Compassion is a gift that keeps on giving. When you develop a sense of connection and genuine concern for others, you not only help them with your presence and actions, you also give yourself a gift. How? By engaging in each moment with an open mind and heart, you learn not to run from any experience. As such, you become increasingly able to handle whatever life throws your way. Opening the heart develops strength, not weakness.
One can practice compassion both on and off the cushion. Here I offer a simple sitting meditation practice as well as 10 informal exercises for bringing compassion into your daily life. Pretty soon, the distinction between these modes of practice loses meaning. All of life becomes practice.

The Buddhist teachings tell us that wisdom and compassion are like the two wings of a bird that will fly you to enlightenment and that you need both wings in order to fly. What does that mean for us?

First of all we might just reject this as irrelevant to us because we don’t think we want to be enlightened, we’ll settle for happiness. What we don’t realize, however, is that enlightenment is just a fancy name for the highest form of happiness, a state that is not only our birthright but the end point of our evolution. We’re heading there anyway, whether we think we want to or not. Some of us aren’t moving of course, some of us are even going backwards, but our innate desire for happiness will keep pulling us towards it.

This five minute video is the first part of a fascinating skype conversation between Elizabeth Namgyel and Erric. Elizabeth describes compassion as a radical expansion of self. Then she gives some tips about how we can begin to cultivate this expanded sense of self.

There’s a standard American joke that goes, “A man walks into a bar…” and proceeds to have a short story ending with a punch-line. To get this post started right, I’ll finish the joke:

Watch this interview with Arturo Behar, an Engineering Director at Facebook, on the opportunity for mindfulness, compassion and empathy in social media and the necessity for developing tools within Facebook for enabling it.

I recently attended a weekend by Patrick Gaffney, who is an amazing teacher on the topic of compassion. Not surprisingly, this was what the weekend was mostly about. He defined it very beautifully as the spontaneous wisdom of the heart.