Answer: Say thank you when someone has been kind to you.
Read this article. It explains everything.
Understanding Autism – Temple Grandin
July 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow
Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds
Temple Grandin – Thinking in Pictures
What is the meaning of life?
July 5, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Answer: Here’s a good answer from leading physicist, Michio Kaku:
Closer To Truth asks Michio Kaku: Does the Cosmos have a Reason?
Wisdom learned the hard way – through experience
February 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment
1. Richard Branson’s lesson: Your good reputation is everything — don’t do anything that risks losing it.
One of the best lessons I ever learned was when I did something illegal. I got caught and paid for it. At the time, I thought I was being a bit of a longhaired pirate. It even seemed the game. I thought I was being bold – but I was also being foolish. Some risks just aren’t worth it.
During the 1970s we were all a bit hippie. The mood was very much ‘us and them’. With all the other renegades, many of them now notable actors, writers, musicians and politicians, I’d gone on protest marches against Vietnam and being chased by the police, I’d waved banners and claimed up onto the plinth of Nelson’s column. It was fun to protest, but we also felt passionate about the Vietnam War. (I wish we protested harder against the war in Iraq.) Pirate radios were blasting the airways from off-shore. People were doing drugs by the wagonload. It was exciting.
My scam seemed a neat little trick that I convinced myself was practically legal. It started by accident in the spring of 1971. Virgin was known to selling cool, cut-price records and we had a large order from Belgium. If you exported records to Belgium, you didn’t have to pay tax on them; so I bought these tax-free records direct from the big record companies like EMI and hired a van to take them across the Channel on the ferry. My plan was to land in France and drive on to Belgium. I didn’t know that in France you had to pay tax, even if you were in transit on the way to somewhere else.
At Dover the customs people stamped my papers with the number of records I had. When I arrived in France, I was asked for proof that I wasn’t going to sell the records in France itself. I showed my order from Belgium and said I was just passing through France, but it did no good. The French said I had bonded stock and had to pay tax.
I was annoyed and upset because my intentions were honest and straightforward and it seemed to me that French customs was being very stuffy, so I argued about it and they wouldn’t budge. Since I didn’t want to pay tax, I had to return by ferry to Dover with all the records still in the van, angry that I had wasted my time and lost a good order. But on the drive back to London, it dawned on me that I now had a vanload of tax-free records. I even have a customs stamp to prove it. I thought I could still sell them by mail order or in the virgin shops and make about £5000 extra profit.
It was against the law, but I just thought I was bending the rules a bit and taking advantage of a situation that wasn’t of my making. After all, I had started out to do the right thing. At the time, Virgin owed the bank £15,000 and now it seemed as if luck, or fate, was helping us out. I had always got away with breaking rules and thought this was no different. I would have got away with it as well if I hadn’t been greedy. Instead of just selling that one vanload and being satisfied with the windfall, I made a total of four trips to France, pretending each time that the records were for export, and turned right around again as soon as I landed on French soil, before going through their customs. The last time, I didn’t even bother getting on the ferry. After I got my stamp from customs, I just drove in a circle in the port at Dover, in one gate and out the other, and headed home. I am sure that if I hadn’t been stopped I might have carried on. It was so easy. Only it wasn’t easy. I was being watched.
The real problem was that I was just small fry in a far bigger scam operated by much larger record chains who were doing what I’d stumbled into by accident, but they were doing it on a far wider and more cynical scale. I was only dealing with one vanload of the records we like and sold in on one existing shop in Oxford Street – though in all honesty, we were also going to put a few in the shop we were about to open in Liverpool. But the bigger operators had a more sophisticated system going and keep distributing right across the country. I got an anonymous tip-off at midnight when I was in bed, to say that we were to be raided first thing in the morning. I was shocked by this terrifying news and listened in a sick daze as the caller explained that all the records I bought for export from EMI had an invisible E stamped on them that you could only see under an ultraviolet sun lamps. Before he hung up, he said he was helping me because I had helped the suicidal friend of his through the Student advisory service.
We had one night to get rid of all the tax-free stock. I called Nik and Tony and rushed out to buy two sun lamps from an all-night chemist. We met up at our warehouse and started pulling records out of their sleeves and shining lamps at them. As large luminous Es stared up at us, we panicked and ran in and out of the warehouse, carrying piles of records to our van before driving through deserted streets not to hide them somewhere else, or destroy them, which would have been sane and sensible – but we actually put them in the racks of the Oxford Street shop. It made no sense whatsoever, but we had the deluded idea that Customs would only raid our warehouse and not bother with our shops. By the time six burly Customs officers, who looked as if they meant business, burst into the warehouse I had almost recovered from a panic of the previous night. Feeling rather clever, I hid a grin as they watched them search for the illegal records – we even helped them, earnestly taking records out of their sleeves and handing them over for inspection. I didn’t know that they were also raiding the shops. It was a huge shock when I was arrested, driven down to Dover and thrown into prison.
I couldn’t believe it. I thought that only criminals were banged up. But, alone and that bleak cell lit by the unrelenting glare of a single bright lightbulb, it slowly dawned on me that I wasn’t a hippie pirate. This wasn’t a game. And I was a criminal. My headmaster’s words came back to me. When I left school, aged 16, he had said, ‘Branson, I predict that you will either go to prison or become a millionaire.’
I wasn’t a millionaire – but I was in prison. My parents had always drummed into me that all we had in life was our good name. You could be rich, but if people didn’t trust you, it counted for nothing. I lay on a bare plastic mattress with just an old blanket and vowed that I would never do anything like this again. I would spend the rest of my life doing the right thing.
In the morning, Mum came to the court to support me. I had no money for a lawyer and applied for legal aid. The judge told me if I asked for legal aid I wouldn’t get bail, which he set at a whopping £30,000. I didn’t have that kind of money. I had the Manor, but it was still mortgaged, so Mum put up her home as security. Her trust in me was almost more than I could bear. She looked at me across the court and we both started to cry.
I will always remember her words on the train back to London. ‘I know you’ve learnt a lesson, Ricky. Don’t cry over spilt milk. We’ve got to get on and deal with this head on.’
Instead of going to court, customs agreed to settle the case by fining me a sum equal to three times my illegal profit. It came to a massive £45,000, but they said I could pay it at back at the rate of £15,000 each year. It seemed a scary prospect to find but I wasn’t angry. I had shown the law no respect and deserved to pay. Not doing anything illegal had been my watchword ever seen.
My way of restoring my own respect was to pay back every penny without moaning. In fact, I gained. Once again, with my back against the wall, my goal became to make a lot of money – but legally. We worked like crazy, opening new Virgin Records shops and thinking up good ideas to expand.
Ever since then, when I am asked how far I am prepared to go in achieving my aims, my answer is the same. I make it a priority not to break the law and I check all the time that I’m not.
Your reputation is everything. If you’re starting in business and ask me if I have a lesson for you, I’d say, ‘Be fair in all your dealings. Don’t cheat – but aim to win.’ This rule should extend to your private life. My motto is, ‘Never do anything if you can’t sleep at night.’ It’s a good rule to follow.
(from Let’s not Screw It, Let’s Just Do It by Richard Branson p 109-113)
2. Leslie Morgan Steiner’s lesson: How to spot a violent relationship early:
Living Through Crazy Love: Leslie Morgan Steiner at TEDxRainier
Learn and consider the secrets of domestic violence as you follow Leslie from the Ivy League through a violent relationship, reaching the power to break the secrecy and silence, and as she recovers a healthy future. Leslie Morgan Steiner’s memoir about surviving domestic violence, Crazy Love, was a New York Times bestseller, People Pick, and Book of the Week for The Week magazine.
3. Morrie’s (from Tuesdays with Morrie) lesson: Forgive yourself and forgive others:
“Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others.”
. . .
“Mitch,” he said, returning to the subject of forgiveness. “There is no point in keeping vengeance or stubbornness. These things” – he sighed – “these things I so regret in my life. Pride. Vanity. Why do we do the things we do?”
The importance of forgiving was my question. I had seen those movies where the patriarch of the family is on his deathbed and he calls for his estranged son so that he can make peace before he goes. I wondered if Morrie had any of that inside him, a sudden need to say “I’m sorry” before he died?
Morrie nodded. “Do you see that sculpture?” He tilted his head towards a bust that sat high on a shelf against the far wall of his office. I had never really noticed it before. Cast in bronze, it was the face of a man in his early 40s, wearing a neck tie, a tuft of hair falling across his forehead.
“That’s me,” Murray said. “A friend of mine sculpted that maybe thirty years ago. His name was Norman. We used to spend so much time together. We went swimming. We took ridess to New York. He had me over to his house in Cambridge, and he sculpted that bust of me down in his basement. It took several weeks to do it, but he really wanted to get it right.”
I studied the face. How strange to see a three-dimensional Morrie, so healthy, so young, watching over us as we spoke. Even in bronze, he had a whimsical look, and I thought his friend had sculpted a little spirit as well.
“Well, here is the sad part of the story,” Murray said. “Norman and his wife moved away to Chicago. A little while later, my wife, Charlotte, had to have a pretty serious operation. Norman and his wife never got in touch with us. I know they knew about it. Charlotte and I were very hurt because they never called to see how she was. So we dropped the relationship.
“Over the years, I met Norman a few times and he always tried to reconcile, but I didn’t accept it. I wasn’t satisfied with his explanation. I was prideful. I shrugged him off.”
His voice choked.
“Mitch . . . a few years ago . . . he died of cancer. I feel so sad. I never got to see him. I never got to forgive. It pains me now so much . . .”
He was crying again, a soft and quiet cry, and because his head was back, the tears rolled off the side of his face before they reached his lips.
Sorry, I said.
“Don’t be,” he whispered. “Tears are okay.”
I continued rubbing lotion into his lifeless toes. He wept for a few minutes, alone with his memories.
“It’s not just other people we need to forgive, Mitch,” he finally whispered. “We also need to forgive ourselves.”
Ourselves?
“Yes. For all the things we didn’t do. All the things we should have done. You can’t get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened. That doesn’t help you when you get to where I am.
“I always wished I had done more with my work; I wish I had written more books. I used to beat myself up over it. Now I see that never did any good. Make peace. You need to make peace with yourself and everyone around you.”
He leaned over and dabbed at the tears with the tissue. Morrie flicked his eyes open and close. His breathing was audible, like a light snore.
“Forgive yourself. Forgive others. Don’t wait, Mitch. Not everyone gets the time I’m getting. Not everyone is as lucky.”
(from Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom, p 164-167)
4. Dan Gilbert’s lesson: Care for your body when you’re young:
Interviewer: You say that we regret not doing something more than something we did. What do you regret not doing – and doing?
Dan Gilbert: I regret not looking after my health a bit better back when it was easy to do. The guy who had my body before me wasn’t all that nice to it.
(from Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, p 7 in the P.S. section)
5. Kris Kristofferson’s lesson: Me and Bobby Magee:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG2kq-4dM98
6. Harry Chapin’s lesson: Cat’s in the Cradle:
7. Stephen King’s lesson: Stay away from recreational drugs:
Dear Me,
I’m writing to you from the year 2010, when I have reached the totally ridiculous age of sixty-two, in order to give you a piece of advice. It’s simple, really, just five words: stay away from recreational drugs. You’ve got a lot of talent, and you’re going to make a lot of people happy with your stories, but – unfortunate but true – you are also a junkie waiting to happen. If you don’t see this letter and change the future, at least 10 good years of your life – from age 30 to 40 – are going to be a kind of dark eclipse where you disappoint a lot of people and fail to enjoy your own success. You will also come close to dying on several occasions. Do yourself a favor and enjoy a brighter, more productive world. Remember that, like love, resistance to temptation makes the heart growth stronger.
Stay clean.
Best regards,
Stephen King
(from Letters to Sixteen-Year-Old Me by dearme.org)
8. Some relationship regrets from posters on Quora:
- I regret not trusting my gut about the person I was with. Because I was blinded by love and in too deep, I ignored a huge character flaw.
- Blind to obvious personal flaws: Unwilling to admit something obvious afraid that it will end the relationship.
- I regret not talking about our issues because I was too afraid to face the truth that we weren’t compatible/good for each other, resulting in years of being in a bad relationship.
- Not to talk about problems: I put all problems aside whenever we meet. When I’m brave enough to talk about them, it always turn into a fight. It serves a good sign that it’s not gonna work.
- I regret the communication gap. Trying to avoid the issues and expecting other to understand.
- I regret my failure to share my feelings more openly, even if they are hurt feelings…
- I regret not listening to her advice and getting relationship therapy. Relationship therapy is not an admission of defeat, nor is it a bandaid, nor the final throes of a dying love. It’s prudent maintenance of a healthy relationship and a commitment to lasting love.
- I regret my complacency in assuming that just because the relationship was there yesterday, it would be there tomorrow.
- I regret that I only showed her affection privately, but made jokes about our relationship publicly.
- I regret not moving on sooner from relationships that were not growing. Trust me, you know pretty quick.
- I regret not getting out of relationships sooner. I typically stayed in relationships for a year or so when I was younger, even though some part of me knew the person I was with was not a person I was in love with. I tended to confuse familiarity with love…or I feared being alone.
- I regret letting myself and my partners assume that our relationship is my highest priority and should not be allowed to die.
- I regret being stubborn and not compromising when it didn’t matter.
- I regret to be blindly in love, ignoring the truth and living in own “dreamland”.
- I regret my failure to be more accommodating to my partner….
- I regret my failure to take seriously the possibility that I might actually hurt my partner’s feelings…
- I regret putting work over relationships.
9. Some parenting regrets by Qoura responders: Parents, if you had to do it over again what would you do differently?
- I would have held off on letting my son buy an xbox.
- I am sorry I allowed them to have TV’s and telephones in their bedrooms. They never came out of their bedrooms after that!
- I would not let problems fester. Both of my children, 13 and 11 are significantly overweight (in excess of 50 pounds each). This situation developed with my son almost from birth. As he got older, he naturally developed sedentary habits and we didn’t live in a neighborhood with enough peers to draw him outside into running around the way I did as a boy. The extra weight has deprived him of a normal childhood. Although he enjoys hitting a baseball and catching a football, he hasn’t wanted to play team sports because, at 190 pounds, he can not keep up.My daughter participates in musical theatre and some of the other parents whose children are skinny dancers can barely contain their contempt for her weight. It isn’t that I care what they think–they can go to hell for all I care–but the fact is musical theater is an extremely body-conscious subculture. There are only 1/10 or 1/100 number of good roles for heavier people as there are for pretty, fit ones.Today I take the kids to the gym every day and we work on treadmills and ellipticals for an hour at a time. We are a month into the process and I full expect to continue for 12-18 months to get them down to normal weights. It is a sacrifice for me, but it had to happen and I only have myself to blame for letting it go this far.
- For the first seven years of parenthood I worked in a job that felt like my equivalent of a startup environment: lots of late nights working at my computer, lots of furious typing into the blackberry at all hours. I’m ashamed to think of how many times my kids failed at dragging me away from a screen.
- My son is 15. I would definitely have let him fail more and fail earlier. Because in the end it’s not what we do for our kids it’s what we teach them to do for themselves. I’m still getting better at allowing him to fail but I should have started much earlier.For example, “Oh, you forgot your homework at home? Oh well, guess you’ll remember it next time.” “You forgot to pack your medicine for the hiking trip? Guess you won’t be going.”
- I’d would have worked harder to successfully breastfeed my oldest two sons.
10. Carol Dweck’s lesson: the seductive lure of seeking self-validation off others:
I am afraid that in the fixed mindset, I was also a culprit. I don’t think I put people down, but when you need validation, you use people for it. One time, when I was a graduate student, I was taking the train to New York and sat next to a very nice businessman. In my opinion, we chatted back and forth pleasantly through the hour-and-a-half journey, but at the end he said to me, “Thank you for telling me all about yourself.” It really hit me. He was the dream validator – handsome, intelligent, successful. And that’s what I had used himfor. I had shown no interest in him as a person, only in him as a mirror of my excellent. Luckily for me, what he mirrored back was a far more valuable lesson.
(From Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck, p 162)
How can I break a promise, pledge or agreement honorably?
December 9, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Answer: Consider applying Dave Logan’s pledge-retraction strategy, as spelled out in this article:
How to break your word, honorably
In a nutshell here’s what Logan suggests for undoing a promise, pledge or agreement:
- State why the promise no longer makes sense now.
- Formally revoke the promise.
- Make a new promise that still retains the core values of the original.
- Accept responsibility for any unpleasant fallout arising from your retraction of your original promise.
In the article, Logan gives an excellent example of how to word this promise-retraction strategy in action. Here’s my understanding of the essential structure:
I promised not to [XXXXXXXXX] under any circumstances. I did so because I believed then, and do now, that [state belief].
Because of [state change in circumstances], I now believe that [XXXX] is in conflict with my [state original pledge]. While I still believe [XXXX] is a bad idea, I need to be able to [XXXX] without the limitations imposed on me by the [promise I’ve made]. In the end, the best decision may be to not [XXXX], but I cannot in good faith [carry out my duties] with the [promise to XXXX] constraining my actions. Therefore, I am revoking the pledge I made to [XXXX]. While I am no longer bound by the pledge, I remain committed to doing my best for [you, the company, etc.]. I now make a much more important pledge: to make the best possible decisions for [ you, the people I serve, and for the future generations of our country,company, etc.] no matter the political cost to me.
Please read the article for all the details.
How can I learn to feel less superior and arrogant towards others?
September 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Answer 2: Watch this video where Ayn Rand demonstrates how ugly arrogance and superiority can sound.
In this interview with Phil Donahue back in the 1980s, Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, would have probably described herself as “confident”, but for many of us watching her, she comes across as just plain arrogant. Watching her in these videos, especially when she answers questions from the audience, might be a wake-up call to anyone who worries they might rub others up the wrong way with their superior, arrogant delivery style!
Examples of forgiveness letters
September 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment
1. Click on the following blog post to read over a hundred forgiveness letters, submitted by readers of the article. Remember, you don’t need to send the forgiveness letter; just writing it with a genuine forgiving spirit is enough.
The Forgiveness Letter
PS
Inspired by reading all these forgiveness letters, I decided I would shoot one off myself. It only took a couple of minutes. I then put it in an envelope, sealed it up, and threw it in the bin! I now feel free of any resentment (at least for the time being!) Forgiveness letters are clever!
Good reviews of the scientifically proven benefits of practicing gratitude
September 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment
1. An excellent, up-to-date article that includes lots of practical exercises for children and adults:
Thank You. No, Thank You:
Grateful People Are Happier, Healthier Long After the Leftovers Are Gobbled Up
by Melinda Beck , November 23, 2010, The Wall Street Journal Health Journal.
Examples of gratitude letters
September 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment
1. A gratitude letter written by a 17-year old girl to her mother:
I would like to take this time to thank you for all that you do on a daily basis and have
been doing my whole life….I am so thankful that I get to drive in with you [to school]
everyday and that you listen and care about the things going on in our lives. I also
want to thank you for all the work you do for our church. Every week you work to
provide a great lineup of worship that allows everyone to enter in and glorify God
every Sunday….I thank you for being there whenever I need you. I thank you that
when the world is against me that you stand up for me and you are my voice when I
can’t speak for myself. I thank you for caring about my life and wanting to be
involved. I thank you for the words of encouragement and hugs of love that get me
through every storm. I thank you for sitting through countless games in the cold and
rain and still having the energy to make dinner and all the things you do. I thank you
for raising me in a Christian home where I have learned who God was and how to
serve him….I am so blessed to have you as my mommy and I have no idea what I
would have done without you. I love you a million hugs and kisses.(this letter is from a scientific paper entitled Gratitude in Adolescence: An Understudied Virtue by
Jeffrey J. Froh and Giacomo Bono.)
How can I learn to be more compassionate?
September 1, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Answer: Read this great article by Leo Babauta for 7 good ideas:
A Guide to Cultivating Compassion in Your Life, With 7 Practices
by Leo Babauta, creator and author of the website Zen Habits
“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.
If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” – Dalai Lama
I believe compassion to be one of the few things we can practice that will bring immediate and long-term happiness to our lives. I’m not talking about the short-term gratification of pleasures like sex, drugs or gambling (though I’m not knocking them), but something that will bring true and lasting happiness. The kind that sticks.
The key to developing compassion in your life is to make it a daily practice.
Meditate upon it in the morning, think about it when you interact with others, and reflect on it at night. In this way, it becomes a part of your life. Or as the Dalai Lama also said, “This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.”
Definition
Let’s use the Wikipedia definition of Compassion:
Compassion is an emotion that is a sense of shared suffering, most often combined with a desire to alleviate or reduce the suffering of another; to show special kindness to those who suffer. Compassion essentially arises through empathy, and is often characterized through actions, wherein a person acting with compassion will seek to aid those they feel compassionate for.
Compassionate acts are generally considered those which take into account the suffering of others and attempt to alleviate that suffering as if it were one’s own. In this sense, the various forms of the Golden Rule are clearly based on the concept of compassion.
Compassion differs from other forms of helpful or humane behavior in that its focus is primarily on the alleviation of suffering.
Benefits
Why develop compassion in your life? Well, there are scientific studies that suggest there are physical benefits to practicing compassion — people who practice it produce 100 percent more DHEA, which is a hormone that counteracts the aging process, and 23 percent less cortisol — the “stress hormone.”
But there are other benefits as well, and these are emotional and spiritual. The main benefit is that it helps you to be more happy, and brings others around you to be more happy. If we agree that it is a common aim of each of us to strive to be happy, then compassion is one of the main tools for achieving that happiness. It is therefore of utmost importance that we cultivate compassion in our lives and practice compassion every day.
How do we do that? This guide contains 7 different practices that you can try out and perhaps incorporate into your every day life.
7 Compassion Practices
- 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.
These compassionate practices can be done anywhere, any time. At work, at home, on the road, while traveling, while at a store, while at the home of a friend or family member. By sandwiching your day with a morning and evening ritual, you can frame your day properly, in an attitude of trying to practice compassion and develop it within yourself. And with practice, you can begin to do it throughout the day, and throughout your lifetime.
This, above all, with bring happiness to your life and to those around you.
“My message is the practice of compassion, love and kindness.
These things are very useful in our daily life, and also for the whole of human society these practices can be very important.” – Dalai Lama
