Practice | Compassion Journal

22 Habits That Will Make Your Life a Little More Peaceful Each Day

September 15, 2015 By Brianna Wiest

1. Throw out, sell or donate everything you don’t need. Use this guide to minimalism to help you decide what you’re keeping in excess. If there’s anything that will immediately release your anxiety and put you at ease, it’s making the choice only to keep the physical things that either serve a purpose or hold a positive meaning for you.

2. Organize everything you do. And I mean everything. Your paperwork should be filed and your bills should be organized as soon as they come in the door. Your clothes should be kept in an easily accessible fashion, and your day-to-day necessities should always be placed somewhere you can easily find them. It will take so much of the guesswork and fumbling out of searching for that one random thing you only use once every two weeks (but desperately need, when you do).

3. Don’t consume what you don’t need. This is the other half, the more difficult half, of releasing everything you don’t use: you can’t buy more crap to replace it. Only buy the food you’re going to eat, and be very mindful and selective of what clothing and other products you buy. Will you actually use them? Do you even really want them, or do you want to just feel better in the moment? Trust me: A bolstered bank balance and the confidence of having a little more self-control will feel much better (and so will keeping a simple space you can actually maintain).

4. Put your self before your work life, as often as you can. Sure, there are some exceptions — like when you have to take care of your responsibilities and forego a few more minutes of sleep for an important email — and that’s fine, as long as you’re in the mindset that you are not your work. You are more than just what you do and earn.

5. Do something that makes you meditative. If sitting cross-legged and breathing isn’t your jam, find something that is. Do whatever it is that makes you really grounded and present and in the moment. If that’s going for a long drive with the windows down and music blaring, do that. If it’s dancing, do it in your room each day. If it’s painting, schedule time to do that, too.

6. Learn to turn daily chores into therapeutic practices… for example, bathing. You have to do it regardless, and the combination of hot water, the physical act of “cleansing” and how relaxing a hot shower or long bath is at the end of a long day makes it an ideal daily practice to reduce your nerves. Light a candle and listen to music and use salts to cleanse yourself. Be meditative about your rituals, and focus on the act of releasing and clearing.

7. Start to build a commonplace book. It’s a collection of quotes, ideas and passages that particularly inspire you or make you think, compiled and organized and filed neatly, so you can access whatever information you feel you need. Keep sections for “inspiration” or “healing” or “relationships” or “work,” and keep track of all the little things you come across that inspire you.

8. Incohesively journal. And don’t worry about storybooking your life… similar to the commonplace book, just jot down the ideas and epiphanies and observations you have in your day-to-day life. Look back and reflect on the things that most compel you to express them, and they’ll give you an idea of what it is you need to change/do more or less of in your life.

9. Burn candles at night. The flame itself is mesmerizing and calming; it will make your space smell better, and will overall give you a beautiful ambiance.

10. Replace your daily coffee/tea intake with hot water with lemon and honey. It’s relaxing and yields incredible health benefits. It’s cheaper and more natural than your usual latté alternative. There’s nothing not to love.

11. Only pay in cash. It’s difficult until it becomes a habit, and then you won’t be able to imagine how you ever did anything else. It keeps you conscious of what you’re spending (makes you realize how much the little things add up), keeps you on your budget and completely removes the “will this purchase dip into my bill money” fear (which should never be an issue).

12. Recite mantras. Even if it seems a little too new-agey for you at first, I promise, it’s so extraordinarily powerful that you’ll actually start to consider what it is you repeat to yourself once you see how impactful this practice becomes. Whatever you feel you’re lacking, or you want more of, say you “are” that thing. For example: “I am safe.” “I am in financial abundance.” “I am always taken care of.” “I am successful.” You lay the foundation to enact a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I am” is the most powerful “prayer” you can say.

13. Stop interacting with people who aren’t positive influences in your life, and don’t apologize for doing so. If they want to call you rude or unkind, so be it. You are under no obligation to make other people comfortable at the expense of your own sanity.

14. Cook your own dinner. There’s something very grounding about combining ingredients and working with foods and making your own meals. It makes you feel connected, responsible and empowered, in the simplest, most human way.

15. Observe what you unconsciously consume. Food, music, reading, TV. These things affect how you feel throughout your days. Don’t underestimate the power of the things you don’t even realize you’re letting into your life.

16. Ask yourself what kind of life you’d like to live, and base your other goals off of that idea. If what you think you want, for example, is to “start a business,” ask yourself if doing the dirty work of it, day in and day out, is your passion — or if you’re just in it to say you did it and seem successful. This, more than anything else, is how to determine the path best suited to you.

17. Make much more realistic goals than you normally do. You won’t actually be accomplishing any more or less than usual, but you will remove the guilt from believing you should have done more.

18. Find your ultimate joy in the simplicity of everyday life. Show yourself that you don’t need extravagance to have a truly incredible internal experience. You don’t need expensive foods to have a great meal. You don’t need anything other than what you currently have to start living the life you want. Why? Because the life you want is ultimately rooted in a feeling — a feeling that you can induce simply by shifting your perception.

19. Pay attention to what you seek. You will find it, no matter what. If what you subconsciously want is to see all the things that are wrong with your life, so as to force yourself to change it, that’s exactly what you’ll get. If what you seek is knowing all the ways you’re as unworthy as you fear you are, that’s what you’ll get, too. (So of course, you can make the opposite true.)

20. Develop a personal philosophy, and let it guide you through your daily life and decisions. If you don’t have any personal belief about why we’re here, what you’re ultimately doing, what your purpose is, etc., you’re going to live a highly unfulfilled life, riddled with worry, anxiety and unrest. You don’t have to adopt the beliefs of a certain religion or a particular group of people, but you do have to subscribe to what feels absolutely right to you. Not because somebody else told you so… but because it’s aligned with who you inherently are, and how you inherently think.

21. Stop trying to police yourself. Contrary to your instinct, much of the effort you exert to “hold yourself together” is useless. The more you integrate every aspect of who you are, the less you will unknowingly exert energy toward suppressing feelings, therefore compounding your stress and putting yourself on the road to implosion at any given moment. It’s more dangerous to suppress and ignore the “negative” aspects of who we are than it is to accept them. (In psychology, this is sometimes referred to as the “shadow selves” or Gestalt therapy.)

22. Stop believing that the way you perceive things is the way they actually are. Leave yourself room to be surprised. Remember that when you’re in a place of fear, you’re not seeing things clearly, or the way they really are. Remember that you can’t predict what will make you happy, but you can choose to seek gratitude, and peace, in the present moment.

This article first appeared in http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.

Matthieu Ricard and the Altruism Revolution

August 15, 2015 By Carolyn Gregoire

Matthieu Ricard has lived many lives.

As a young student in Paris during the late 1960s, he was writing his dissertation in biochemistry at the prestigious Institute Pasteur. Five years later, guided by an inner stirring to explore a deeper side of life, he was living Darjeeling, India, where he had moved to study under a Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader.

After his initial departure to India in 1972, Ricard spent many years living in silent contemplation in the Himalayas. This period of retreat ended when he published The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Live, a book based on a series of conversations with his father, philosopher Jean-Francois Revel.

Those father-son conversations were to become the first of many dialogues between East and West that have defined Ricard’s illustrious career. The beloved monk and humanitarian continues to bridge many worlds: those of spirituality and science, East and West, ancient beliefs and modern times. He has spoken at Dharamsala and the World Economic Forum at Davos; has worked with leaders ranging from the Dalai Lama to LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner to neuroscientist Richard Davidson; and has connected with millions of people through popular TED Talks while also living a quiet life his home country of Nepal.

With his many titles — including humanitarian, best-selling author, scientist and photographer — Ricard is uniquely poised to succeed at his current project: inspiring us all to act for the benefit of others.

His latest book, Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World, runs over 600 pages and has more than 1,600 scientific references. The tour de force brings together science, religion and history to explore the nature of compassion. For Ricard, exploring altruism — the selfless concern for the well-being of others — was a natural next step after last book on happiness.

“It’s a natural effect: You are open and kind to others, and without even noticing, you are happy,” Ricard told The Huffington Post over the phone from his mother’s home in France. “If you’re only preoccupied with yourself, even though you’re trying to be happy, you turn your back to happiness and you make yourself miserable. Either you get a win-win situation or a lose-lose situation.”

matthieu ricard

Ricard argues that altruism is hard-wired into the human brain, and he describes this innate capacity to care for others as the answer to the greatest challenges facing our world today.

The book suggests that cultivating altruism on both an individual and societal level is the only way to bridge the “schizophrenic dialogue” between society’s immediate needs and its long-term interests. Where we’ve gone wrong, Ricard says, is in sacrificing the well-being of future generations and the environment in order to satisfy our present desires.

Acting with altruism is the only way to address the short-term, mid-term and long-term needs of society, Ricard told HuffPost Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington during a recent conversation at the publication’s New York City headquarters. “The simple notion of having more consideration for others can reconcile those three time scales,” he said.

In a competitive, individualistic culture, it’s easy to dismiss altruism as a pie-in-the-sky utopian ideal. But, Ricard argues, the ability to care about others may be the very thing that keeps our species alive.

Altruism As An Evolutionary Advantage

Scientists and philosophers have long debated whether humans are fundamentally good, or driven solely by selfishness. Academics have often struggled to find a place for altruism within the theory of Darwinian evolution — you know, the idea that individuals ruthlessly compete against each other for scarce resources, with only the strongest going on to thrive and reproduce — largely because it often implies a cost to the individual.

But the story isn’t that simple.

“Altruists should logically be the eternal losers in the struggle for life. However, that is far from the reality,” Ricard writes, noting that in our long history of living as hunter-gatherers in small cooperative tribes, mutual aid was indeed beneficial to the survival of each individual as well as the group.

He points to a large body of evidence, including the influential work of Harvard evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, that suggests reciprocal aid is vital to the survival of a species, and that those who help others rather than fighting against them may turn out to be the evolutionary winners.

Although academics continue to argue about whether humans are naturally egoistic or altruistic, modern research has suggested that the tendency to care for others is indeed innate to human nature.

Case in point: A 2007 brain-scanning study by neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health asked volunteers to think about a scenario in which they would either give money away to a good cause or keep it for themselves. The researchers were stunned to find that imagining giving the money away activated a primal part of the brain that normally lights up in response to food or sex — suggesting that morality is not only natural to us, but deeply pleasurable.

Your Brain On Compassion

Even if altruism is in some way hard-wired in the brain, that doesn’t mean it’s always easy for us to exercise compassion in our daily lives. Scientists are showing that through a systematic training of the mind, we can boost our capacity for empathy and compassionate behavior — and by extension, our own happiness and mental well-being.

Ricard tends to laugh off the infamous title he earned several years ago in a neuroscience study: the “happiest man in the world.” It’s not completely off-base, though. When University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson hooked up EEG sensors to Ricard’s brain while the monk meditated on “unconditional loving-kindness and compassion,” he recorded levels of gamma waves (which may be associated with compassion and calm attention) “never before reported in the neuroscience literature.”

It seems like the decades Ricard has spent meditating on compassion have led to measurable, and indeed extraordinary, changes in his brain.

That fact that meditation can create significant neural changes is now well-known, and a growing body of research shedding light on the benefits of compassion meditation in particular. Known as lovingkindness (“metta”) meditation, the practice that has been touted by Buddhists for over 2,500 years involves reflecting on the suffering of all living beings and wishing to relieve that suffering.

In a 2008 study conducted by positive psychologist Barbara Frederickson, 140 healthy adults who had little to no previous experience with meditation were given training in lovingkindness meditation and asked to practice 20 minutes daily for seven weeks. Compared to a control group, the new meditators reported feeling more love, serenity and joy in their daily lives. They also showed improvements in physical health, including vagal tone, a measurement of heart rate and fight-or-flight response.

At Stanford, research being conducted at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) is showing that compassion training, which includes lovingkindess meditation, to be effective in boosting altruism as well as improving physical and emotional well-being.

“Connecting with others in a meaningful way helps us enjoy better mental and physical health and speeds up recovery from disease,” Emma Seppala, a psychologist at Stanford and scientific director of CCARE, said. “It can even lengthen our lives.”

Citing recent brain imaging studies, Seppala added, “The reason a compassionate lifestyle leads to greater psychological well-being may be explained by the fact that the act of giving appears to be as pleasurable, if not more so, as the act of receiving.”

Based on both this modern research and ancient Buddhist wisdom, Ricard sees altruism as an important antidote to unhappiness. As the eighth-century Buddhist monk Shantideva famously said, all suffering comes from the wish for ourselves to be happy, and all happiness comes from the wish for others to be happy. Indeed, psychiatry research has shown negative self-focus to be at the root of some mental illnesses.

But selfishness is also at the core of many of the most pressing social issues of our times, Ricard argues.

“Selfishness is at the heart of most of the problems we face today: the growing gap between rich and poor, the attitude of ‘everybody for himself’ which is only increasing, and indifference about generations to come,” he writes.

By cultivating compassion, we can improve our own well-being, while also mediating not only humanitarian but also environmental crises.

“If we care for others, and for future generations, we are not going to destroy the planet we’ve been given,” Ricard says.

The Altruism Revolution

While meditation is a good first step toward cultivating compassion on a personal and social level, Ricard stresses it shouldn’t be the end goal.

“Meditation gives you more inner strength and confidence, and if you don’t feel vulnerable, you can put that to the service of others,” he said. “So it’s not just about sitting and cultivating caring mindfulness. It’s building up a way of being and then using it for the service of others.”

Ricard himself doesn’t just meditate on compassion — he’s long been putting it in action. For the past 15 years, his humanitarian foundation, Karuna Shechen, has built schools and hospitals across India, Nepal and Tibet. The organization has managed over 140 humanitarian projects in the Himalayas, and most recently focused its attention on bringing relief to thousands of Nepalis displaced by the earthquake.

Though a relatively small operation, Karuna Shechen has managed to help 220,000 people in 550 villages in Nepal, providing up to 30 days’ worth of food rations for each individual, medical assistance when needed, basic weather protection, seeds so that they can grow crops again, and offering protection to women and children who may be at risk for trafficking.

Despite the grave challenges facing the world today, Ricard remains optimistic about the influence of the ongoing “altruism revolution.”

While researching for his book, Ricard says, he noticed a widespread change in attitudes.

“I saw this shift happening in basically every discipline I encountered, from psychology to economics, through evolutionary theories,” Ricard said. “You see the revolution of the [nongovernmental organizations], that has already happened. You see vibrant sectors of the economy, like crowdfunding, impact investing, socially and environmentally responsible farming, cooperative banking, micro credit, social business. And you see more and more books on empathy and compassion. The big picture is emerging in that direction.”

More and more everyday people, too, are committing to finding small ways to make a difference in their communities, Ricard says — starting with practicing kindness.

“You can always have an impact, there are so many ways to do so,” he said. “Everyone has skills that they can put to the service of some NGOs or volunteer work. It doesn’t have to be in Sudan or the Himalayas, it can be right here in your neighborhood.”

This article first appeared in http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.

How to Raise Non-Judgmental Children: 5 Ways to Build Compassion

July 15, 2015 By Anna Partridge

Hands up who has been judged for saying the ‘wrong’ thing, wearing the ‘wrong’ clothes, driving the ‘wrong’ car, being the ‘wrong’ weight, living in the ‘wrong’ house, eating the ‘wrong’ food, living the ‘wrong’ life?

Hands up who has judged someone for wearing the ‘wrong’ clothes, driving the ‘wrong’ car, being overweight, being the ‘wrong’ race, color or age or raising their kids the ‘wrong’ way?

I have a challenge for you – for the next hour, you won’t judge anyone. You won’t judge your parents, you won’t judge your children, you won’t judge the person you just walked past on the street.

Imagine a world where people didn’t judge each other.

Imagine a world where people showed kindness and compassion to others.

Imagine for a second if parents didn’t judge each other, but worked together to raise happy, healthy children. Imagine if there was no judgment in mothers groups or on the playground, but parents actually helped each other out.

What if people in workplaces didn’t judge each other, but worked together to get the best outcomes.

Imagine if you didn’t judge the homeless person you walked past on the street last night – instead you talked to them with care and compassion.

You have probably all heard the story of when the father got on the subway late at night with his 5 children who were all being loud and misbehaving in one way or another. Catching the disapproving look from the other people in the carriage, the father apologized. ‘Sorry, I am on my way home from the hospital and just trying to imagine how I will handle my first night without their mother’.

The world can be a cruel place. It can lack compassion and kindness for people who are judged and for those who judge.

Why do people judge others? Judging others is a natural instinct because they look, sound or behave differently to us. It is a primal instinct to defend territory and we take a fight or flight response and this may have worked for cave men that needed to protect their own areas, however today it runs deeper.

The main reasons for judging others is a lack of understanding, perceived views from experience or upbringing or a lack of empathy and compassion.

Perceived views and lack of empathy and compassion are largely learnt and built on behaviors stemming right from our childhood and upbringing.

As parents, we have a responsibility to teach our children about differences, educate them about others so they have a genuine understanding and build on their empathy and compassion. We can teach our kids how to be non-judgmental.

Here are the 5 ways to raise non-judgmental children.

1. Expose your children to people from different walks of life

‘It takes a good deal of character to judge a person by his future instead of his past’ ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

For the past two years, I have been working at a homeless shelter. People who came there were mentally ill, drug addicted, homeless, socially isolated and marginalized by society. I took my children with me some days and people judged me for taking them to a ‘dangerous’ place.

The encounters my children had with the visitors to this shelter were always a raw and beautiful experience for my kids and for me to see how they interacted with people who they would not normally speak to.

One meeting that sticks out in my mind is when my children met Cathy* – an Aboriginal lady in her early 40s with bright pink, curly hair who was homeless at the time.

She had a rough side and had experienced life in ways different to many. My son sat with Cathy on the bench and asked her where she slept at night and she described where she slept and what it was like. As a mum of 9, she had a way with kids. They talked about what it was like to be homeless and how different her life was to his.

They talked about what happened when it rains in the middle of the night and where she gets her breakfast without a kitchen. They talked about what bathroom she used and where she put her clothes without a cupboard. She loved my kids as soon as she met them and they got to know each other quite well over the next few months. There was no judgment from either side. Now when it rains at night, my kids wonder where Cathy is and hope she has found somewhere dry to sleep for the night.

If we allow our kids to meet people from different backgrounds, we are building on their empathy, compassion and understanding of differences.

2. Allow your children to experience many cultures

‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’ ~ Henry David Thoreau

If you can, live in a different country. When my kids were little, we lived in the States. My husband was doing a university masters with military members who were serving from all over the world and they brought their families to live in Washington DC for the year. My kids played with children from Pakistan, Holland, Norway, Lebanon and the UAE. They also went to school with American kids and learnt the pledge of allegiance. It was a great immersion into a new culture.

Here are a few other ideas to experience other cultures:

– Go on holidays to places with cultures vastly different from your own

– Meet local families who are from different cultures and invite them for dinner

– Each city generally has an enclave of particular cultures with many great restaurants to visit e.g. China town in Sydney, Brick Lane in London, Washington DC has an Ethiopian quarter

– Go to your local Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai restaurants and meet the chefs

– Put the world map up on the wall in the dining room and pick a different country each week to look at their culture or cook a different meal from a particular country

– Children generally learn a language at school – look at the culture specific to the language or encourage them to learn another language

3. Educate your kids about differences and celebrate differences

From a very young age, children know that people look or speak differently to them.

Take the time to tell your kids it is OK to be different and talk about the differences they have observed. It is not OK to judge that person for being overweight or being a different race.

Talk to your kids about difference religions, cultures, appearances, illnesses and how other people live their lives.

Talk to them about mental illness, about alcoholism, about children with autism and about people’s idiosyncrasies. If these things are not foreign to our children, they will accept the differences they observe as normal everyday occurrences and not judge it for being different.

By talking to our children we provide them with a vocabulary to discuss differences.

4. Tell the truth, not opinion

I was in the park with a friend the other day and four men were sitting on the chairs in turbines with long beards. Her 5 year old son asked ‘Are they religious people mom? Are they OK?’

No matter her views or judgment she replied – ‘They are from the Sikh community that live close by us. You know Alibi* from your school is from this community’.

She could have shrugged it off and not answered in a truthful way – she could have shrouded it with opinion to illicit fear or pity. Her answer was straight up and her son knew he was in a safe environment with different people around.

No matter your views and opinions, if you can tell the truth around differences, our children will make have the chance to form their own ideas.

5. Use non-judgmental language

Our kids will take our lead from the language we use. If we use judgmental language, our children will. Our children will soon pick up if we are racist, sexist, biased or judging others and copy.

Being mindful of the language we use will give our children the right words to use around others to show kindness and compassion.

A family with a little girl was sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery. A Pakistani man walked in and sat down on the bench next to the little girl. The dad stood up and sat in between the little girl and the man, obviously uncomfortable with his appearance. The doctor came out and called the family in and the Pakistani man followed – it turned out he was the donor of the bone marrow that saved the little girl’s life months earlier.

If we educate our children about differences, teach them about other cultures and provide them with opportunities to meet people from many walks of life – we set our children up to be compassionate, kind adults.

This article first appeared in Positive Parenting with Anna Partridge.

How to Transform Hostility into Compassion

June 1, 2015 By Jacob Gotwals

When we view others with hostility, we’re more likely to try to get our needs met at their expense. Transforming our hostility into compassion can shift our approach to conflict, allowing us to respond in ways that are more beneficial for everyone involved. (By hostility, I mean those strategies, impulses and habits that tend to arise within us when we view others as bad, wrong, or deserving of punishment.)

Notice Your Hostility

The first step is to notice our own hostile feelings, impulses, and habits. What does hostility look like? It could include feelings such as distaste, irritation, anger, resentment, or fear, with thoughts about the wrongness or badness of someone else. We see the other person as a destructive force to be controlled. We see them as separate from ourselves—a separate, external, threatening force. Often we are focused on a limited resource, and we perceive the other person as competing with us to obtain that resource. We may find ourselves secretly or openly rejoicing at news of the other person’s misfortune.

When we see others as forces to be controlled (rather than as human beings), we are more likely to try to meet our needs at their expense. We may feel justified in this by our thoughts of the other as wrong, bad, and deserving of punishment. To the extent that we consider ourselves victims of the other’s actions, we are likely to react with righteousness. When we have this kind of thinking, our reactions may range from subtle acting out (for instance, passive-aggressively avoiding eye contact), to all-out war with other people, groups, or nations.

Cultivate Empathy and Self-Connection

Noticing we are in an hostile state of mind is the first step, but the actual transformative process involves empathy and self-connection. Our empathy does not have to involve the other’s participation. It’s all about our openness to putting ourselves in their shoes and sensing their experience—including what they are feeling and the needs that are stimulating those feelings. What’s actually going on for them? Can we appreciate the needs behind their behavior (even when we don’t like the behavior itself)?

Self-connection is also important—for centering ourselves and for preparing to seek a beneficial response. We may have been competing with the other person for certain resources; if so, our self-connection process may involve looking at any limiting beliefs we may be holding about the scarcity of those resources. We might also look at our own attachment to getting our needs met through strategies that put us in competition with the other person. What needs are we trying to meet? Can we find other ways of getting those needs met?

Letting go of our view of the other person as bad and wrong may raise a possibility that may feel scary and difficult to face: in our righteousness, we may have acted in ways that we regret. Can we forgive ourselves for these things, and can we forgive the other person for actions and reactions that may not have been skillful?

Respond to the Situation

Releasing our hostility opens the possibility of responding to the situation in a more beneficial way. Any response is possible—we may choose to increase or decrease our involvement with the other. If we choose to increase our involvement, we might initiate an honest conversation with the other person. Or, we may choose to reduce our involvement, choosing other strategies for meeting our needs. We may choose to take steps to protect ourselves—not out of hostility or a desire to punish, but with compassion for both ourselves and the other person. (Compassion is not incompatible with discernment and clarity about our own boundaries.)

Sometimes I may choose a strategy of reducing or ending my involvement with another, when I don’t see that involvement as beneficial. But I still want to remain connected with them, in the sense of having a compassionate openness to their humanity. I want to continue to value their needs, whether or not I am involved with them or actively communicating with them.

This article originally appeared in https://www.swc.edu.

Seven Compassion Practices

June 1, 2015 By Leo Babauta

Morning ritual. Greet each morning with a ritual. Try this one, suggest by the Dalai Lama: “Today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others, I am going to benefit others as much as I can.” Then, when you’ve done this, try one of the practices below.

Empathy Practice. The first step in cultivating compassion is to develop empathy for your fellow human beings. Many of us believe that we have empathy, and on some level nearly all of us do. But many times we are centered on ourselves (I’m no exception) and we let our sense of empathy get rusty. Try this practice: Imagine that a loved one is suffering. Something terrible has happened to him or her. Now try to imagine the pain they are going through. Imagine the suffering in as much detail as possible. After doing this practice for a couple of weeks, you should try moving on to imagining the suffering of others you know, not just those who are close to you.

Commonalities practice. Instead of recognizing the differences between yourself and others, try to recognize what you have in common. At the root of it all, we are all human beings. We need food, and shelter, and love. We crave attention, and recognition, and affection, and above all, happiness. Reflect on these commonalities you have with every other human being, and ignore the differences. One of my favorite exercises comes from a great article from Ode Magazine — it’s a five-step exercise to try when you meet friends and strangers. Do it discreetly and try to do all the steps with the same person. With your attention geared to the other person, tell yourself:

Step 1: “Just like me, this person is seeking happiness in his/her life.”

Step 2: “Just like me, this person is trying to avoid suffering in his/her life.”
Step 3: “Just like me, this person has known sadness, loneliness and despair.”
Step 4: “Just like me, this person is seeking to fill his/her needs.”
Step 5: “Just like me, this person is learning about life.”

Relief of suffering practice. Once you can empathize with another person, and understand his humanity and suffering, the next step is to want that person to be free from suffering. This is the heart of compassion — actually the definition of it. Try this exercise: Imagine the suffering of a human being you’ve met recently. Now imagine that you are the one going through that suffering. Reflect on how much you would like that suffering to end. Reflect on how happy you would be if another human being desired your suffering to end, and acted upon it. Open your heart to that human being and if you feel even a little that you’d want their suffering to end, reflect on that feeling. That’s the feeling that you want to develop. With constant practice, that feeling can be grown and nurtured.

Act of kindness practice. Now that you’ve gotten good at the 4th practice, take the exercise a step further. Imagine again the suffering of someone you know or met recently. Imagine again that you are that person, and are going through that suffering. Now imagine that another human being would like your suffering to end — perhaps your mother or another loved one. What would you like for that person to do to end your suffering? Now reverse roles: you are the person who desires for the other person’s suffering to end. Imagine that you do something to help ease the suffering, or end it completely. Once you get good at this stage, practice doing something small each day to help end the suffering of others, even in a tiny way. Even a smile, or a kind word, or doing an errand or chore, or just talking about a problem with another person. Practice doing something kind to help ease the suffering of others. When you are good at this, find a way to make it a daily practice, and eventually a throughout-the-day practice.

Those who mistreat us practice. The final stage in these compassion practices is to not only want to ease the suffering of those we love and meet, but even those who mistreat us. When we encounter someone who mistreats us, instead of acting in anger, withdraw. Later, when you are calm and more detached, reflect on that person who mistreated you. Try to imagine the background of that person. Try to imagine what that person was taught as a child. Try to imagine the day or week that person was going through, and what kind of bad things had happened to that person. Try to imagine the mood and state of mind that person was in — the suffering that person must have been going through to mistreat you that way. And understand that their action was not about you, but about what they were going through. Now think some more about the suffering of that poor person, and see if you can imagine trying to stop the suffering of that person. And then reflect that if you mistreated someone, and they acted with kindness and compassion toward you, whether that would make you less likely to mistreat that person the next time, and more likely to be kind to that person. Once you have mastered this practice of reflection, try acting with compassion and understanding the next time a person treats you. Do it in little doses, until you are good at it. Practice makes perfect.

Evening routine. I highly recommend that you take a few minutes before you go to bed to reflect upon your day. Think about the people you met and talked to, and how you treated each other. Think about your goal that you stated this morning, to act with compassion towards others. How well did you do? What could you do better? What did you learn from your experiences today? And if you have time, try one of the above practices and exercises.

This article was originally published by http://downtheforestpath.com/.