Cultivating a More Compassionate Heart
Happy Valentine’s Day! Today we are celebrating love and connection with each other. In these divided times it is easy to feel overwhelmed or discouraged. In our current climate everything is magnified by a constant flow of information, immediate social media reactions, and the 24-hour news cycle. It makes the divide between us feel large, larger than we can sometimes manage. In these moments, it can be easier to turn inward and avoid anything that makes us uncomfortable. But we can break out of this cycle. Today we are diving deeper into compassion; what it is, how we can live it out, and how we can weave more compassion into our everyday lives.
Compassion
What is compassion? We often mix it up with empathy. So how do empathy and compassion differ from each other? Empathy and compassion both include an emotional response to another’s distress. With empathy, we recognize the difficulty someone faces and we can feel that emotional difficulty ourselves. We can see it and relate to how it would feel in our own lives. Compassion takes this a step further. We recognize the difficulty someone faces, we can relate to it in our own lives, and we feel driven to alleviate the difficulty. Empathy can be thought of as more inward, an emotional response. Compassion can be an outward action. We feel empathy, we show compassion.
Self-Love
In our lives, some relationships make showing compassion easy. When a dear friend or family member is hurting, we can reach out. We can pitch in and help with anything they might need. This process becomes more difficult when the person who needs the most compassion is one we struggle to connect with, live very differently from, or is someone who views the world very differently from us.
In both of these cases, in order to offer our full selves to the service of others, it’s important we begin by looking inside and deepening the self-love and kindness we show ourselves. Writer Yung Pueblo describes this as, “meeting every part of yourself with unconditional acceptance, from the parts that you find easy to love, to the rough and imperfect parts that you try to hide from.” It is getting to the bottom of what you need to truly know and heal all parts of yourself. This is a lifelong process, something we will always need to tend to.
You can use the pages of your planner or notebook to help you in this process. As you write, be honest with yourself. Connect with your past challenges or hurts and work through how they impact your life now. Brainstorm ways you can heal those past pains. Are there habits or changes you can make to impact yourself positively? Work at finding peace and acceptance in yourself each day. You can choose practices to assist in this: seeing a therapist or developing a meditation practice, writing a daily affirmation, or going on a daily walk and listening to music that lifts your spirits. Utilize the tools in your planner to help you, such as your habit tracker, space for journaling, and brainstorming pages for new ideas.
If you’re interested in taking this further, explore these writing prompts in your planner or notebook:
Which parts of yourself do you struggle to accept? How has this affected your past?
Which parts of yourself do you love? How can you share your gifts with others?
How can you grow in your self-love?
Care for Others
Our care for others begins in our communication. Clear communication makes connection easier to reach. Through your self-love exploration you may encounter boundaries you need to safeguard and support yourself. In this new safe space, clearly communicate with those around you. Support others by showing up for them. This might mean showing up even when it’s difficult or inconvenient for you. Step outside your routine and reach out. If you are expressing compassion for someone you often feel divided from, pause through the process. Pause before reacting. Pause and breathe and connect to the bigger picture. Remember why you started this. Pausing can help us stay connected to our best selves.
If you’re interested in taking this further, explore these writing prompts in your planner or notebook:
Who in my life needs help? How can I reach out in a respectful way to show I care?
How can I connect with my community at large in a more meaningful way?
Which relationship in my life is difficult right now? What common ground do I have with this person? How can we bridge the divide between us? In what ways can I show I care?
Our main goal must be to love ourselves and others as much as we can. If we start with love, we can build great things. The more we can relate to others, feel empathy, and show compassion, the greater our connectedness will be and the less our differences will divide us. Ultimately each of us is looking for love, connection, and feeling accepted. We hope you know how much we love you, our Golden Coil community. Thank you for being here! We’d love to hear your thoughts on compassion in the comments section below.