Compassion Archives

Develop your compassion for others with these free mindfulness meditation practices

How to Befriend Your Body, Your Emotions And Your Spirit

Take a pause in your day to befriend your body, your emotions and your spirit. Sean Fargo leads this guided self-compassion meditation to help us sense into our transient experience and our essence with care.

Be Still and Gaze Upon Everything Kindly

Gil Fronsdal leads a Guided Meditation Be Still & Gaze Upon Everything Kindly. Buddha represents being still, tranquil in body & mind, eyes gazing kindly.

The Buddha statue is kind of symbolic, a teaching in its own right. Exhibiting confidence without assertiveness. It represents being still, tranquil in body, tranquil in mind. They eyes are half-open and the idea is gazing upon the world with kindness as we know the Buddha is a kind and compassionate person. This summarizes the teaching: Be still and gaze upon everything kindly.

Be still, don't be frozen, don't hold yourself tight, relax into the stillness and tranquility, and gaze upon everything kindly, So whatever goes on whatever comes up it's a training not to be in conflict or beaversive or be critical of whatever that's happening.

And with that kind of attitude, we are kind of like beginner all the time, starting over again. Partly in meditation, we're constantly starting over.

Guided Metta

Guided Metta meditation led by Gil Fronsdal. Metta is Loving-Kindness, is one of the cornerstones of Buddhist Practice and a companion of Mindfulness.

Loving kindness practice is a practice of goodwill for oneself and for someone else. Finding inside of us the intention for our own wellbeing and for someone else.

It is not positive affirmations, it is not positive thinking, but it's like a prayer or a wish inside of us and nurturing it to let it grow towards wishing goodwill towards others.

It is a very significant practice and a central one in Buddhist spiritual practice. It is kind of a tenderizer of the heart.

This half an hour guided meditation begins with the usual comfortable alert posture.

Patience

Listen to Guided Meditation on Patience by Marcia Rose. With patience being the most important and necessary quality with mindfulness insight.

Generosity

Marcia Rose talks about the seamless circle of the paramies of generosity. Paramies are the accumulated forces of purity within the heart and mind.

What is Generosity and Simple Ways to Become Generous

Generosity is the act of being selfless and not expecting anything in return when you give willingly. There is this feeling of happiness deep within your heart. Here are some ways to become a more generous person:

Consider the benefits of generosity.
Learn to embrace gratitude
Start really small.
Give first.
Divert one specific expense.
Fund a cause based on your passions.
Find a person you believe in.
Spend time with people in need.
Spend time with a generous person.
Live a more minimalist life.

Source: becomingminimalist.com

Listening Deeply

Kate Munding talks about the 5 precepts- a commitment to non-harming. Learn how listening deeply with compassion is a form of wise speech.

Compassion With Attunement

Frank Ostaseski leads a meditation centering on compassion and attunement. He says compassion is an attunement to exactly where you are.

Practicing with Darkness and Light at the Winter Solstice

In this meditation practice, Donald Rothberg talks about embracing the darkness and inviting in the light especially in this time of winter solstice.

Reflections on the Splendor of Generosity

Phillip Moffitt explains there is joy in generosity. This particular meditation is to acknowledge the practice of compassionate generosity in mindfulness.

Right Livelihood & Redemption

Jack Kornfield talks about the mystery of human life and the topic of redemption in relation to having the right livelihood. How will you live if it’s short?

In his talk on ‘Right Livelihood and Redemption,’ Jack Kornfield explores the topic of the end of life – of death. In his typical fashion, he shares poems and stories related to death, calling us to reflect upon the impermanence of life. Despite the uncertainty of our lives, contemplation of death draws us deeper into the mystery of this human experience and asks us to consider how we will use our time while we are here.

The Right Livelihood

More important than what we do is how we do whatever it is that we do – what energy, attention, and spirit do we bring to the way we live? Kornfield explains how it’s the “spirit that you bring to what you do” that informs right livelihood. This might call us to reflect as we inquire within ourselves: how am I showing up to my work today? How can I redefine and revalue what it is that I do? Can I learn to live right rather than to do right? Can I awaken right where I am, as I am?

Living with Presence

We can deepen our inquiry into life and death through a variety of meditation and mindfulness practices. Any practice that draws us deeply into our present moment experience heightens our experience of this life. We begin to value the time we have on this earth through our rising consciousness. Living with presence can help to enhance our time on this earth, heightening our sense of inner peace, acceptance, and contentment.

Self Compassion

Appreciate your compassion with this self compassion guided meditation by Sean Fargo. Take your mind into a difficult situation and internalize.

Increasing Loving Kindness

Sean Fargo leads a guided meditation to increase Loving Kindness. This meditation expresses the kind wishes from the heart, which amplifies to all you know.

Compassion

Sean Fargo leads a walking meditation with compassion as the theme. Find a place to walk that is safe to listen to this instruction.

Metta in the Post Obama Era

Matthew Brensilver leads a guided meditation about Metta in the Post Obama Era. “Aspire to be safe for others.” centering on this statement and striving to be free from suffering.

Heartfulness Meditation

Wes Nisker leads a heartfulness meditation. This meditation aims arouse compassion and love to the world we inhabit, to imagine the earth from space and hold it’s beauty.

After this heartfulness meditation, you should feel love and joy about your existence in our beautiful world. Your heart will be filled with gratefulness and acceptance about our role in this great and wonderful world we live in.

Guided Metta Meditation

Joseph Goldstein leads a guided Metta meditation. Metta is loving-kindness, is a general feeling of friendliness or goodwill towards others.

Heartfelt Meditation

Joseph Goldstein leads guided heartfelt meditation on Metta – the feeling of kindliness, loving-kindness, and heartfelt. Of friendliness and goodwill.

More Heartfelt Meditation

After listening to this audio, also watch this Guided Metta Meditation video. Joseph Goldstein takes you on a calming, guided heartfelt meditation for 48 minutes to help you understand what loving-kindness in practice is.

Also read our 8 Mindfulness Exercises for Love and Compassion. From trauma and depression to anger and contempt, a variety of human experiences act as invitations for us to deepen our sense of the transformative power of love. As we open our hearts to this broader way of viewing ourselves, our pasts, and those around us, our experience of compassion grows and our life transforms in infinite ways. These 8 mindfulness exercises online are examples of practices and teachings we can explore in relation to our search for greater peace, happiness, and unconditional acceptance.

Self-Compassion Break

In this self-compassion break exercise, Kristin Neff teaches us how to take a moment to offer ourselves compassion in the middle of a hectic day. Our tendency (when it comes to our mindfulness practice) is to develop compassion for others. But, are we developing enough compassion for ourselves?

Mindfulness Meditation

Many forms of mindfulness exercises, meditative traditions, and schools of spirituality place great importance on the need to have compassion for other beings. This is particularly true of Buddhism (some schools and subjects more so than others).

There’s no question that having compassion for others is important. We spend much of our lives struggling with others, attempting to wrest control away from those around us. In the process, we put ourselves at odds with other people. In doing so, we make the mistake of failing to realize that all of us are one: we’re all here together on the same ship, and it’s impossible for any of us to succeed unless each and every one of us does.

Still, it’s just as easy to get caught up in these selfless motivations and forget to do something equally important: that is, to have compassion for ourselves. While we tend to think of ourselves as living in a society that promotes self-esteem, we often do a surprisingly poor job of advocating for ourselves and our own needs.

Taking a Self-Compassion Break

Fortunately, introducing self-compassion into your daily life doesn’t have to be complicated. In this free mindfulness exercise, Kristin Neff offers us a simple way to bring awareness and self-compassion into what otherwise might be a hectic and busy day.

To begin with, you’ll take a moment to consider a source of suffering that you’re currently experiencing. This can be large or small — either will accomplish the same purpose. Perhaps you’re having trouble in your relationship, or you’re experiencing stress related to your job. It’s best to choose something that doesn’t completely overwhelm you, particularly if this is your first time attempting to use this practice.

Once you’re in touch with the situation, you’ll learn how to apply self-compassion to the feelings you’re experiencing. Listen to the video on this page to get started.

Self-Compassion Meditation

This meditation by Kristin Neff is a variant of the classic loving-kindness meditation but tailored particularly on self-compassion.

Many people object to self-compassion because it feels sappy, because others seem more important, because we feel unworthy, or because we don’t want to feed our ego.

But the more we practice mindfulness (nonjudgmental awareness), the more we prioritize self-compassion as a way to simply take care of ourselves, to value ourselves as much as anyone else, and to replenish ourselves for the service of others.

Self-compassion is a powerful tool you can use to improve your well-being, self confidence and resilience. Many find it easy to have compassion for others but struggle in applying this same kindness to themselves. By taking moments throughout your day to pause and practice self compassion, you can gradually increase this quality and make it a more regular habit in your life.

Compassionate Body Scan

Kristin Neff leads a meditation called the Compassionate Body Scan. It takes about 20 minutes to complete. Start with getting in touch with your body.

Compassionate Body Scan Worksheets

Along with this compassionate body scan audio, you may want to download these free body scan worksheets here and here.

The Body Scan is designed to help you feel and bring awareness to the myriad of sensations that occur throughout your body. By practicing this meditation regularly, you can improve your body awareness and also better work with pain and difficult emotions in the body. Additionally, people report feelings of relaxation and renewal after this practice.

The Body Scan is a variation of a Burmese Vipassana meditation practice that involves scanning the body for physical sensations. This meditation is also done in various yoga practices. The Body Scan is used in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), created by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D.

The Flowering of Compassion

Mark Coleman talks about the Flowering of Compassion. Mark explains we live in a world of heartful connectedness. The real path lies in loving-kindness

Loving Kindness For The Earth

Einstein said a human being is part of the whole universe. Nisker talks about Loving Kindness for the Earth. Our task is to widen our compassion for her.

Loving Kindness for the Earth, Compassion, and Mindfulness

We have all heard stories about the power of love. No matter what form it comes in, love has the ability to inspire, heal, uplift, and encourage us, even during the heaviest times. But what is this force of love really? What is it in its truest sense? We often hear loving phrases passed around such as “unconditional love” and “loving-kindness,” but it is not always clear how these universal notions of love can be applied to our everyday lives amidst the challenges, hardships, and emotions we all face. As we begin to look more closely at what is meant by words like loving-kindness and unconditional love, we come to better understand what these notions of love refer to and how their essence blossoms alongside our mindfulness practice.

Equanimity and Faith

Sharon Salzberg talks about Equanimity and Faith. Equanimity is the evenness of mind, especially in difficult circumstances. Develop a mind that’s filled with so much love and resembles space.

The cause of much of our upset and emotional instability is clinging and neediness around people we like, and aversion and negativity towards people we don’t like. We also have an unhealthy indifference to strangers, who may need our help, or at least our good will.

This equanimity and faith meditation helps us to examine our feelings towards people, and correct them where they are mistaken. This leads to a more balanced, wholesome, and helpful viewpoint. It also cuts off a lot of emotional turmoil at its root.

Life of Service

Mark Coleman talks about Life of Service. How wonderful and inspiring if the life of service we have is filled with compassion and loving-kindness.

Self-Compassion Practice

Rick Hanson talks about Self-compassion Practice. It is easy to feel compassion towards others than to yourself simply because we don’t feel much concerned.

Befriending Yourself

Rick Hanson talks about Befriending Yourself. This practice aims to cultivate the deep sense of being a friend to yourself. Firstly, take care of yourself.

How does it feel to befriending yourself?

Befriending yourself can be so difficult but here are 3 ways to make it easier to come home to yourself:

1. Consider a loving-kindness or compassion-centered meditation at least 3 times a week.
2. Practice receiving praise and compliment with radical acceptance
3. Keep a gratitude journal

Source: Medium.com

After you listen to this audio, take time to read our post about 8 Mindfulness Exercises for Beginners. In this mindfulness beginners guide, we’re going to strip things back and provide everything you need to embark on your journey.

That includes 8 beginner mindfulness exercises that you can experiment with today, and plenty of further resources so you can dig deeper.

Meditation: Tonglen

Tara Brach leads a guided Meditation: Tonglen. The natural suffering we encounter is the gateway to compassion. Let loving awareness takeover and let loose of all resisting.

Tonglen is a Tibetan practice of giving and receiving that helps to awaken our innate capacity for compassion. In this meditation by Tara Brach, which she describes as a version of Tonglen meditation, we are guided into a deep and open awareness of the places within us that are calling for our attention. Where are we caught in repetition, resistance, or suffering?

Meditation Tonglen: Gateways Into Compassion

Brach explains how the suffering that we experience in life is a gateway into compassion. As we find the courage to meet whatever challenge or discomfort is present within us, the experience begins to transform into something different – into compassion. Contrary to our human tendency to pull away from what is painful, this practice invites us to move more deeply into the experience. Where the felt experience is challenging, we can ease and facilitate our movement into a place of compassion by resting the hand on the heart or by focusing on the out breath, releasing whatever energies may be caught within us.

Collective Suffering and Compassion

In this meditation, we move first through our own experience of suffering and then expand our field of awareness, coming into contact with our humanity’s collective suffering. As we practice giving compassion to the collective, and to particular individuals in our lives who we know are struggling, we awaken the compassionate heart within us. We can also feel the vast openness of aware

More from: Tara Brach

RAIN of Compassion

Tara Brach leads a guided heart meditation: RAIN of compassion. Begin with sensing the heart’s intention to awaken the heart of compassion.

RAIN of Compassion

Tara Brach guides us through this RAIN of compassion meditation. She begins this meditation by inviting us to open ourselves to our own intention to awaken or expand the heart within us. From there, we move into visualizing an openness of sky expanding from within us, permeating the mind as it leaves a gentle smile behind. This opening sets the stage for softness, surrender, and openness that has the capacity to uplift and transform us.

RAIN Acronym

Brach uses the RAIN acronym as a tool to facilitate this mindful compassion practice. It stands for:

R – Recognize what is going on;
A – Allow the experience to be there, as it is;
I – Investigate with interest and care; and
N – Nurture with self-compassion.

Keeping this in mind can help us to return to presence when the mind wanders (which it will do from time to time). It allows us to experience things as they are without judgement or persuasion for things to be different. Even if challenging emotions are present, we can use this acronym to remind us to allow this experience to be present, and to move through it with compassion and curiosity.

After RAIN?

An updated version of RAIN includes an additional ‘A’ at the end of the acronym, making it RAINA. This ‘A’ stands for ‘After the RAIN,’ inviting us to realize freedom from our previous narrow identity.

More from: Tara Brach

Compassion Q&A

Tara Brach holds a Q&A session on the topic of Compassion. Let the heart soften and open, bring mindfulness attention to untangle the tangle.

How do we open ourselves to our compassionate heart? This talk by Tara Brach guides us to explore the topic of compassion. Tara Brach covers three skillful means as ways to open ourselves up to compassion, before deepening the exploration through a talk and Q&A session.

Object Awareness for Compassion

The first anchor for compassionate awareness is object awareness. As we rest our attention on a single object – or on the breath for instance – the chaos of the mind calms down and a calm clarity arises. When this happens, compassion is more likely to make itself known. This focusing of attention helps us to soften the mind as we ground ourselves in the heart space.

Metta Meditation

Brach explains that metta can be understood as anything that helps the heart to come back to its natural state of openness. When left unexamined, we may notice that the heart has a tendency to contract in resistance to the world around us. Metta requires us to pay attention in a way that allows the heart to open. We can use imagery, messages, touch, or anything else that helps the heart to expand.

RAIN for Self-Compassion

The third skillful means she identifies is mindful awareness of the RAIN acronym. This recognition, allowance, inquiry, and nourishment of whatever our present experience is can help us to move deeper towards the compassion heart.

More from: Tara Brach

Self-Compassion

Tara Brach talks about the topic Self-Compassion. In these difficult times, we’re often cruel on ourselves. It’s necessary to have self-compassion to bring the fullness of our being.

Harnessing self-compassion is often more challenging than it sounds. Many of us have been conditioned in ways that subconsciously work in opposition with our attempt to embrace ourselves in kind and loving ways. This talk on self-compassion helps us to better understand what it means to self-love.

Embracing the Waves

The struggle with self-compassion is learning to be kind and tender towards life’s challenges when we arise. It can be easy to become caught up in self-judgment when the less desirable aspects of our humanity arise. However, as we learn to embrace the waves, we come into greater acceptance with all that is. Brach uses a great metaphor in this talk to explain how we can trust that we are the ocean so that when waves arise they really hold no danger. When challenging emotions arise, we can learn to love these too, harnessing compassion for our humanity.

A Full Witnessing for Compassion

When self-judgment or negative thought patterns arise, we can take a step back from the stories the mind weaves as we ask ourselves: what part of me is in need of attention? This stepping back from our attachment to the waves that move through us can help us to move towards a nurturance of whatever we are struggling with at present. When we come from this compassionate lens, the mind softens and the heart expands beneath our loving attention.

More from: Tara Brach

The Kind Heart

Whatever the mind thinks about something fondly, it becomes the mind’s inclination. Joseph Goldstein talks about The Kind Heart. Cultivate loving kindness.

Developing Compassion

Jack Kornfield talks about Developing Compassion. The Buddha said the freedom of the heart is love. Compassion is the quivering of the heart when it touches sorrow.

In this mindfulness talk on compassion, Jack Kornfield opens up with a beautiful and inspiring poem called ‘The Sleepless Ones.’ This poem reminds us of our shared humanity, tuning us into the invisible mystery of the universe that connects us all.

Through silence and meditation, we begin to gain a greater sense of this. In times of either happiness or grief, we can tune into this connection to find inspiration, hope, and meaning.

Mindfulness Exercises for Compassion

There are a variety of mindfulness exercises that can help us to develop compassion. We can begin with self-compassion practices that help us to embody a greater sense of kindness and love turned inward.

We can also explore loving kindness meditations, or metta, which expand upon this base of self-love to bless all beings – those known to us as well as those unknown – with the same love and kindness we so deeply yearn for. With the same love and kindness that is our birthright.

Exercise for Self-Compassion

In this exercise for self-compassion, we are invited to take a new perspective on our relationship to some part of our lives. By drawing to mind some aspect of ourselves that we judge or criticize and then approaching this inner struggle from the lens of a supportive and compassionate loved one, we begin to sense that our limited perspective is not the larger truth.

We begin to see how we can speak with greater kindness to the inner world within that yearns for love and tenderness.

Going Home

Sharon Salzberg talks about Going Home; to reach the balance in living a life of mindfulness and compassion; to aspire to become fully liberated being.

Mindfulness & Pain 6: Compassion and Investigation

Learn how to bring up kindness toward yourself & use the power of mindfulness to investigate how you feel in Compassion and Investigation by Oren J. Sofer.