The Bridge of Empathy: Connecting to Others Through Compassion & Awareness

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As we open to the full range of experiences within ourselves, we become aware of what we perceive in each moment, no longer denying some feelings while clinging to others. By coming to know our own pain, we build a bridge to the pain of others. Knowing that someone will suffer if we perform a harmful action or say a hurtful word, we find we do these things less and less.

The important thing to remember is that our sense of self-awareness is uniquely human, and it allows us to observe our own brain, to have mastery over it, and to exercise and improve it. As with all things, the search for meaning improves with practice, which eventually leads to an even richer and more meaningful life.

Fasting the mind is easier said than done. It requires immense discipline and a transformation of lifestyle. But paradoxically it is not hard at all; it is the easiest thing in the world to accomplish because your true nature is an empty liberated mind. This ancient art of healing brings you back to the present moment, where you’ve always been in reality...

We may think we have learned to tell time, but actually we are allowing what we have made of time to tell us how to lead our lives. The next time someone asks you, 'Do you have the time?' consider it a profoundly important question. Don't look at your wrist. Look into your heart and mind and translate the question to 'Are you paying attention to your life?'

A constant complaint in our unpredictable world is that we live in an age of distraction. I am quick to label students who stare at their phones in my class distracted...

When observing our mind, we may notice that much time is spent thinking about the past and the future. Thoughts and emotions twirl around, seemingly of their own accord, but sometimes we must admit to churning them up or at least not making the effort to counteract them. What do we...

Most of us have heard about male and female energy, and how we all have a bit of both within us. In truth, these ener­gies are one, inseparable and incapable of existence as singular entities. However, the functions of our creative life force are characterized along masculine and feminine lines.

Do you have a favorite coffee mug and get a bit miffed if a guest inadvertently uses it? Do you have 'your' side of the bed? We all have an affinity with repetition and habit, often when there's no good reason for it. It's just familiarity, our comfort zone.

You will never be Jesus or Mother Teresa or Buddha or Pema Chodron or Buckminster Fuller or Eckhart Tolle (to name a few great teachers at random). You can only be yourself every moment. Discover who you are, and you find your own unique path along the way.

Mindfulness meditation apps can reduce the body’s response to biological stress, new research suggests.

You’ve probably heard of mindfulness. These days, it’s everywhere, like many ideas and practices drawn from Buddhist texts that have become part of mainstream Western culture.

Remember then: there is only one time that is important – Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. This quote by Leo Tolstoy in What Men Live By and Other Tales is valuable wisdom and...

In my piano service business, I worked many seven-day weeks, and some fourteen- to sixteen-hour days. Once, when I had a particularly long day ahead of me, I decided I would put all my effort into deliberately working slowly. I couldn’t get a day off, so going slowly for at least one day seemed rather appealing.

Breathing is the bridge between our external and internal environments. The exhalation is linked to relaxation and the sense of well-being. It’s understood in expressions such as, “breathing a sigh of relief” and “breathing easy.”

If your mind is always racing, then you're probably overwhelmed with activities, which are over-stimulating your mind. Your commitments take up every minute of your day; from the time you wake up, until the time you go to bed. Your mind never gets a rest, not even when you sleep.

We know that mindfulness can transform the life of an individual. But did you know it could also change the world? We need to develop new social practices and encourage a broader cultural shift towards more sustainable living and climate action.

The Buddha's teaching of simple mindfulness or awareness as a way to enlightenment is particularly suitable for people today.

Choose one or two ways you can apply mindfulness in your daily life in the coming week. The more specific you are in choosing the activities, the more likely you are to follow through. You might choose washing the dishes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to begin your mindfulness experiment...

Twenty ways to become more present including getting enough sleep, listening to your body, and more.

Mindfulness courses have less effect on the attitudes and emotions of men than on those of women, new research suggests.

Excessive thinking is rarely creative thinking. More commonly it is driven by craving (or desire) and aversion (or fear), and is often aggressive or defensive in nature. Excessive thinking loves to “attack” problems and anything or anyone that...

Many of us are obsessed with certain things such as food, sex, gambling or work, or with certain people or emotions. When it comes to these obsessions we are out of control. But all of us have one obsession that we tend to ignore: we are obsessed with thinking.

Mindful eating is increasingly being promoted as a solution to being overweight. Mindful eating, we are promised, will help us eat less, transform our relationship with food and end our battle with weight once and for all.

Taking time for your personal development isn't indulgent, selfish, or self-serving. Rather, it is necessary and vital to be good to yourself, if you wish to do good for others. What happens when you become more aware of yourself is that you'll be able to let go of...

It takes some training to equate complete letting go with comfort. But in fact, 'nothing to hold on to' is the root of happiness. There's a sense of freedom when we accept that we're not in control. By not knowing, not hoping to know, and not acting like we know what's happening, we begin to access our inner strength.

When you hear health messages—such as quit smoking or get more exercise—do you feel motivated or ashamed? A new study suggests how we react may depend on how mindful we are.

Our lives are a series of “moments” that flow together. We tend to extract one frame here, another one there, and fabricate stories about them. Stories breed with each other. One triggers another.

I fear losing the stillness I gained. But I take comfort in knowing that the abbey is there, that the monks are singing the hours, and that there is silence in between.

Many of us would like to have a peaceful ride, enjoy the present moment, yet we can’t help but make future plans so we feel secure, or we spend time digging on past hurts. But... the true experience of being alive is beyond those plans, and “happens” to us.

Unlearning habits and establishing new ones is no more difficult than learning them in the first place. Here are some guidelines for freeing yourself from the automatic nature of your old-perception habits...

The present is what is happening when you strip away all the resentments of your past and all the worries you have about your future. To live in the present is to live as if the past never existed and as if the future were irrelevant. Living in the present is a vision for life that is achievable in any...

To come to the beginning of ourselves is to cease to be victims of circumstances, the actions of others, or even our own mistakes. The true story of who we really are begins now. We are no longer tossed willy-nilly from one desire, thought, or worry to another in a futile process of trying...

When we learn to respond more healthily to the emotions and feel­ings that arise, we can radically change the quality of our lives. One of the greatest disappointments I felt in growing up was that no one ever gave me help in dealing with emotions. The experience must be extremely widespread, because...

Practicing mindfulness can help you recognize habits and replace them with newer and better ones. This is a core element of mindfulness, and indeed why mindfulness is itself called a “practice.”

With the release of the latest Apple Watch this month came a new Breathe app which promises to “help you better manage everyday stress”. Giving mindful breathing a place beside the alarm clock and weather app seems to prove mindfulness has truly gone mainstream.

One day Ajahn Chah held up a beautiful Chinese teacup. “To me this cup is already broken. Because I know its fate, I can enjoy it fully here and now. And when it’s gone, it’s gone.” When we understand the truth of uncertainty and relax, we become free.

It is not what we feel or experience that we need fear; it is what remains unconscious that poses the real threat. Parts of our survival psychologies, such as an unconscious need to feel loved and secure by helping others, eventually betray us...

The world of distraction spins around and around, while moving continuously to keep itself amused and entertained. It transports us to a world of fantasy, or a world of controversy, or competition, or of just about anything other than the one true existence that is right before us. Distraction keeps...

Living in the here and now is the only way to make it safely through life with as much stress-free enjoyment and productivity along the way as possible. Some of us go down the path (life) shining our lights (focus of attention) too far and too frequently behind us...

Mothers-to-be don’t spend their entire 40 weeks of pregnancy glowing radiantly; there can be midnight worries, endless shopping lists, and swollen feet.

This exercise is designed for very deep relaxation. The instructions given here will help you achieve a balanced and effective relaxation response in a minimum of time.

I smile to myself as a long awaited opportunity has finally arrived. I say opportunity perhaps inappropriately, but the chronic illness that challenged my life for so many years gifted me with an understanding of life that would help me make sense of the rest of it.

Silence is often the doorway to an ever deepening understanding of this thing called Life and our own true power. Silence is a wonderful place where wonderful things happen... Silence is food for the soul, a gift from the Great Universal Intelligence.

The brain findings suggest that mindfulness training may have helped the veterans develop more capacity to shift their attention and get themselves out of being 'stuck' in painful cycles of thoughts,

There’s evidence that mindfulness meditation can improve how we age and even fight disease. Yet, little is known about the brain changes behind the effects.

Making mindfulness a habit seems paradoxical: habits are things that we do automatically and with little attention, whereas mindfulness is about paying attention to the present moment. Yet we can develop a habit of paying attention to the present.

If we look at human history, we find it replete with animals, in legend and lore. Beginning with the oldest cave paintings, and continuing into the print and electronic media of current times, animals are deeply embedded in our stories because they inform our ways of understanding the world. Since humanity’s beginnings, they have helped us to survive and thrive...

The problem that many people have is their misconception of what leads to happiness. They usually point to their successful career, family, and material possessions as evidence of their happiness. But as you’ve probably realized by now, all these things are impermanent and bring only temporary pleasure.

Regular science does not acknowledge the existence of a fifth dimension. In the hardcore factual world of science, there are only three dimensions of space: up/down, left/right, and forward/back. There is a fourth temporal dimension—that of time. However, things in the scientific world are changing.

Most people today cannot relate to mysticism at all, not even when it is described as an inner spiritual instinct. For this reason, I prefer to call those who do pause and reflect, listen, and connect spiritually (and keep as their main focus at all times that special inner Divinity innate to us all) modern mystics.

Our bodies, like our world, reflect our internal dynamics. If we have chaos within our consciousness, we have chaos within our bodies. We must clear out the fear and the junk we’ve carried around for years and learn again what it is to simply be.

In today's world, many people are coming to the realization that searching for happiness through achievements and material possessions simply adds to their rising stress, only bringing them more chaos and unhappiness. As they are forced to re-evaluate the direction of their lives, they begin searching for an alternate road to happiness and inner peace.

Many more patients are now living for years with the diagnosis of terminal illness. The author describes her journey to what she calls "livingly dying" - facing her death by living in the moment with grace and mindfulness.

Older people are nearly twice as likely as young adults to have their memory impaired by distractions such as irrelevant speech or written words.

You stumble along thinking you don't know the way, and then one day you realize you're in the middle of it. I'd always thought that a path was a means to an end. A course of study, a tour of duty. The distance from A to B. The anguished span between wanting and having. The truth is...

Attention, as with awareness, can be understood as a relationship. It is the relationship between the one who is aware, or the "awarer" (whom we know as "me" or "I"), and the object of awareness. When it comes to the quality of our attention, we are like a child who, when he or she initially picks up a hammer, just smashes away at the nail without having yet understood that...

The impact we can have on the world we share, if we choose to be kind in every circumstance or even in an occasional situation, simply can’t be overestimated. The shift in how life would feel to everyone is truly beyond description. This may seem far-fetched, but...

Your stories about your past, your current circumstances and fu­ture only exist in your mind, not in reality. And once you fully get this, you can more confidently release your grasp on the need to think all the time, start to take your mind less seriously and laugh your way to freedom.

Any place we live must accommodate a number of activities: socializing, sleeping, cooking, eating, bathing, relaxing. But what about quiet alone-time? Renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell insisted we all need a place to "simply experience and bring forth what [we] are and what [we] might be."

The practice of mindfulness entails a careful examination and surgical dissection of what is being presented by reality from what is being projected by us. When we are simply imagining something and we attend with a quiet mind, our projections tend to vanish like mist under a hot sun. On the other hand...

I saw a romantic greeting card which showed a couple kissing in the front seat of a car. The message said, "If you can kiss while driving safely, you are not giving the kiss the attention it deserves." Anything that is worth doing...

A good way of integrating mindfulness into daily life is to practice while engaging in activities you might usually plow through on auto-pilot.  You might find that paying attention to these everyday activities can radically...

People whose “drug of choice” is food have a tendency to cope with stress by over-eating, often bingeing on foods. Unlike drugs or alcohol, it isn’t possible to steer clear of temptation — we all need to eat, several times a day...

Elliott Jaffa, Ed.D., a behavioral psychologist who conducts "active listening" seminars for businesses and other groups, says, "In reality, very few people really know how to listen. There's more to active listening than sitting back and letting your eardrum collect vibrations. When done properly, it's actually hard work..."

Living amid the busyness of our high-tech and low-touch society takes us away from fully experiencing our day-to-day lives. We often live on autopilot, doing without experiencing. We can be quick to judge, react, resist, run away, or retreat when things don’t...

Mindfulness meditation is a wonderful way of turning our attention toward spirit. Mindfulness pays attention to what exists, here and now. It shifts attention away from memory, imagination, ideas and concepts...

We often consider feelings as existing with only positive or negative values. Besides positive and negative feelings, there are neutral feelings. We want pleasure, we don’t want pain, and we relax when we feel indifferent. When a pleasurable feeling arises or is anticipated, the response of most...

We spend our lives immersed in a flood of thoughts, unaware that another dimension of consciousness is available to us. It is a dimension in which we come to know ourselves as something other than thinkers. By taking a step back, we become the witness of our thoughts. This subtle but radical...

While we live, we’re doing something in every moment. That doing may be sleeping and dreaming, or laughing or playing, or sitting very still in meditation, or writing or stretching. Life consists of action (or stillness) moment to moment. So even if...

Your adventure begins with a close look at how you might acquire some, if not all, of your beliefs. I could ask: Are you hypnotized?  Imagine that a stage hypnotist has hypnotized you. The experience will seem quite real, even if it’s a pure hallucination. Imagine you’ve been...

When we arrive back home after a mountaintop experience, often we are required to deal with the maddening routines of life. Laundry has to be done, dishes have to be washed, professional work needs our attention, lawns have to be mowed, pets need to be cared for, and our families need our attention; all of these...

The first spiritual law of success is the Law of Pure Potentiality. This law is based on the fact that we are, in our essential state, pure consciousness. Pure consciousness is pure potentiality; it is the field of all possibilities and infinite creativity. Other attributes of consciousness are...

We need to avoid dwelling on any judgments, decisions, or internal commentary that may arise based upon the feelings we are observing. We must be careful not to identify with the feelings and consider them "ours". The following contemplations support the arising of insight into the nature of feelings and the ways in which we react to those feelings....

So often we do not have our minds on what we are doing -- our bodies are doing one thing and our minds are on a totally different tack, which creates disharmony. In order to turn off our “automatic pilot”, we need to develop more awareness of what we are doing, to do things more slowly so that we can see each part of the routine action more clearly.

When you look at a painting, whether the Mona Lisa, the Birth of Venus or anything you find beautiful, where is the beauty coming from? Where is the source of the beauty? It is obviously not coming out of the painting, or everyone would agree that one painting is beautiful and another is ugly...

If you were to observe yourselves very carefully and observe the choices that you allow yourselves to make in your existence, you would observe the limits to which you yourselves choose to impose on the joy of your existence. You would observe the degree to which you limit your joy of existence.

by Marie T. Russell.

I speak with a lot of people daily, and it seems like "not having enough time" is a recurring theme... We spend our waking hours doing things on our list of "things to do" and not having (or taking) the time to do the things that would nurture our spirit and that would please us best.

by David Montini.

The fear was so intense that he could feel his heart beating in his throat. Moments before he had been enjoying the company of his two older female cousins (16 and 18 years old). It had become a normal Sunday practice to play with them after escaping from visiting next door with the adults. They were engaged in their weekly naughty behavior of playing poker, sipping wine, and smoking his aunt's non-filtered cigarettes.

by Doris Wild Helmering. Sense ability is the skill to observe your thoughts, your feelings, and your behavior. It also makes you aware of others and provides real-time feedback as to how your feelings and behavior affect others -- inhibiting or inviting closeness, empathy, tolerance, emotional intimacy, interconnectedness, and oneness.

by Marie T. Russell. Summer has gone... and Winter will be arriving... yet Spring will return. The seasons pass in nature, as in our own lives. The winter of doubt and fear does pass away as we become aware that there is no one to blame for the dark times we went through -- not even ourselves. These are simply the processes of life, the changing seasons as it were.

Our minds tend to chatter away, describing all manner of disastrous possibilities and outcomes, particularly when faced with difficult tasks or decisions. Barraged by complaints, criticisms, and doomsaying, it is no wonder that we can become paralyzed and unwilling or unable to take any action at all.

by Wayne Teasdale. The elements of awareness encompass conscious knowing, the ability to read hearts, to be a healing, loving, compassionate presence, situated in the Now. They also encompass practical wisdom in every situation, the ability to enlarge perspective, to affirm others and promote dialogue and mutual..

The present is the only time we can choose between love and fear. When we fret about the past or worry about what to do in the future, we accomplish nothing. And yet, our mental habit of reliving the past and rehearsing what is to come generates various forms of pain.

by John Kuypers. When you are living in the present, you know what's important for you, and you act on that knowing. You are able to see the big picture and the smallest detail all at the same time. Your sense of timing and your instincts become sharp. Great athletes show us just how true this is.

by Eckhart Tolle. Are you stressed? Are you so busy getting to the future that the present is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being "here" but wanting to be "there," or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It's a split that tears you apart inside.

The soul often whispers to us through synchronistic events. A synchronistic event occurs when we recognize that two or more causally unrelated events resemble each other and catch our attention. When we don't pay attention, the message has to be more powerful, perhaps in the form of an accident.

One of the most difficult and rewarding things you will ever learn is how to live in the moment. Quite simply, if you are to have power to create the reality you want you must learn how to live in the moment.

There is a huge tendency to have way too much going on inside our minds, at the same time. Hundreds of thoughts and decisions about various things are all vying for our attention. There's also memory...

Silence is not particularly my thing. I remember, many years ago, when my closest and dearest friend shared with me that she was attending an eight day "silent retreat" -- just the thought put me in a twitter. Yet, now that I'm in my fifth decade, I'm beginning to appreciate at least a measure of silence...

When purpose and pleasure are brought together work becomes play. Every bit of work done in this spirit strengthens the man who does it. It is recreative as well as creative.

The biggest trap in the world to fall into is that of making careless and cruel comments about others. It is difficult not to jump in and fan the fire with our own critical take on another. It is equally as difficult to ...

Have you ever suddenly and inexplicably felt depressed or irritable when just moments before you'd felt fine? That happens to all of us from time to time. The next time it happens, take a moment to remember what occurred just prior to your shift in emotions. What did you tell yourself about the comment or situation that made you feel bad? 

We can travel a long way and do many different things, but our deepest happiness is not born from accumulating new experiences. It is born from letting go of what is unnecessary, and knowing ourselves to be always at home. True happiness may not be at all far away, but it requires a radical change of view as to where to find it.

In the 17th century, the French philosopher René Descartes came up with the "explanation for it all": I think, therefore I am. This statement was the source of debates in philosophy classes. It was the existential "which came first" dilemma: the chicken or the egg?