Compassion is an important trait. Not only compassion for others, but compassion for yourself is important to living a happy life. Through compassion you can improve your social connections. Whether this is your neighbors, colleagues, family or friends. Compassion makes for better relationships. Self-compassion ensures that problems can seem a lot less problematic, reducing stress and anxiety.
To help you have more compassion in your life, in this article I will discuss what compassion is and how meditation can help you gain and give more compassion.
Compassion
Compassion is a beautiful word, but it can have different meanings for everyone. Originally, compassion means co-suffering. So that you go through suffering together with another. Compassion is also seen as wanting to reduce suffering in another person, but for me it is so much more than that.
Compassion involves the ability to empathize with others. Not only in suffering, but also in happiness. You are then happy for the other person that they have achieved a goal rather than envious, for example.
Especially if you have times when things are not going so well for a while, compassion is very important for you.
Compassion from others can make you realize that you are not the only one with problems.
Through compassion from others, you can be presented with solutions to your problem that you may not have thought of yourself. This may just be the solution you are looking for.
You yourself, of course, can have compassion for your fellow man. Sometimes this is more difficult.
With friends it is often easy to be compassionate about their feelings, but with colleagues and some family members it can be more difficult. This is very unfortunate, because by being compassionate with each other there too, you can strengthen bonds.
Compassion for others
Compassion for others is very important, but especially if you have a lot of caring responsibilities you may suffer from compassion fatigue.
Especially those who provide psychological or other care can at some point get tired of trauma and other problems people have that they are asked to provide a solution for.
As a result, you may become numb to problems in your environment. Even if they do not occur in your professional life, but rather in the private circle.
Therefore, it is important to maintain compassion for others while protecting yourself from compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue is also often a sign of burnout (1).
To maintain compassion for others, you can do several things, such as meditate.
Compassion meditation and other meditation helps maintain your compassion levels and reduce stress. Stress is also a major contributor to burnout.
That meditation has this effect on compassion and stress is shown in a study conducted on 61 people, 33 of whom performed compassion meditation daily. After just six weeks, the group that had practiced meditation showed less stress and more compassion(2).
In the process, participants' behavior in the study also changed on stressful situations.
In addition, you can also train yourself to be more compassionate. Research shows that when healthy adults take such training they respond more selflessly when someone needs help outside of that training, such as helping someone who has fallen(3).
Such training also changes the connections in the brain related to emotion and social thoughts. This causes you to make different decisions in social situations than if you haven't trained yourself for compassion.
In addition, mindfulness meditation also helps generate more compassion.
Compassion for others meditation exercise
Research also shows that meditating regularly to let go, among other things, helps one be more compassionate toward others(4).
In this study, subjects were placed in a waiting room with an actor. Then a person walked in on crutches who appeared to be in a lot of pain, this of course was played by an actor. The already seated actor would just ignore him. Moreover, all the chairs were occupied.
Among those who meditated regularly, half stood up to give the person with crutches a chair. Whereas in the group that did not meditate, only 15 percent stood up to help the person in pain. This is a pretty big difference.
So you can actually just meditate and by doing so regularly you can already become more compassionate toward others.
Meditation Exercise
You sit or lie down in a comfortable position. Then you begin by shifting your attention to your breathing. You don't need to direct your breathing, you just need to be "aware" of it.
Once you notice how your breathing is going and you have made the connection with yourself you start directing your breathing. You start by breathing through the belly. You can check this by putting your hands on or against your belly. If they move on your breathing it means you are breathing through your belly.
Try to maintain this calm feeling of breathing for about 2 to 5 minutes. If you find it difficult, you can also count your breaths. Each time count to 10 and then start over.
Compassion for yourself
Compassion for others is very beautiful, but it is also important to have self-compassion. By self-compassion, I mean being kind to yourself.
It is very easy to be hard on yourself. That you have to achieve certain goals and that you burn yourself down if you don't succeed. This is a great shame because failure is part of life. Burning yourself down is actually being very mean to yourself.
Through more self-compassion, you allow things to sometimes not go your way. You also allow more self-compassion to allow more negative emotions more quickly.
Indeed, it is very common in today's society to brush away sadness, grief and other negative emotions and pretend they are not there. But sometimes it is good to do take time to process negative things that have happened or to just relax.
By having more compassion for yourself, you can better handle stressful situations and gain self-confidence.
Self-compassion also helps improve the values you assign to yourself. Instead of being worthless, you become valuable according to yourself. Your glass becomes half full instead of half empty.
In addition to improvements in self-confidence and reducing self-criticism in a moment when you've dealt with something a little less conveniently, self-compassion also helps to stop thoughts that actually reduce your self-confidence and increase self-criticism(5).
Research also shows that self-compassion can be improved with mindfulness meditation.
Self-compassion meditation exercise
You can also meditate in other ways to have more self-compassion.
One of the most well-known meditation exercises for compassion in general is the love and kindness meditation, which I described in a blog on multiple meditation techniques. That's the first exercise you can do.
In addition, you can also perform this meditation exercise:
The critic, critic receiver and observer
For this exercise, you're actually going to meditate three times, but in a different place.
Each time, you first sit comfortably and focus on breathing. Then you first observe your thoughts. You observe their topics, arguments and the tone in which you give them. This is actually the critic.
When doing this, also pay attention to the tone your thoughts have. If you find this difficult you can also speak them.
Now sit elsewhere and observe how these thoughts affect your emotions. If necessary, verbalize how those critical thoughts feel as well. "That thought makes me feel unsupported by myself." Is, for example, a way to make your emotions more tangible.
Finally, empathize as someone who observes what is going on. Just like when you help a friend with a problem, you can also help yourself. You describe what you see, how you yourself react and can think of ideas on how to handle it differently. For example, you can do this in the following way:
"I see that I'm really bummed that something didn't work out for me, then I start burning myself down instead of thinking about what I can do differently next time."
Another observation may be:
"After such a hard day, you really don't want to hear all those negative thoughts. This seems very annoying and tiring."
These observations can cause you to realize things that free you from negative thoughts and can actually give those thoughts a positive spin(6).
After this exercise, also check how the tension in your body is doing. If you think you are sufficiently relaxed you can stop, or you can do another round.
Want to learn more about mental techniques to feel better about yourself? Then come to a seminar or check out Hypnosis Institute Netherlands' training courses.
Sources:
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2002-17425-005
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306453008002199
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/7/1171.short
http://www.northeastern.edu/cos/2013/04/release-can-meditation-make-you-a-more-compassionate-person/
