Meditation seems to be the ‘in’ thing these days and there are numerous ones that offer you peace and calm and aid in emotional well-being. However, there’s one meditation we would like to talk about, ‘compassion meditation’, which aims at compassionate thoughts for one and all.
What would you say if we ask you ‘what does compassion mean to you’? How would you react? You may scratch your head, think and probably mutter something, perhaps incomprehensible. So, what exactly is compassion? And why so much talk about it? That’s because, in this increasingly busy world, people, it seems, hardly have time to be sensitive to others and their suffering.
So, it’s important to be compassionate. It’s empathy, genuine sensitivity for those suffering and feel a desire to help them alleviate this suffering. And, ‘compassion meditation’ is a technique where we cultivate this feeling by recognising that we are not alone in this suffering. This technique of meditation helps dissolve self-centredness making us, you guessed it, more compassionate towards everyone.
Deeply rooted in the Buddhist philosophy, Karuna or Compassion Meditation, it guides you towards compassionate thoughts. In fact, this technique connects us with our own suffering as well as others’ suffering, while awakening the inherent empathy in us. This meditation technique helps us be more humane overall.
So, there’s compassion for self, in which you produce feelings of empathy for yourself by producing it for someone else first and then directing it towards yourself.
Then, there’s the metta meditation or the technique of compassion for people who are outside your group. It extends to offering compassion towards yourself and then expand it to your loved ones and eventually to those who are strangers. This technique can also be used towards someone who you dislike or are angry with. In fact, this one is used for creating empathy towards such social groups that are outcasts in society.
Basically, compassion meditation is to help everyone lessen their suffering, which includes ourselves and generate this innate feeling within us. In effect, this meditation technique spreads, joy, happiness and makes the world a better place by feeling empathetic towards everyone.
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