Compassion

December 29, 2024 • 4 min

Compassion is often mistaken for being a bit wet but it’s powerful and super helpful. The best tonic for pain, suffering and shame. In the same way that it feels nicer to be around kind, gentle caring people when you’re struggling – or at all really - than it does harsh, critical or disinterested people, we benefit from creating these conditions for ourselves. 

Paul Gilbert is the founder of compassion focussed therapy and defines compassion as “a sensitivity to the suffering in self and others, with a commitment to try to alleviate and prevent it” 

Compassion really can be used to alleviate suffering, engage with and bear emotional pain, calm our anger and anxiety, build emotional resilience, keeps us physically well – reduce inflammation and enhance our immune system. It reduces the risk of depression and anxiety and increases our ability to connect with others, the most critical and human of functions. We are designed to love and be loved and when this is the case we function at our best, both emotionally and physically. 

We live in a world that doesn’t make compassion easy. So much drive, competition and comparison all create conditions where we can end up being quite harsh and self critical. If we feel ashamed of ourselves, or our feelings thoughts and behaviours, then bringing some compassion to our situation can really really help. Compassion is different from sympathy. Sympathy enables us to feel the pain of our suffering, and the pain of others. Compassion brings feelings of kindness, friendliness and a ‘heartfelt wish’ that we or others may be happy. In compassionate meditation exercises there’s an additional focus on a warm kind internal voice tone and a softness in facial expression – these are important in helping us generate these feelings. 

So often I work with people who are giving themselves a really hard time, for having a hard time. Compassion encourages us to bring a friendly curiosity to our experience, and a willingness to alleviate suffering. It encourages us to befriend ourselves and our experience. Meaning we can lean in and help – like we might for a really close friend, rather than spinning off into automatic patterns of self critical thinking and sometimes less than helpful coping strategies. If we’re being hard on ourselves we can get more and more entrenched in difficulty, find it harder to access help, meaning things are less likely to dissipate and ease naturally. Shame on the other hand, makes us want to crawl under a rock, pull a duvet over our head and hide away. It’s very hard on us and often creates secondary problems as things pile up around us metaphorically or literally. I find that compassion works like a balm for shame, dissipating it and allowing things to change. 

As Paul Gilbert says: by opening your heart to compassion for your difficulties, you can take the first steps towards dealing with them in a new way’.

If it feels hard being compassionate to ourselves, or others, we can start by acting ‘as if’ we were. Just like an actor might before getting into role. Bringing a heartfelt intention to be self compassionate, enables the feelings to follow. 

My favourite instant compassion exercise – is ‘what would I say to a friend in this situation’? So often this enables us to access feelings of compassion that we would find hard to tap into for ourselves. We’re often more compassionate to friends than we are to ourselves. My other favourite pocket practice is to put a hand over the heart and say ‘let me be kind to myself’. It’s a powerful intention that can make a huge difference. 

Doing something caring for someone else, or for yourself, is a great way to boost your mood. Compassion makes us feel useful, connected and brings meaning. A random act of kindness for someone else is a guaranteed mood boost. Or for yourself! Perhaps making yourself a cup of tea and allowing yourself to fully enjoy it. Or sending a really heartfelt message to a friend telling them how much you value them. 

A gratitude diary is a really lovely way to foster feelings of compassion. When I remember I whip mine out over dinner with the kids and we all say three things we’re grateful for. A nice sandwich, my son finding my glasses, that it’s sunny today. These can all help us access feelings of compassion and soothe us. We’re drawing our attention to things that ARE happening, but that we have a human tendency to gloss over. We’re wired to survive not thrive, straight onto the next thing. Getting more, staying safe, planning etc. In fact a deep appreciation of small things seems to make people much happier. 

I’m going to be sharing lots of mindfulness practices, some especially compassion focussed, which can really support you with developing these skills. I hope there’s something in here that has felt helpful and that you can bring compassion to whatever your day brings you next.