What is compassion?
Compassion is sympathy and concern for the sufferings or misfortune of others. Compassion helps us mend relationships, connect with others and it improves our health and well being. Compassion makes us human and allows us to engage with others in a genuine way.
Compassion offers us a different approach to different situations we would often turn away from. It all starts with empathy it’s the commonality for the human condition. It allows us to approach difficult situations in a kind manner and wanting to help resolve them or help resolve them. Compassion encourages us to be kind in any situation, it allows us to see the human side in others. It pushes us to address inequalities, cruelty and struggles of the situations people and even ourselves are going through. Humans are social and when we find ourselves seeing others struggle, it gets in the way of us being able to experience happiness whole heartedly. Getting out of our comfort zone can be scary, but it allows us to experience different perspectives and that is an important factor in understanding and feeling compassion. When practicing compassion we must let go of judgement, just as we do for ourselves, we must practice this for others too. Often we come from a place where society puts a lot of stereo types or prejudices on people in certain situations. We must let go of that and take an honest look of what is going on. When we approach people with a preconceived judgment, we are already placing barriers. It is always good to put yourself in their shoes, imagine that was you. How would you want to be treated, how could someone help you? Perhaps it could be a friendly conversation, a smile or just someone approaching you without judgement and feeling a true human connection.
Self compassion, is treating yourself the way you would a friend who is going through a hard time. You need to have self kindness, recognize that it’s ok to feel this way or make mistakes without harshly judging yourself. Why is is important or necessary to have self compassion? People who have self compassion tend to be happier, more satisfied and motivated with less anxiety and depression. They have a certain resilience needed to cope with difficult life events. We can learn to embrace ourselves and what we are experiencing in life, providing ourselves with the strength needed to overcome and thrive.
Compassion is not only seeing the other persons human aspect or ourselves without judgment, but is also taking action. Whether that action be feeling inspired for yourself to overcome your difficult situation or turning a persons day around with a simple act of human kindness. Compassion is important for us to practice in our day to day lives with others and of course ourselves.
