How do we manage to train compassion?
- Bring your mind to a person close to the one you love.
- Relive a time when this person has suffered (or imagine what that suffering would be like).
- Now cultivate the desire to want to free this person from this suffering.
- When you've accomplished the previous step, practice broadening your focus to people you don't care about.
- Little by little, keep expanding the focus and now include people who irritate you.
It is difficult, and you will probably feel reluctant to do this! Observe how day after day you find it less strange. You will be expanding your circles of empathy and training your capacity for compassion!
According to Richard Davidson, doing this exercise repeatedly can help not only improve a person's capacity for compassion, but substantially reduce bullying in schools.