#PERSPECTIVES | The Truth About Compassion

Compassion can often be confused between self-sacrifice and empathy…so what is true compassion? Discover the difference and learn how to take the steps to fully embody compassion on this episode of #Perspectives, so that you can begin to have deeper and more meaningful relationships with others and yourself.

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Key Topics and Time Stamps

1.15 What is compassion and what is not compassion.
- Sometimes compassion can be confused between self-sacrifice or empathy or what is what….What is compassion?
- I think it’s misrepresented a lot of the time. People say ‘I'm a compassionate person’ but there's a lot of surface to it. And we need to have depth.

2.00 Difference between Empathy and Compassion
- To me empathy is feeling what I'm able to relate to, what someone else is feeling or experiencing.
- compassion is going a step further and wanting to help resolve that or be part of their journey with them and be ok with that and not make you it about ourselves.
- Whereas where it can get unhealthy is, it looks like compassion to someone, though what they're really doing is making their feelings that person's feelings or taking on the person whose hurting feelings and being upset with them.
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3.30 Example of expressing empathy vs compassion
- Empathy is a demonstration. It’s wanting to know the feelings, perceptions and thoughts
- Compassion is working out with the person what do we do with this, do we do anything, do we just sit with it.
- Without empathy we can’t have compassion

5.38 Before empathy there first comes the I-amness, the sense of self

6:00 Narcissistic Listening
- Narcissistic listening is not compassion. This type of listening is, they shared something and then you say, ‘yea that happened to me,’ or ‘recently I’ turning the conversation back on them.

6:35 Steps and layers
- Compassion is the top Layer
- Then empathy to get compassion
- But we’ve got to earn empathy by being able to be kind to ourselves
- To be kind to self is to have a sense of our own I-amness and enough-ness that ‘I can handle that’ which is a demonstration of self-esteem
- So the order goes:
o Compassion
o Empathy
o Resilience
o Self-esteem
 Boundaries
 Needs
 And emotionality
- Compassion requires you to be able to be completely comfortable in your emotions because if you’re not comfortable with your emotions you shut them down…when someone else displays those emotions you’re not comfortable with you can’t be compassionate, ask the right questions to tune into it because you don’t have a healthy relationship with it
- Therefor this version of compassion can come off as shame

9:00 An example of truly being compassionate
- If someone can
o Dive into your pain
o Dive into your shame
o Are into what your celebrating
- So to be able to be compassionate you have to be able to be there in pain, shame and glory


12:00 lessons from learning compassion and contrast
- The way I look at it in this case is, what were the emotions.
- Find out what were the needs
- What is it this person needed in that time
- And ask them what did you need then, what needed to have happened for you to have felt loved, included and safe and to feel that compassion was present to you.
- And then boundaries
- Do you do you feel that you were supporting your boundaries when you set that thing or did you feel your boundaries were not being supported when you said that?
- Resilience is believing in the choice in the face of hopelessness.

16:15 Example of healthy boundaries
- The more that you respect your boundaries and understand them the more I can understand yours and where mine ends and yours begin and you can do the same for me.
- It’s knowing, that’s me and that’s you and we’re not the same

18.20 My core values
- my values are
o health
o fitness
o vitality
o love
o wisdom
o truth
o playfulness

19:57 Why it’s the gift to give to people

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