Compassion and Gentleness
Apr. 30th, 2013 01:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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three_weeks_for_dw project (running April 25-May 15), I'm posting some content just to Dreamwidth. This is a good opportunity to seek new readers for your blog and new blogs to read, and to recommend stuff you enjoy on other people's blogs to help them make new connections too. Previously we discussed "Skin Hunger," "Touch Aversion," "Primates Need Touch," and "Self-Soothing and Self-Control." Skip ahead to "Creating Safe Space," "Building Trust," "Healthy Vulnerability," "Coping with Emotional Drop."Compassion and Gentleness
Compassion is a feeling of sympathy for hardships and a desire to help alleviate them. It influences our internal and external lives. Practicing compassion for others can promote spiritual and emotional growth. This can actually change the brain over time.
Self-compassion turns this virtue inward, expressing tenderness for your own difficulties and resolving to work on them. Being gentle or critical with yourself affects your biochemistry. It's a useful practice too.
You can test your level of self-compassion. There are strategies and exercises for self-compassion. This lovely meditation invokes loving-kindness both for others and for self.
Gentleness is the use of compassion to moderate power. It is controlled strength, used to help instead of harm. It is not the same as weakness. Typically people think of ways to be gentle with others.
However, you need to be gentle with yourself too. People often show more compassion to others than to themselves. This is especially common for women, but can happen with anyone. When things go wrong, be gentle with your own pain. Think about how you would treat someone else who was suffering in the same way. Take steps to recover from the setback. There are also tips for being gentle with yourself in general.
These things work together. Compassion is a motivation; gentleness is a method. Whenever you practice these virtues for the benefit of another, you improve your ability to use them with yourself, and vice versa. Helping others helps yourself. The world will always be full of challenges, but we can choose to buffer the impact of that by applying compassion and gentleness.
What are some ways that you practice compassion and gentleness? Where are some areas that you think need improvement, either within yourself or the wider culture?
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-30 10:41 am (UTC)Being, as I am, a Quaker, peace and acceptance towards all comes top of my list and I try to accept difference as not being difference at all- just variety.
We need to break down prejudice and fear- I have experienced all too many people who are willing to condemn me simply for being who I am. People I've never met and who would pass me on the street without so much as a second glance, yet who think they know all about me and people like me and think they know my body better than I know it myself.
And some of these people are 'professionals' who really ought to know better............
Thoughts
Date: 2013-04-30 06:11 pm (UTC)I like variety.
>>We need to break down prejudice and fear- I have experienced all too many people who are willing to condemn me simply for being who I am.<<
Too true.
>>And some of these people are 'professionals' who really ought to know better.<<
Which goes a long way toward making professional services unappealing, unavailable, or worse than useless for many people. That's a problem.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2013-05-01 07:09 am (UTC)Re: Thoughts
Date: 2013-05-01 07:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-05-03 02:24 pm (UTC)Thoughts
Date: 2013-05-03 05:43 pm (UTC)Good luck with that. I hope some of what I wrote will be helpful.