About Compassion

What is Compassion?

Compassion isn't an emotion. Compassion is a fundamental drive of all social mammals. We will adopt and protect other mammals regardless of their species. When you finish this article, type 'cross-species adoption' into YouTube. Pets are examples of cross-species adoption.

Compassion is the drive to diminish the suffering of a being that we identify with. The more separate we feel, the less compassionate we become.

The more separate we feel, the less compassionate we become.

How compassion becomes eroded

Each culture has a cultural narrative. A cultural narrative is a collection of morality tales (a story or narrative that teaches right and wrong). A cultural narrative describes how to think and feel to be 'normal'. A cultural narrative is like a story. A story has a plot (history), dialogue (a moral message), and actors (heroes and villains). Keep that in mind the next time you watch the news!

The narrative of the modern world is divisive; it is a narrative of conflict and separation. It teaches us to become indifferent to the suffering of others. We are taught to fear or resent whoever the current narrative identifies as 'wrong' (the villains).

The more separate we feel, the less compassionate we become; but the more compassionate we become, the more connected we feel. It may be difficult to feel connected in such a divisive world, but we can reconnect to our compassion because it is a deeply genetically embedded behaviour. To develop compassion we need to practice compassion.

The more compassionate we become, the more connected we feel.

The alternative is to feel increasingly more separate over time until it's us against the world. which is a competition we can never win.

How to develop compassion

I teach compassion meditation and compassion practices. Once we reconnect to the present moment through mindfulness, we must reconnect to what is actually in the present moment; our minds, our bodies, nature, and others.

Connection, Compassion, and Meditation is the topic for all my teaching until our day retreat on Monday, October 31, in the North Downs near Shoreham in Kent.
Learn to break the spell of the materialistic modern world and reconnect to your mind, body, nature, and others.

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