity to focus, calm themselves, and manage stress. She is also the author of The Mindful Child.
Susan shares her insights on how children can learn practical skills to live more balanced, joyful lives. Her approach for teaching mindfulness to kids involves research-based techniques and playful activities.
Aligning with Ashoka’s mission of “Every child should master empathy,” Ashoka Switzerland looked for ways to implement best practice initiatives from the global Ashoka network within the Swiss context. Ashoka Switzerland held an Empathy-Workshop on November 27th in Zurich in order to introduce these models to previously identified stakeholders, build common goals, and defined concrete steps.Mary Gordon (“Roots of Empathy”) and Heidrun Mayer (“Papilio”) discussed their models with a small group of selected experts from foundations, education institutions, and organizations related to empathy, for example, Christiane Daepp (Swiss Ashoka Fellow and founder of the “Office of Ideas”).
Compassion: it feels wonderful to get and wonderful to give. It’s no surprise, then, that 68 percent of Americans in our recent survey rate themselves in the 8 to 10 range on the compassion scale – the most popular of 10 labels we offered. It’s also a shining example of how logic is overrated in the formula of what makes a product, brand, candidate or cause relevant.
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TED...
The Definition of Compassion Now that we have discussed the process of having and learning we shall move onto compassion itself. What is compassion? Well I could go to the dictionary and copy what it says, instead I will write what I think that compassion is about. My definition of compassion is a little complex and will take a little explaining, so lets begin. Compassion is an expression of empathy for another’s human condition in as much as a direct recognition of humanity and circumstance that has produced a state of loving kindness. Compassion is a state of indiscriminate forgiveness toward another human being state of existence. Now I have expressed two definitions one more to go, Compassion is love expressed toward another because of the recognition of the self. Empathy Love and Forgiveness combined is what I call Compassion. The expression of this kind of compassion is probably the most beautiful thing in the world because it is total understanding and love.
For two days last week, Danbury was Dalai Lama Central, the epicenter of peace and compassion.
The visit by His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, was nothing short of a coup for Western Connecticut State University, and of course, the Do Ngak Kunphen Ling Tibetan Buddhist Center for Universal Peace, in Redding...
Inspired by the Dalai Lama's teachings, WestConn is pushing to become the nation's next "compassionate university," a certification offered by the Compassionate Action Network in Seattle.
The Dalai Lama’s first lecture during his three-day visit to Boston was filled with laughter and discussion on the meaning inter-faith harmony, as he spoke to a crowd of close to 2,000 in a packed ballroom at the Boston Marriott Copley Place hotel.
The talk was hosted by the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT, a think tank established in 2009 that focuses on the development of ethics and moral purpose in research and education.
Imagine a world where CEOs looked at people who purchased their products the same way they looked at a newborn baby or their favorite grandparent. Imagine a business world where, regardless of religion, both founders and customers and all the people in between, looked at each other as if they were each other’s keeper.
Imagine a world where companies possessed deep compassion for their customers, their competition and themselves.
How can we maintain the ability to care about others?
I vividly remember the first day my medical school classmates and I met our cadavers in the anatomy lab. Large body bags lay on metal tables that had been bolted to the floor. I remember the sheer size of the bags best. No doubt existed in my mind that dead human bodies indeed lay within them. And yet part of me couldn't quite grasp that I was actually going to soon be unzipping them and cutting into flesh through which blood had once flowed as freely as it now did in mine. I vividly remember also a classmate of mine—one who'd struck me as being particularly sensitive to others—leaning against the wall at one point, looking pale and shaky. I remember worrying that she was going to faint.
Great companies have compassionate leaders, says Google's "Jolly Good Fellow."...
Jinpa defines compassion as follows: “Compassion is a mental state endowed with a sense of concern for the suffering of others and aspiration to see that suffering relieved.”
Specifically, he defines compassion as having three components:
A cognitive component: “I understand you” An affective component: “I feel for you” A motivational component: “I want to help you”
Great leaders possess a paradoxical mix of two important and seemingly conflicting qualities: great ambition and personal humility. These leaders are highly ambitious, but the focus of their ambition is not themselves; instead, they are ambitious for the greater good. Because their attention is focused on the greater good, they feel no need to inflate their own egos. That makes them highly inspiring and influential.
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