Caring about others

38533Please read the following passage (Find in “Important Documents section) – Mindfulness for Beginners (reclaiming the present moment and your life): Chp. 9 – Feeling Joy for Others
Book by Jon Kabat-Zinn

CHAPTER 9 – FEELING JOY FOR OTHERS

Feelings of compassion and loving-kindness for others can be developed and refined.

Like joy and a sense of well-being, compassion for others and loving-kindness are currents native to our hearts and minds, and so are already present. Perhaps they are simply unattended and unobserved, obscured by the overgrown vegetation of our usually entangled minds, preoccupied as they often are with our endlessly driven agendas.
If we are on the lookout for them, feelings of compassion and loving-kindness for others can actually be recognized and welcomed into awareness, along with perhaps some compassion and loving-kindness directed toward ourselves. This is often the hardest part — recognizing anything within ourselves worthy of compassion. However, believe it or not, these qualities of the heart are all intimate denizens of our own interior landscape. While they may ordinarily go unnoticed and unexplored, that circumstance can change anytime we care to approach our experience an openhearted and matter-of-fact way, just as an experiment.
Awareness might then serve as an open doorway into new ways of being in relationship to the full repertoire of our emotional life — without having to do any work at all or having to become a new or different kind of person”.

1. What did you learn from it and why?
2. How can you incorporate this message into your daily life?
3. What thoughts would you like to share with your classmates?