How Compassion Leads to Growth

People have to understand that if they were born in other people's shoes, they would be doing the same. With this, we’re able to give others their needed compassion and care for change, regardless of their past. We also need to think about having compassion for ourselves so we can give ourselves a better chance of improving. Everyone goes through challenges, and we have a choice to meet people with either hostility or patience. Then, we need to take some time to slow down from our fast lives where everything is instant. If we do not slow down, we will always feel overwhelmed and not have any time for other people nor ourselves.

We need some time for ourselves or else we’re always in a hurry to be in a future where we’re not hurrying. People nowadays work to someday have enough money for fun, which just stems from our need to survive. So we need to define success as having peace with ourselves, making material things almost irrelevant. We can have money but it may be with people who do not have mutual genuine care for each other. If we define happiness as having something, we may be putting your happiness out of reach perpetually. People can still be committed to dreams and aspirations, but then need to appreciate the now. Because we never know when our death will come, it’s important to be happy today than in a potential future.

One sign of unhappiness is emotional obesity or when we don’t feel heard which results in craving comfort food. When we accumulate our negative emotions, we tend to overcompensate with pleasure. Then, this hurt is only made worse by others who pick on the overweight people as inadequacy is reinforced. And so fat people say “I am fat” which makes it difficult to lose the fat that’s been identified with. This is why self-worth is important, as it makes people lose the feeling of inadequacy which holds them back. When we do this, we eliminate our association with who we once were and start to grow. And so when people shed weight, they’re also shedding the person who depended on food for comfort.

The cure for bad habits then is to solve what is causing it and not eliminating the replaceable bad habit. People can cure a bad habit, but they will only form more bad habits when they do not acknowledge their pain. We cure this root cause by remembering how precious we were as children and knowing we still are. Then, it just needs the patience to develop ourselves as we need time for self-improvement. Throughout the journey, we need to be caring for ourselves as we logically find a way to improve. Once we feel appreciated by ourselves, we’re able to make choices that are best for ourselves. From here we can make small changes every day and improve drastically as time goes by.

From all this, we see that the greatest communicators are the listeners, who do not simply react but respond thoughtfully. When people only think about how others’ views relate to them, truly fulfilling relationships never happen. True relationships then occur when people want to know others’ views of life.

Source: Peter Crone